by Michael Hollister
Exclusive published at Michael Hollister on August 30, 2026
5.274 words * about 28 minutes readingtime
Part 1 read here:
The Mecca Pact: What Three States Really Signed – Part 1
Briefing Format of the In-Depth Analysis – 10 minutes readingtime:
The Mecca Pact: Movement at the Edges
Weekly analysis, background and context by email.
Part 2: The Architecture.
Who gets invited, who stays outside, who is excluded – and what movement at the edges reveals about the emerging order in the Middle East. As August 21, 2026
The most interesting country in the Mecca Pact is not one of its three members. It is Egypt – the country almost anyone looking at this alliance would have expected to find inside it, and yet it is not there. The largest Arab army, master of the Suez Canal, recipient of Saudi money for decades, and for months tied into a consultation format with exactly these three capitals: from the outside, Cairo looks like the obvious fourth seat at the table. Cairo is not sitting there. And the reason is twice as revealing as the easy story of a hesitant Egypt suggests – because, according to consistent Saudi accounts, Riyadh did not want Egypt there either (Middle East Eye).
That gap contains the central finding of this second part. The first part of this analysis asked what the pact obliges its members to do and what it does not – and concluded that an alliance with a real mutual-defense clause but no published treaty text, no specified obligations, and no codified nuclear umbrella is, first and foremost, a political structure and perhaps only later a military one. Part 2 asks a different question: not what stands at the center, but who is moving at the edges. Who is courting whom, who is holding back, who is being turned away, and who responds by building a counter-axis. An alliance is defined not only by the obligations it imposes on its members, but also by what it attracts and repels at its perimeter.
The Lowy Institute captured the essential feature of the agreement in a single observation: the pact shortens the strategic distance between the Gulf, the eastern Mediterranean, and South Asia (Lowy Institute). A new security geography is not being created at the negotiating table of the three signatories but in the movements of the states around them. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has already pushed the door wide open: the pact should not stop at three countries, and more “brotherly nations” should be brought under its umbrella. Three questions will determine the shape of the coming order, and none appears in the treaty text: Who is invited and still does not say yes? Who wants in and is not admitted? And who stays outside and begins constructing the counterweight next door? Read those three movements and the map becomes clearer than it does from studying a treaty nobody outside the signatories has yet seen in full.
Egypt: the obvious absentee
Egypt’s absence is not an oversight but the result of prior history. Cairo had already been at the table in the quadrilateral format that later appeared under names such as “the quad,” “STEP,” or the “Regional Four,” bringing together Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan. On March 19, 2026, the foreign ministers met on the sidelines of the summit of Arab and Islamic states in Riyadh, where Ankara reportedly pushed for a four-party rather than a three-party arrangement; another foreign ministers’ meeting followed in Cairo on June 21. But the trail went cold. When the agreement was signed in Mecca in August, Egypt had fallen out of the framework, and the remaining three deliberately established themselves as the “three founding members.”
Egypt’s official explanation is constitutional. Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said Cairo was examining accession “very seriously,” but that a decision required “deep studies in light of the Egyptian constitution and legal obligations.” That is not a pretext. Article 152 of Egypt’s 2014 constitution bars the president from declaring war or sending armed forces on combat missions abroad without prior consultation with the National Defense Council and a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. A binding mutual-defense clause modeled on the Mecca Pact would place exactly that process under a standing external trigger – the decision to enter a war would no longer rest with Cairo alone. Insisting on constitutional review is the diplomatically wrapped statement that no Egyptian government is prepared to surrender that control.
But the constitution is only the surface. Beneath it lies a calculation that Chatham House summarized with unusual clarity: for Egypt, the risks of joining currently outweigh the benefits, although that balance could change over time. Membership would mark Cairo as having chosen a side against several actors that view one or more of the three members as rivals: Iran and the Houthis, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Greece, Cyprus, and India. That perceived alignment could damage Egypt’s relations with all of them without delivering a proportional return. The military core of the cooperation – air and missile defense, intelligence sharing, maritime security, and defense-industrial collaboration – is already available to Egypt through the Quad framework and its participation in the Saudi-led Red Sea maritime security coalition. The marginal benefit of signing is small; the risk is high. That is the economics of non-membership.
Then comes the deepest layer: Israel. For many Egyptian security planners, a future conflict with Israel remains the most serious long-term threat despite the 1979 peace treaty and ongoing security coordination. And in that contingency, no regional alliance would offer Egypt protection comparable to the relationship it already has with Washington. Because Israel remains the United States’ central regional partner, Washington is still Cairo’s most important security partner. A binding mutual-defense pact with Ankara, Riyadh, and Islamabad would be read in Washington and Jerusalem as a substantive break with the framework that has underpinned Egyptian security policy for almost half a century. There is also the sovereignty concern: integration into a Saudi-led arrangement would strengthen Riyadh’s claim to Arab leadership – from Cairo’s perspective, raising the risk of a patron-client relationship with the kingdom.
And here the story flips. Cairo was not the only side hesitating – Riyadh did not want Egypt in to begin with. Three Saudi sources familiar with the talks told Middle East Eye that the kingdom opposed Egypt’s inclusion even though Ankara pressed for Cairo to be brought in. A former senior adviser to the Saudi royal court put it bluntly: the leadership doubts Sisi’s loyalty, explicitly contrasting that distrust with its confidence in Turkey and Pakistan. Riyadh judges behavior under fire, and from the Saudi perspective the behavior it observed points toward Abu Dhabi. The sharpest data point came in May 2026: for the first time in its history, Egypt publicly deployed fighter aircraft abroad – a Rafale contingent to the United Arab Emirates to defend against Iranian drones and missiles (Janes). Sisi flew to Abu Dhabi, inspected the squadron alongside President Mohammed bin Zayed, and had it declared that whatever struck the Emirates struck Egypt. Cairo did not make the same gesture toward Saudi Arabia during the same war.
The reason for this tilt is economic and runs through Abu Dhabi. The Emirates are Egypt’s largest investor, and their capital is of a different nature from Saudi support. The Ras El-Hekma agreement of February 2024 brought in $35 billion: $24 billion in fresh foreign-currency cash and another $11 billion converted from existing Emirati central-bank deposits into equity (The National). Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund received development rights to one of the country’s most valuable stretches of coastline, while Egypt retains a 35 percent stake. This is not budget support that can be repaid and then forgotten – it is ownership embedded deep in the productive base of the Egyptian economy (TIMEP). Saudi support since 2013, estimated at roughly $25 billion, came largely as budget assistance and central-bank deposits: external, renegotiable, and revocable. Cairo’s choice between its two Gulf patrons is therefore a choice between one whose claims remain reversible and one whose claims have become structural. Joining a Saudi-anchored pact that pointedly excludes Abu Dhabi – at a moment of visible estrangement between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi stretching from Sudan to Yemen – would force Cairo to make explicit a hierarchy of loyalties that it has so far been able to keep conveniently implicit.
The fair counterargument remains. Ankara sees the issue more openly. Fidan expects Egypt to join “in the next phase” once “a few technical issues” are resolved and calls Cairo a natural partner (Al Jazeera). Chatham House does not rule accession out; it merely considers it secondary for now: there is no cost in waiting. Egypt is more likely to move if practice shows that the pact’s binding mutual-defense obligations are not sharply activated – at which point Cairo could join without sacrificing its role as mediator. Non-membership is not a rejection. It is an option being kept open.
Qatar: the fourth capital that does not sign
To understand movement around the pact, Egypt has to be separated from Qatar – two different “fourths” that are constantly conflated in reporting. In the prehistory of this alliance there was a quiet axis of four capitals that we described in May 2026: Ankara, Riyadh, Islamabad, and Doha. The fourth capital in that sketch was Qatar, not Egypt. The formal consultation mechanism, by contrast, used Egypt as the fourth actor. Two different fourth seats, and the distinction matters: Egypt is the obvious country that is not inside; Qatar is the close partner that deliberately does not sign.
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