Systemic Determinants of Regional Cooperation: Turkish-Egyptian Rapprochement since 2020

Tensions in bilateral and regional relations between Türkiye and Egypt, which had escalated during the Arab Uprising, normalized since 2020. The aim of this article is to explain the relations between Türkiye and Egypt in the context isolationist and interventionist strategies in the Middle East. The differing approaches to U.S. Middle East policies under Trump and Biden have been a determining factor. Although the US has isolationist military preferences, it also intervenes in the Middle East through other means. When the US interventionist approach is low, the regional power vacuum increases, and consequently, tensions and conflicts among the actors in the region increase. When intervention is high, the opposite result occurs. Methodically, this article adopts qualitative process tracing to analyze and examine the causal mechanism. This article argues that systemic factors, rather than internal, identical or ideational factors, have been the primary determinants of change in Turkish-Egyptian relations in 2020.