May Darwich, University of Birmingham
Over the past decade, Egypt has grappled with acute crises along nearly all its borders: civil wars in Libya and Sudan, mounting threats to strategic interests in the Nile Basin, and maritime insecurity in the Red Sea. The Arabic proverb, “misfortunes do not come singly,” aptly captures the multiplicity of challenges confronting Sisi’s regime. The events of 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent genocidal campaign in Gaza have only deepened the challenges facing Egypt’s foreign policy, polarizing observers between those endorsing the regime’s narrative of “Egypt’s return to leadership” (Boussel 2025), especially after mediating a ceasefire in 2025, and those declaring the demise of its erstwhile leading role (el-Hamalawy 2024; Shama 2026; Darwich 2024). Beyond this discursive polarization over whether Egypt has maintained its leadership role in a region in flux, Cairo’s foreign policy responses to these crises reveal a pronounced reluctance to balance looming threats. Even when core national interests were imperiled, Egypt’s actions remained devoid of a balancing strategy, either relying on internal mobilization or external alliances, and instead seemed lacking a coherent vision of how to address these challenges. While many observers have expected Egypt to balance Israeli expansion in the region by forging strategic alliances regionally or internationally — whether through hedging via closer ties China and Russia, or through an internal military buildup to reduce its dependence on the US security umbrella —Egyptian response during those crises seemed frozen in time, with rhetorical gestures instead of any active balancing. Egypt has clearly “underperformed” in times of crises, prompting the question of how to understand its behavior.
This essay interrogates the theoretical construct of underbalancing and assesses its explanatory validity in the case of Egypt’s foreign policy, especially toward Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Egypt’s posture toward Gaza constitutes a puzzling episode in a series of underperformance in Cairo’s foreign policy. Despite Israel’s growing military expansion and significant domestic mobilization in Egypt favoring a balancing response to Israel’s military dominance, Sisi’s government appeared either unwilling or unable (or both) to articulate a balancing stance, even a “soft balancing” (Feng and He 2017; Papa and Han 2025). Even signals of Egypt’s alignment with Saudi Arabia and Turkey to balance UAE-Israel-US alliance seemed short-lived and failed to crystalize into a durable commitment. Such conduct could be characterized as “underbalancing,” contravening the structural realist expectation that threatened states will counterbalance dangerous power concentrations, thereby exposing a critical deficiency in both balance-of-power and balance-of-threat logics. This essay argues that while neoclassical realism, and specifically the theory of underbalancing, offers a promising lens, Egypt’s case may not merely exemplify underbalancing; rather, it poses a fundamental challenge to the theory. The subsequent section delineates the concept of underbalancing in neoclassical realism, explicating its core propositions, followed by an empirical analysis of Egypt’s policies during the Gaza war—a critical case that interrogates the theory’s explanatory reach.
Egypt: Underbalancing in Action?
Balancing means the aggregation of military power through either internal mobilization or forging external alliances to prevent or deter the military domination of a rising power and/or threat. Balancing often materializes when the stakes are high, such as territorial occupation or threatening vital interests (e.g., sea lanes, allies, etc.). Balancing does not require a direct military attack, but a state can decide to balance against a potential threat to protect long-term security interests by building new alliances (external balancing) or engaging in a military buildup (internal balancing). While balancing is the ideal response in a law-of-nature like terms when states’ interests are at stake, scholars have long established that such a response is rare in reality (Schweller 1994; Schroeder 1994). Sometimes states overbalance, i.e., doing “too much” in the face of arising problems (Mallett and Juneau 2023; Juneau 2024; Fatton 2023). In other instances, states may choose to do “too little” in the face of the threat, i.e., underbalancing. State may also choose other options: including bandwagoning, buckpassing, appeasement, or hiding.
Underbalancing “occurs when the state does not balance or does so inefficiently in response to a dangerous and unappeasable aggressor, and the state’s efforts are essential to deter or defeat it” (Schweller 2004, 168). Scholars often explain underbalancing as a “theory of mistakes,” where states do not adequately respond to threats, often due to domestic variables related to elite fragmentation and social cohesion (Schweller 2004, 2006) or ideational factors preventing balancing (Gause 2017). Relying on neoclassical realism, Schweller presented a theory of underbalancing, whereby states facing threats do not automatically respond to threats through balancing, but some domestic variables related to state coherence that would reflect the willingness and ability of actors to take the risk and cost of balancing behaviour. State coherence is an intervening variable creating policy adjustments to the automatic balance of power logic, changing how states respond to systemic changes. Schweller (2006, 47) identifies four variables that influence whether a state balances threat: elite consensus, elite cohesion, government or regime vulnerability, and social cohesion. Disagreement among elites about whether a threat exists (elite consensus) or about the source of threat reduces a state’s willingness to balance (Schweller 2006, 48; 55). Furthermore, regimes that are vulnerable to removal from office struggle to mobilize public support for balancing policies (Schweller 2006, 49), while a fragmented society (social cohesion) is unlikely to share a uniform perception of threats (Schweller 2006, 54).
Scholars studying alliance in the Middle East also looked at underbalancing as a result of ideational factors playing as intervening variables preventing balancing behavior. Gause (2017) argues that alliance patterns in the Middle East after the Arab uprisings defy traditional balance-of-power expectations. Despite Iran’s clear rise in regional influence — through its ties to Iraq, Hezbollah, and other actors — other states have not formed strong counterbalancing coalitions. Instead, they exhibit “underbalancing,” focusing on partnerships with non-state actors rather than formal alliances, continued dependence on the US security umbrella, tacit coordination with Israel culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords. Gause contends that this behavior is best explained by ideology and regime security taking priority over pure power politics. The ideological diversity and differences between Arab states, Turkey, Israel has prevented a regional balancing to materialize.
Turning to Egypt’s behavior during the Gaza war, no balancing occurred despite clear security stakes: a conflict on its borders, Israeli encroachment on the border region in Rafah, and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea that have reduced Egypt’s Suez Canal revenues nearly by half. Egypt has increasingly found itself with limited capacity to shape unfolding events along its borders. Furthermore, the Israeli incursion into Rafah, a city adjacent to Egypt’s border, compounded the erosion of Egypt’s military and strategic image. The images of Israeli army raising their flag on the Philadelphi Corridor constituted a violation of the 1979 peace treaty, according to which the area around the border (zones C and D) remains demilitarized, with a limited Egyptian police force deployed along the borders, according to the 2005 Philadelphi Accord (annexed to the peace agreement) (Higazy and Mamdouh 2024). With no reaction from the Egyptian government or armed forces, such flagrant infringement reflects an underbalancing behavior. Despite nominal control over the Rafah crossing according to the 2005 accord, Egypt struggled to assert effective authority, particularly in the face of Israeli bombardments and operational disruptions. The crossing, once a symbol of Egypt’s gatekeeping role in Gaza, became emblematic of its waning influence, as humanitarian aid convoys faced repeated delays and logistical challenges. Moreover, the escalation of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea — ostensibly in solidarity with Gaza — exposed vulnerabilities in Egypt’s maritime security posture, necessary for maintaining its profits from the Suez Canal at a time of substantial economic crises (Shama 2026; el-Hamalawy 2024). These attacks disrupted global shipping routes and underscored Egypt’s inability to project military deterrence or coordinate a robust regional response in the Red Sea region.
From a balance-of-power or balance-of-threat perspective, these regional dynamics should have prompted the formation of a coalition among various Middle Eastern actors aimed at constraining and reversing Israel’s military capabilities and its perceived opportunistic expansion. Given Israel’s unprecedented military support from the United States and Europe, all regional states had reason to be concerned about its behavior. Egypt, in particular — given its historical military confrontations with Israel and Israel’s persistent claims over the Sinai Peninsula — should have assessed that the Gaza conflict heightened its vulnerability to Israeli military dominance, with potential implications for Egyptian security. Yet, such balancing behavior did not materialize. Egypt has even failed to exercise “soft balancing” in international and regional institutions. Nor did Egypt bandwagon with Israel or the United States; bilateral tensions have deepened, and Egypt rejected proposals to relocate Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula (International Crisis Group 2024; Darwich 2025). Attempts at appeasement through mediation also failed until mid-2025, as Israel proved resistant to compromise. “Hiding” was not feasible given Egypt’s geographic proximity to Gaza.
The Pathology of Inaction
While “underbalancing” appears to offer a plausible explanation, the case of Egypt challenges key premises of the theory. Post-October 7, elite cohesion remained intact, and despite agreement along the Egyptian elites that Israel’s military dominance poses a critical threat to Egypt’s security (Aboudouh 2025), there has been a near consensus around a policy of strategic inaction — a continuation of intellectual advocacy for “strategic dormancy,” a term advanced by Abdel Moneim Said, a prominent analyst closely aligned with the regime (Said 2018). This intellectual framing legitimized inaction as a rational choice, even as regional instability deepened.
Nevertheless, Egypt’s inaction in the case of Gaza challenges the logic of underbalancing as understood in the neoclassical realist theory, where the absence of balancing behavior is primarily attributed to constraining domestic factors. In the case of Egypt, the domestic context reveals a more complex dynamic. The public opinion was strongly mobilized in favor of a balancing behavior against Israel, and such a balancing stance could have enhanced the regime’s eroding legitimacy, particularly amid an unprecedent economic crisis. Therefore, the conventional assumption that the domestic public opinion or societal cohesion inhibit balancing behavior does not apply here. Nor does the case fit the concept of “omnibalancing,” whereby elites in power align with great powers (or external powers) to fend off domestic threats (David 1991; Nonneman 2005; Watkins 2020). Instead, the Egyptian regime faced unprecedent pressure from its external allies to relocate Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula, which caused tension between Egypt and the US (Darwich 2025). Nevertheless, a rejection of these proposals was not followed by a balancing behavior. In fact, pursuing balancing behavior carried significant external risks, as it threatened the loss of critical US support.
At the same time, the regime faced the delicate challenge of suppressing public outrage and calls for balancing Israel’s military aggression, thereby departing from the historical practice of earlier regimes that have long instrumentalized the ‘Palestine’ cause for domestic purposes (Valbjørn, Bank, and Darwich 2024). Egypt’s underbalancing thus reflects a strategic trade‑off between preserving external backing and containing domestic anger over Palestine. This choice of underbalancing behavior here thus partly aligns with the long-standing scholarly consensus underscoring Egyptian foreign policy as driven by economic constraints and authoritarian regime survival imperatives (Abou-El-Fadl 2019; Shama 2013; Selim 2022; Piazza 2019; Magued 2024). Moreover, the ideological diversity among many regional actors, as rightly mentioned by Gause (2017), has also in this instance inhibited a regional alignment to counter Israeli military expansion, especially with deep divisions between Arab states and their entrenched partnerships with the US. Balancing meant endangering the regime’s external support and bandwagoning with US and Israel meant endangering domestic stability.
Therefore, the underbalancing theory does not fully explain the foreign policy options of regional powers, such as Egypt, when faced with such shifts in regional power distributions, often along with interference from great powers. Scholars often assume that theories developed to explain the behavior of great powers at the international level could be scaled down to the regional level, assuming regions could be regional security complexes in their own right (Buzan and Waever 2003; Lake and Morgan 1997). Nevertheless, scholars often noted that the principal difficulty in “downscaling” underbalancing to the regional level is the difference between great powers and regional powers (Hutto 2023). Obviously, regional powers are smaller than great powers; their power projection capabilities are not global. Given the power asymmetries between great and regional powers, underbalancing might be driven by other considerations or following different logics at the regional level. Furthermore, the intrusion or penetration of a great power, i.e. in this case the US, in the regional power distribution has crucial consequences for state behavior as illustrated by the case of Egypt.
Beyond simple inaction in the face of the crisis, Egypt’s Gaza policy exemplifies another trend: foreign policy as performance rather than substance. Cairo’s approach — what might be termed “photographic diplomacy” (Newbury 2024) — relies on symbolic gestures of “pretending to balance” while avoiding serious commitments. This performative strategy reflects a deeper malaise in regional security politics: overestimating deterrent capacity and indulging rhetorical boasting about minor achievements. Egypt’s behavior illustrates this phenomenon vividly. International relations theory has paid scant attention to the pathology of such inaction. By clinging to narratives of past achievements and overstating its diplomatic leverage, Cairo is struggling to adapt coherently to a rapidly deteriorating regional order. This gap in theoretical understanding calls for a more nuanced framework that integrates regime vulnerability, symbolic diplomacy, and the performative dimensions of foreign policy to understand “underbalancing” within what remains a deeply “penetrated” regional order.
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