Testing the R-4 in Istanbul: Egypt’s room to maneuver after the Mecca Pact
When the foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan meet in Istanbul this week they will do so against a striking political backdrop: three of the four countries, that together formed the quadrilateral mechanism, signed a joint defense agreement in Mecca three weeks ago while the fourth, Egypt, remained outside it.
According to an Egyptian diplomat familiar with the preparations who spoke to Al Manassa, the upcoming meeting of the quadrilateral consultative mechanism known as “R-4” will discuss ways to develop it and give it a more institutional character, including establishing a secretariat and a more regular working structure, alongside discussion of the regional situation.
Beyond this agenda, the sixth meeting of the R-4 since its formation last March will be the first real test of relations among the four countries following the signing of the trilateral defense agreement, and the signals coming from the four capitals seem to lean toward an effort to keep the divergence over the agreement from turning into a dispute that overshadows their broader relations.
Perhaps one of the earliest signals of how this divergence would be managed appeared in a photo published by the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs following an Egyptian-Turkish meeting days after the Mecca agreement was signed; Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty appeared alongside his Saudi and Turkish counterparts, Faisal bin Farhan and Hakan Fidan, the three of them dressed in white in an informal setting, seated around a table at a restaurant in Alamein on the North Coast.
That same day, Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, called his Egyptian counterpart, and the two exchanged “views on ways to strengthen cooperation in the fields of security and defense,” amid mounting speculation over Saudi Arabia’s position on Egypt’s participation in the military alliance.
But the more important question isn’t only whether Cairo was excluded from the agreement or chose to remain outside it, but whether its absence reflects a deeper difference in how it conceives of regional military alliances and the threat circles it wants to commit itself to defending against.
Narratives of absence
Media reports, citing Saudi sources, had spoken of Riyadh objecting to Egypt’s participation, at a time when talk was growing of the possibility that Cairo might become the fourth member of the new defense arrangement.
While Egypt’s official position remained cautious in dealing with the Mecca agreement, Cairo held to a narrative that its participation was still under deep review, and that there were constitutional, legal, and technical aspects being examined by the relevant bodies.
But multiple Egyptian sources told Al Manassa that joining such a military alliance isn’t an Egyptian choice, and that Egypt has no “appetite” for this type of alliance, “at least for now.”
At the same time, sources who spoke to Al Manassa from the three capitals that signed the agreement offered different explanations for Egypt’s position on it. And although the narratives don’t align, they all agree, including the Egyptian one, that the agreement wasn’t a product of the weeks preceding its announcement, nor was it directly tied to the Israeli-American war on Iran, but rather was negotiated over a longer span of time.
As the Egyptian diplomat familiar with preparations for the Istanbul meeting describes it, the idea of the agreement was raised with Egypt about a year ago, and another Egyptian diplomat confirmed to Al Manassa that more detailed discussions over Cairo’s accession continued for about six months before the announcement, while Saudi sources spoke of negotiations lasting more than two years among the countries involved.
There was no “decisive Saudi objection” to Egypt’s accession… and Turkey was keen on Cairo’s participation “from the start”
Faisal Abbas, editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Arab News, frames the agreement in terms of the level of military integration already existing among the three countries, telling Al Manassa that reaching the agreement with Pakistan was “easier and faster” given the history of relations and prior military cooperation between Riyadh and Islamabad. Cooperation with Turkey, on the other hand, developed, in his words, “deeply, noticeably, and very quickly in recent years.”
He sees this history of cooperation as key to understanding the trilateral agreement, adding that Egypt is “certainly an important country,” but that the agreement, in his assessment, requires more than close political relations.
“Joining the agreement requires reaching a certain stage of cooperation,” Abbas says, noting that the three countries have “partnerships and joint manufacturing, not just a pledge or an intention of mutual defense.”
The Mecca agreement provides for immediate military solidarity and a joint response to any security threat affecting the sovereignty of a member state, on the premise that an attack on one is an attack on all, and it also establishes a binding framework for joint arms manufacturing, defense technology transfer, and the development of defense systems, alongside intensified intelligence coordination and counterterrorism cooperation.
Military relations among the three countries are already moving toward joint manufacturing and technology localization rather than simply purchasing equipment; Saudi-Turkish cooperation includes technology transfer and the production of systems such as drones, helicopters, and land-based systems, while Saudi-Pakistani cooperation, under the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) signed last year, draws on Pakistani expertise in defense industries, aviation, and training.
Beyond the ‘Saudi objection’ narrative
But the narrative linking the trilateral agreement to the evolution of military cooperation runs up against the fact that Egypt itself has advanced military relations with each of the three countries.
With Pakistan, special forces from both countries have conducted counterterrorism exercises and combat-readiness training, including the Raad–2 exercise last April, while dialogue continues over joint military manufacturing and technology transfer.
During a meeting with Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, Asim Munir, last October, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi spoke of the country’s keenness to continue “strengthening bilateral cooperation with Pakistan and elevating it across various fields.” El-Sisi also held talks with the chairman of Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee last July on “ways to support and strengthen joint cooperation in the military and security fields, and to exchange expertise in counterterrorism.”
Bilateral military cooperation between Egypt and each of the three countries makes it hard to reduce its absence to a mere lack of “military partnerships”
With Ankara, Cairo has notably expanded its defense cooperation since the restoration of diplomatic relations in 2023; the two countries revived the Sea of Friendship series of naval exercises and launched partnerships in defense manufacturing, particularly in drones, short-range air defense systems, and long-range munitions, and the latest step in this rapprochement was Egyptian Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Ashraf Salem Zaher’s visit to Ankara last July.
Egyptian-Saudi military relations, meanwhile, span decades and have included joint military exercises and agreements on defense cooperation and maritime security, among them the North Thunder exercises, the 2015 Cairo Declaration, which called for developing military cooperation and working toward forming a joint Arab force, and the maritime security cooperation agreement signed last September, though the defense memorandum of understanding signed in 2023 hasn’t, based on what has been made public so far, translated into a detailed program for producing a specific weapons system.
This broad record of bilateral military cooperation between Egypt and each of the three countries makes it hard to reduce Egypt’s absence to a mere lack of “military partnerships.”
Turkish sources also present a different picture of the Saudi-objection narrative around Egypt’s accession to the alliance. Per a Turkish diplomat familiar with the discussions who spoke to Al Manassa, there was no “strong opposition” or “decisive Saudi objection” to Egypt joining, revealing that Turkey had been keen on Cairo’s participation “from the start,” and pointing to Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan’s visits to Egypt as one sign of this orientation.
The Turkish diplomat acknowledges that Saudi-Egyptian relations sometimes involve a degree of "friendly competition over regional leadership."
Cairo and Riyadh indeed have a long history of competing for influence and regional leadership, one that has surfaced at multiple points in the region’s history, but it has also coincided with long stretches of political and military cooperation, which is why the Turkish diplomat tells Al Manassa that this competition never turned into a Saudi objection to Egypt’s participation in the agreement.
A Turkish military source, speaking of Ankara’s desire to establish a more clearly defined mechanism for providing military support to Saudi Arabia under the trilateral agreement, points to “ongoing deliberations over technical matters” raised by Cairo as a potential future candidate for accession.
A Pakistani source close to diplomatic circles in Islamabad offers a similar account, echoing to Al Manassa the view that “the alliance, by its very nature, is open to other countries,” while Pakistani sources agree that Saudi-Pakistani security and military cooperation was the nucleus from which the new arrangement emerged.
A different threat map
It seems that Cairo, which has invested effort in shaping a vision for regional security arrangements, foremost among them the call to form a joint Arab force, and which carved out a place for itself within the quadrilateral mechanism that originally began as trilateral Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani coordination, prefers to keep the political and military tracks separate, a view that Egyptian sources underscore by insisting that “regional security arrangements shouldn’t be viewed solely through a military lens.”
The first Egyptian diplomat maintains it isn’t “accurate to view the matter as though we’ve been marginalized or excluded. We’re part of the quad, and the fact that we haven’t joined the military component or the joint defense framework doesn’t mean cooperation isn’t ongoing, including bilateral military cooperation, nor does it close the door to opportunities for bilateral cooperation in the future.”
Sources in Cairo also explain the absence in terms of a differing reading of the threat map between Egypt and the three countries; Saudi Arabia traditionally looks east, viewing Iran as one of the most prominent sources of threat, despite shifts in its regional calculations of late, especially amid mounting concerns over Israel following the Israeli war on Gaza, a shift reflected in Saudi Arabia’s distancing from the framework of the Abraham Accords.
Egypt, too, looks east, but toward a different threat; Israel occupies the central position in its strategic concerns, not Iran.
Former head of the Armed Forces’ reconnaissance department Maj. Gen. Nasr Salem expresses this to Al Manassa: “The three countries drafted the agreement in line with their own threat circles or security circles, and these circles may not align with ours here in Egypt. The leadership concluded that our defense and national security circles may not be compatible with theirs at this particular time.”
Egypt also prefers that the Joint Arab Defense Agreement, signed 75 years ago, remain the broader umbrella for such arrangements, an idea Cairo has revived in various contexts since 2015 alongside the proposal to form a joint Arab force, rather than entering a defense arrangement that includes non-Arab powers.
Last March, the foreign minister took part in a virtual meeting with the foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, during which he called for forming “a joint Arab force capable of effectively addressing existing threats,” and at the same time declared “completely rejecting the imposition of any regional security arrangements on Arab states, whether by non-Arab regional states or by parties from outside the region,” as the official statement put it at the time.
This vision is interwoven with Cairo’s desire to avoid commitments that might force it to take sides in rivalries it doesn’t want to become party to, since binding itself militarily to countries with existing regional disputes, such as the tension between Pakistan and India, or Turkey and Greece, or Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Iran, could confront Egypt with choices that don’t necessarily align with its interests.
“Strategic Balance”
This connects to a broader philosophy in Egyptian foreign policy that Cairo calls strategic balance, through which it seeks to preserve room to maneuver that allows it to deal with opposing parties without becoming bound to fully align with any one of them, unless its security interests dictate otherwise.
There’s also a dimension related to Egypt’s current capacity to bear the cost of alignments, and another Egyptian diplomat links this policy to economic pressures and the country’s reliance on a considerable degree of external support and financial flows, saying: “There was a period, let’s say from 2015 to 2019, when our economic situation was better than it is now, and during it we had a stronger foreign policy and the ability to impose certain things. At the moment, though, it’s more a matter of adapting to the situation and standing, to some extent, at an equal distance from all parties.”
In this sense, remaining outside the Mecca agreement doesn’t necessarily reflect a decline in Egyptian military cooperation with its parties, nor does it alone prove that Cairo was excluded from an arrangement it wanted to join; rather, the Egyptian narrative points to a different choice: preserving broad bilateral military cooperation with the three countries and participating in the R-4 framework politically, without yet moving to a collective defense commitment that might constrain Egypt’s room to maneuver.
The Mecca agreement won’t be an item on the Istanbul meeting’s agenda, according to diplomatic sources, but it will loom in the background. The question that matters for the meeting isn’t reopening Egypt’s position, but whether the four countries can build a more institutional political framework without the new boundaries of military cooperation becoming boundaries of the relationship itself.