As the largest and most populous nation in the Middle East, Egypt's foreign policies have historically played a vital strategic role in the region. But what, if any ‘grand strategy’ have the nation's republican presidents pursued? This chapter explores how the different approaches of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak might be conceptualized, placing Egypt's current strategic priorities under President Sisi in historical perspective through an exploration of the various strategic temperaments, ideas and ‘habits’ of past presidents. It reveals the intersections of expansionism, containment and pragmatism in the foreign policy priorities of its leaders over the long term. The chapter argues that each president had a distinctive ‘strategic style’ though these were often not transparent to observers at the time: with the benefit of retrospect however, a clearer picture emerges.

After President Nasser's triumphant political victory in the 1956 Suez crisis, a spate of nationalist upheavals in Syria, Iraq and Yemen appeared to place Egypt in the position of revolutionary vanguard, leveraging the support of the Soviet Union in the Cold War whilst also professing ‘non-alignment’ in the global conflict. But to what extent did pragmatism prevail over ideology in Nasser's pan-Arabism and how far was the nationalist able to retain Egypt's independence from the influence of the Kremlin?

By contrast, the resounding defeat of the 1967 war ushered in a Western allied policy of ‘Egypt first’ in the region, epitomized in President Anwar el Sadat's bilateral peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Hailed for his strategic thinking after the blitzkrieg attack on Israel in the 1973 war that perfectly epitomized Sadat's penchant for strategic surprise, by the end of Sadat's tenure Egypt was firmly in the American camp but isolated from its traditional role as leader of the Arab world.

Under Hosni Mubarak, a policy of reconciliation with Egypt's patrons in the Gulf took priority. Mubarak was essentially a technocrat and much less inclined towards grandiose notions of grand strategy and surprise as a means of executing foreign policy. In a more conciliatory fashion, Mubarak continued much of the same ideas that Sadat had begun: reining in the military, consolidating relations with the US and Israel but also redefining Egypt's principal threat as political Islam, which aptly aligned with the counter-terrorist priorities of Washington, particularly after 9/11.