ANKARA — A defense pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan that was signed on Friday was already taking on a larger shape by Saturday. Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz told CNN Türk that Egypt’s entry into the agreement was not only possible but could be significant — extending an explicit public invitation to Cairo less than twenty-four hours after the original three signatories concluded their collective defense memorandum in Jeddah.
“In the future, of course, this is possible,” Yilmaz said, when asked about potential expansion. “Egypt is a fairly strong country, and its participation could be significant for such a format.” The statement was the first public indication that the Ankara-Riyadh-Islamabad framework was conceived with room for growth from the outset, rather than as a fixed trilateral arrangement.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan formalized the agreement on Friday in Jeddah, according to a joint statement seen by Sputnik, adding a multilateral dimension to an existing 2025 strategic partnership between Islamabad and Riyadh. The pact’s framework, as described in the joint statement, provides for intelligence sharing and regional security coordination. Erdogan’s government was the most recent addition to the arrangement, integrating Ankara into a bloc linking South Asia, the Gulf, and the eastern Mediterranean.
Egypt’s potential entry would change the pact’s character substantially. Egypt is home to the Arab world’s largest military by active personnel, controls the Suez Canal — through which roughly twelve percent of global trade transits — and borders both Libya to the west and Sudan to the south, two states where active conflicts continue and where outside powers have been competing for influence. Egyptian membership in a framework connecting the dominant military powers of South Asia, the Gulf, and the eastern Mediterranean would produce a security alignment without obvious precedent in the post-Cold War Middle East.
The strategic rationale from Ankara’s side is legible. The August diplomatic surge in the Gulf has generated a series of realignments sharing one structural feature: they do not route through Washington. The Türkiye-Saudi Arabia-Pakistan memorandum, signed on the day after Kremlin and UAE officials discussed Persian Gulf normalization by phone, reflects a broader pattern in which regional security arrangements are being assembled by actors positioning themselves to operate with reduced American intermediation.
For Egypt, the calculation is more complicated. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government maintains close military ties with the United States and receives $1.3 billion in annual US military assistance. Cairo has historically avoided formal security commitments to blocs that Washington might read as competitive with its own regional frameworks. Joining a defense pact with Turkey — with which Egypt’s relations were severely damaged for most of the past decade following Cairo’s 2013 military coup, which Ankara condemned — would mark a significant recalibration in its own right.
Egypt-Turkey relations have improved since a 2023 summit between Erdogan and Sisi that began a formal rapprochement. The two governments have cooperated since then on Libya and Gaza-related diplomacy. As Anadolu Agency reported in the lead-up to Friday’s signing, the trilateral framework included undefined expansion provisions from its drafting stage — language consistent with Yilmaz’s public invitation on Saturday.
Whether that rapprochement has reached the point where Sisi would consider a formal defense alignment with Ankara is a different question — and one that Cairo has not yet answered. Yilmaz offered no timeline, cited no Egyptian interest directly, and framed his remarks as possibility rather than negotiation in progress. Egypt has not publicly responded to his statement.
For the moment, the Ankara-Riyadh-Islamabad pact is a signed memorandum between three governments. Whether Egypt becomes its fourth signatory, its first Arab member, and the actor that transforms its regional weight into something qualitatively different — that question belongs entirely to Cairo, and Cairo has not yet addressed it.
