At the Water's Edge

Fifty-nine days after it was signed, the Mecca Pact has been activated. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey have agreed to send forces to defend the kingdom against the Houthis. The alliance itself isn’t the real danger. The danger is when it was formed.

Scott breaks down how the Houthis pushed Riyadh to call in its new allies: strikes on four Saudi cities, attacks on the East-West pipeline that lets Saudi oil bypass the Strait of Hormuz, threats to Saudi airspace, and a drone the Saudis say was headed for Mecca. He separates what the pact is from what it isn’t, and reads the fine print on domestic approval, “all those responsible,” and Pakistan’s insistence that the pact is purely defensive.

Scott also covers what Turkey can actually bring (combat-proven drones, a growing defense industry, and a conscript army that isn’t built for “away games”), why Turkey’s constitution puts treaty approval and troop deployments in separate articles, and why Yemen is nothing like northern Syria. Then Pakistan: nearly six decades of military ties to Saudi Arabia, a three-front squeeze at home, and a delicate role as mediator between Washington and Tehran.

Finally, the big picture: with the U.S. tied down in its war with Iran, middle powers are building their own security order. Could alliances formed after a war starts create a 1914-style escalation chain? And why this is about state power politics, not a Sunni religious bloc.

What does the Mecca Pact mean for Israel? The members-only companion episode is available now in The Briefing Room, our members-only community on YouTube: [MEMBERSHIP LINK]

Follow Scott on Substack: https://substack.com/@scottatthewatersedgeorg

We’re in the most dangerous weeks of the Iran war since March, and the midterms are the reason. Professor Robert Pape returns to explain the wicked incentives pushing President Trump toward escalation before November 3rd, and why every option likely landing on his desk hands Tehran the advantage.

Pape walks through the three clocks converging on the midterms. The USS Theodore Roosevelt and a second Marine Expeditionary Unit are closing within striking range of Iran. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has plateaued while Iran strikes more tankers in Hormuz than in any week of the war. And inflation inside Iran, which Pape puts near 100%, is tempting Washington to try to break Iran’s economy with air power.

He explains why striking Iran’s refineries could invite a retaliatory strike on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq facility that would hurt America more than Iran, and why landing Marines on Larak Island, Hormuz Island, or near Chabahar would hand Iran fixed targets without breaking its kill chain. We also cover the recent Tel Aviv flight incident, the drone threat that moved U.S. B-1 bombers out of an RAF base, and what history says about how long it takes a suicide terrorism campaign to reach the U.S. homeland once ground forces are committed.

Want Pape’s take on whether the Mecca Pact pulls Pakistan and Turkey into this war, and whether the overlapping U.S. and Israeli elections double the danger? The rest of the conversation is available in The Briefing Room, our members-only community on YouTube: [MEMBERSHIP LINK]

Read Robert Pape’s Substack, The Escalation Trap: https://escalationtrap.substack.com

At the Water’s Edge brings you insights beyond the headlines, with a practitioner’s view on national security and geopolitics. Hosted by Scott Kelly, former Green Beret and founder of Grayzone Advisory.

Veterans die by suicide at a rate 72% higher than their civilian peers, and women veterans at a rate 101% higher. Lyndsay Tkach, Wounded Warrior Project's Director of Mental and Brain Health Services, has spent twelve years working on that problem. In the series finale, she explains why she calls suicide "a human issue" rather than only a medical one, and what it would take to reach veterans at scale before a crisis hits.

This conversation covers the risk factors that sit outside the therapist's office (financial distress, chronic pain, sleep problems, broken relationships), the difference between risk factors and warning signs, and how WWP screens every warrior who comes in through its financial, physical, and mental health programs. It also takes on a hard question: how do you screen a community that learned to lie on every health survey? Along the way, Lyndsay shares that one in four WWP warriors surveyed reported suicidal thoughts in the past year, why connection may be the most underused intervention, and why families need support too.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or reach the Veterans Crisis Line at 988, press 1.

This is Episode 5, the finale, of Still Here, a five-part series produced in partnership with Wounded Warrior Project for Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. Catch up with Episodes 1–4 (Zach, Lindsey, Sam, and Joe) if you haven't yet.

Chapters:

Learn more about Wounded Warrior Project: woundedwarriorproject.org

Masked men with vans full of fuel outside the British base that launched B-52s against Iran. A FlyDubai co-pilot stabbing his captain on a flight to Tel Aviv. A drone knocking out power to the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. Three incidents in one week, as Iran's 45-day deadline on the U.S. blockade expires and a third American carrier heads for the region.

Is Iran launching a terror campaign? I don't think so. If Iran is behind these incidents, it looks less like an offensive and more like a regime testing three different escalation paths, all before U.S. combat power peaks in late November.

In this solo brief, I walk through each incident the way I'd brief a commander: what we know, what we don't, the competing explanations, and my confidence level. Then I cover where this fits on Iran's escalation ladder and the indicators to watch over the next six weeks.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Watch the full video version, with maps and the flight data, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlp8SIKfNIY

Members of The Briefing Room on YouTube get a companion video on state use of suicide terrorism: who becomes a suicide attacker, why states have used them, and why most stopped. https://www.youtube.com/@AttheWatersEdge-r5e/membership

Substack: https://substack.com/@scottatthewatersedgeorg

Trita Parsi argues Trump is looking for a "last chapter" in Iran, an ending that makes the whole war look worth it, and that diplomacy won't give him one.

Iran's president flew to New York in the middle of a war to put a deal on the table, and Trump rejected it within days. Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, joins At the Water's Edge to explain what Iran was really offering and why both sides may be heading toward a third round of war.

We discuss why Iran's UNGA proposal mirrors the collapsed MOU, and why sanctions can hurt Iran without changing its policy. Parsi puts the odds of major U.S. escalation after the midterms at 70–80%, and explains why Iran may try to strike first. We also get into what a Democratic Congress could mean for the war and for Secretary Hegseth, and his argument that Europe is already a party to the conflict. On China, he covers Chinese commercial satellite imagery, China's role in holding down oil prices, and the soaring cost of escorting tankers through the Gulf. We close on why Tehran won't make irreversible nuclear concessions to a president it doesn't trust.

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Watch the full video on YouTube: At the Water's Edge

At the Water's Edge is a national security and geopolitics podcast hosted by Scott Kelly, a former Green Beret and one of the last ground force commanders in Afghanistan. Views expressed by guests are their own.

Joe Stabley is a Special Forces medic turned physician assistant — one of the most demanding career fields in the military, followed by a doctorate-adjacent civilian one. By any outward measure, he was a success. He also spent the better part of a decade managing suicidal ideation that started with a friend's death on a peacetime deployment before 9/11, and that he describes as something he still lives with today, not something he's recovered from.

This conversation traces that whole arc: Jason's suicide in the Sinai when Joe was 19, two more friends lost in the years that followed, a breakdown in an ER that led him to the edge of a freeway overpass, an Adderall dependency that started as a PA-school fix, and the VA and Wounded Warrior Project support that ultimately got him here — now a member of WWP's national campaign team. Joe calls this the most raw interview he's ever given, and it shows.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or reach the Veterans Crisis Line at 988, press 1.

This is Episode 4 of Still Here, a five-part series produced in partnership with Wounded Warrior Project for Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. Catch up with Episodes 1–3 (Zach, Lindsey, and Sam) if you haven't yet. Episode 5 — Lyndsay Tkach, WWP's Director of Mental and Brain Health Services, closing out the series — drops next week.

Chapters:

Learn more about Wounded Warrior Project: woundedwarriorproject.org

For more than a decade, Israel has been the only country in the Middle East flying a fifth-generation stealth fighter. That's about to change.

Join the Briefing Room: https://www.youtube.com/@AttheWatersEdge-r5e

The midterms are five and a half weeks away, and Professor Robert Pape says most of the warnings are aimed at the wrong window. Political violence around elections isn't mainly about intimidating voters before Election Day. The real danger zone opens the moment the polls close and the counting starts, and it runs all the way through certification. The question is whether the losers will accept the loss.

Pape joins Scott to talk about his new book, Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism. It draws on five years of research and 20 national surveys of support for political violence in the United States. They get into the domestic escalation trap America is walking into, why the Iran war could give the president much stronger legal footing to use the National Guard or the military at home than he had in 2020, why the guardrails that held in 2020 are gone, and what service members need to understand before any order comes.

Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/Our-Own-Worst-Enemies-Populism/dp/1620979586/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vs_iGQNW5qgYzmPAhBuYLw.d8JMeR0ou3Gdzt5HvoGc6u1M8nsI9WC3xo8dzqM5_Ec&dib_tag=se&keywords=9781620979587&linkCode=qs&qid=1790261780&s=books&sr=1-1