The ongoing American-Israeli confrontation with Iran has placed the Egyptian state in a position where continued equivocation is no longer tenable. A clear and unequivocal stance is now required: will Cairo stand with the Gulf states, which have poured vast sums into Egypt since the popular uprising against the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule on June 30, 2013, or will it drift in the opposite direction?

Here, the resounding one might even say collapse has revealed itself. The world was taken aback, though I was not, by the fact that everything spoken, heard, seen, and broadcast from the heart of Cairo appeared, in both form and substance, to be strongly supportive of the clerical regime in Iran. To such an extent that some observers felt as though this narrative was being orchestrated from Tehran rather than Cairo. This is the cumulative outcome of decades of entrenched hostility toward Israel, carefully cultivated and continuously inflamed, until it reached a stage where the machinery of the Egyptian state could no longer recalibrate or repurpose it in the manner it had long relied upon.

This posture has precipitated a profound and unprecedented crisis between Egypt and the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, reflected in unusually sharp rhetoric from prominent writers, intellectuals, and journalists, widely regarded as echoing the positions of their respective governments.

For Gulf audiences, both official and public, this crisis has further deepened the stark contradictions between reality and the narrative consistently advanced for over a decade by President El-Sisi himself: that “Gulf security is a red line,” that “the security of the Gulf is integral to Egypt’s own security,” and that “the Egyptian military engages with the Gulf as it would with its own state.” All of this culminated in the now-famous phrase: “at a moment’s notice” (masāfat al-sikka), which became firmly embedded in the Gulf’s collective consciousness as a promise of immediate Egyptian military intervention in the face of any threat. The subsequent dissonance has given rise to widespread disillusionment so much so that some have gone as far as to describe what transpired as a “betrayal.”

At the heart of this turbulent scene, the impact on the Egyptian president himself has been unmistakable. His speech on March 14, delivered during the Egyptian Family Iftar at the Air Force House, left attendees stunned. They listened to the same man who once declared, “I swear to God, I have spent fifty years learning what a state means and I am still learning,” in January 2018 during........

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