Egypt’s Turkey Embrace Is a Test Washington Is Failing |
Egypt’s decision to conduct simultaneous joint military exercises with Turkey and Oman this week has been greeted with the usual diplomatic boilerplate about exchanging training expertise and unifying operational concepts. In Washington, it has barely registered at all. That silence is itself the story.
The drills are not incidental. Egyptian and Turkish fighter jets are currently conducting multi-role air sorties from Egyptian airbases, building on a special forces exchange in Ankara in April and naval maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean last September, the first of their kind in thirteen years. Simultaneously, Egyptian commando units are running joint exercises with Omani special forces under the Qal’at al-Jabal 2 framework. Cairo is not hedging opportunistically. It is constructing a deliberate multi-vector military posture designed to signal independence from any single patron, including Washington.
The Turkish dimension deserves scrutiny it is not receiving. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government did not merely fall out with Cairo over the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013. It spent the following decade actively working to undermine the moderate Arab security architecture that anchors Israeli and American interests........