Over the last six decades, bilateral relations between Egypt and Saudi Arabia have not been strangers to the ups and downs of relations between the two powers.
In the 1960s, the two countries fought each other indirectly in Yemen when Egypt under late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser decided to support the revolutionary tide in the country. This unintended war was a useful lesson for both countries, indicating that it would be better for their national interests to avoid such entanglements in the future.
In hindsight, I believe that the two countries drew the proper conclusions. A US scholar of international relations rightly called the 1960s, in the light of the entrenched confrontation between a monarchy, and a very conservative one at the time, and a revolutionary republic in Egypt, the time of the “Arab Cold War”.
The Saudis under former King Faisal looked at Egypt as a revolutionary power that aspired to topple traditional political systems and to establish revolutionary regimes in their place. This was not in fact the case.
Such fears were shared at the time with the administration of former US president John F. Kennedy, who decided to entrust an American envoy with the task of carrying a message to Nasser. The essence of this message was that the Saudis believed that the true intentions of Egypt in deploying troops to Yemen was so that the Egyptian forces there could advance at a later stage towards the oil fields in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia.
Nasser told Kennedy’s envoy that he was glad to hear that the Egyptian Army had the resources to move over such a large part of Saudi territory to reach the oil fields. These were the years of a lack of trust, on the one hand, and an ideological confrontation, on the other, between the two Arab powers.
In the years since then much has changed in Egyptian-Saudi relations, in the Middle East, and in the international system. Instead of the clear-cut division of the Cold War years between West and East, with corresponding alliances between these two blocs and the Arab countries and for that matter across the Third World, today international relations have become fluid, with competing international and regional powers striving for influence in the most strategic regions of the world, particularly the Middle East, the Gulf, and the Red Sea.
The way Egypt and Saudi Arabia deal with such challenges will impact the future relations between the two Arab powers. Their respective alliances with the great powers, on the one hand, and the regional powers, on the other, among them Turkey and Iran, will have a direct influence on how the two countries manage their regional policies.
Take, for instance, their respective relations with Iran or for that matter with Israel. Looking into a crystal ball, I expect that relations with Israel will be highly problematic, especially if the US Trump Administration succeeds, which is doubtful at present given the wars being conducted by Israel on seven fronts, particularly in Gaza, in including Saudi Arabia in the so-called “Abraham Accords” normalising relations between the Arab countries and Israel.
Theoretically speaking, would a hypothetical cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel, when the time comes, have a negative impact on Egyptian interests? Take, for example, the project linking India to Europe via sea and land across the Indian Ocean, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel that was announced in September 2023 by former US president Joe Biden on the margins of a G-20 Summit meeting hosted by the Indian government. Wouldn’t that project compete with the Suez Canal?
In the wake of the Gulf tour carried out by Trump from 13 to 16 May when he visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, the UK magazine the Economist published an article on the strategic significance of the tour in terms of the regional weight and influence of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It argued that the tour had shown that Saudi Arabia is the ascendant power in the Middle East and the Arab World at the expense of the role that Egypt used to play.
Some Egyptian commentators not known for their support for the government seized on this article to attack the foreign policy of Egypt, blaming this on the current difficult economic and financial situation in the country. In other words, they said, the balance of power in the Middle East had shifted to the benefit of Saudi Arabia.
I doubt Egypt shares this biased point of view, however. I also hope that Saudi officialdom will not buy into this argument. The history of the Middle East over the last few decades has shown the complementarity of Cairo and Riyadh. When the two capitals work and cooperate in tandem, they both win, like when they worked together at the emergency Arab Summit held in Cairo on 9-10 August 1990 a week after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Absent such cooperation, I am not sure how Kuwait would have been liberated. Because of this cooperation, an international coalition was formed under a combined US-Arab command that led to recuperating Kuwait’s territorial integrity.
Similarly, the role that Saudi Arabia under the late King Faisal played in supporting Egypt and Syria in the 1973 October War against Israel by enforcing an oil embargo stands as testimony of the strategic significance of the close cooperation between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Their cooperation in the years to come is all the more important in standing firm against the Israeli strategy of changing the geopolitical situation in the Middle East while denying the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own.
I would argue that the true test of the resilience of Egyptian-Saudi relations will come in the context of the changing political map of the Middle East and how the two Arab powers deal with such changes. It is in the interests of both to work together to defeat any Israeli plans to hold the Middle East hostage to Israel and Zionism. Let us agree never to fall victim to Israeli ambitions for regional dominance and hegemony.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 July, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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