Today’s emergency trilateral summit between Greece, Egypt and Cyprus lands at a moment when the ground beneath our region is genuinely shifting.
President Christodoulides, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Egyptian President al-Sisi are meeting at al-Sisi’s invitation, which is precisely why the summit is happening on Egyptian soil, in El Alamein.
And that invitation is loaded. Cairo’s decision to bring the leaders of Cyprus and Greece to the table sends a message with more than one intended audience. One of them, unmistakably, is Turkey. Or rather, one man in particular: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The official pretext is an international air show the Egyptian government is hosting, the opening ceremony of the El Alamein International Airshow, to be precise. But let’s not kid ourselves: that’s the excuse, not the reason. The real story is the decision to bring these three leaders together at all.
This summit comes hot on the heels of the signing of the “Mecca Pact,” and that timing matters. There had been plenty of talk about Egypt possibly joining that arrangement. It didn’t. Despite considerable pressure from Ankara to bring him round, President al-Sisi has, so far, said no. Seen against that backdrop, Cairo’s outreach to Athens and Nicosia is loaded with meanin; it tells us something about where the Egyptian government’s intentions lie, not least on the “Mecca Pact” question.
As we’ve argued here more than once, trilateral partnerships like this one aren’t just diplomatic theatre; they’re serious political and geostrategic engineering, and they can deliver real results. Not just economic ones, either: security dividends too. That’s exactly why we see it as a good thing that Greece and Cyprus keep widening and upgrading their regional game. Handled properly, this pays off many times over. And zoom out far enough, and it’s obvious these partnerships also feed directly into the push for a Cyprus settlement.
Cyprus’s relationship with Egypt, in particular, sits at the very heart of all this. It’s not new, it’s not fashionable — it’s deep-rooted, traditional, and unmistakably geopolitical. All three states are investing in this partnership because they’re moving in step, at a hard moment, in a hard part of the world. And one thing underpins all of it: trust, built up over years. Trust like that isn’t manufactured overnight.
