Standing before cameras on Friday afternoon in the Saudi city of Mecca, the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan held up the text of a freshly inked defense pact.

Announcing the pact, Saudi Deputy Public Diplomacy Minister Rayed Krimly said it would allow the three countries “to develop joint defense capabilities, strengthen strategic deterrence, enhance readiness, and further develop and integrate their respective defense capabilities to jointly address any threats to their safety and security.”

“Any external armed attack on any one of the three countries will be considered as an attack on all,” Krimly said, echoing Turkish and Pakistani officials.

Dubbed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, the pact was presented as the capstone of the cooperation among countries that came together to mediate a long-term solution to the United States-led Iran war — which saw Tehran direct swarms of drones and missiles toward neighboring Arab Gulf countries, hit key military and energy installations, and disrupt the shipping of 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas.

Over the last six months, those countries have held meetings in regional capitals, used their diplomatic and economic weight to lobby Iranian and US officials, conveyed backdoor messages, released public statements as a group, and held late night phone calls with one another that were always followed by quick press readouts to assure the public that things would not spiral out of control.

But when it came to Friday’s meeting, the bloc’s tight-knit formation was disrupted by a notable absence, for the mediating team that had led the de-escalation efforts was a foursome, not a threesome.

Egypt, the notable absentee, was not missing for lack of an invitation.

A Pakistani source close to the recent negotiations told Mada Masr Egypt had been offered to join the coalition but declined.

On Saturday, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan also said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to see the alliance expand and that Egypt was a potential candidate to ​join, among others.

“Egypt is already our natural partner on all issues. I believe that, at the next stage, Egypt will also be among us in the alliance. We already act toward one another as if we were alliance members. There are a few technical issues. Once these are implemented, there is no reason for Egypt not to be part of it,” he said.

Why, then, despite being welcomed with open arms, would Egypt decline to join an agreement it has helped lay the diplomatic groundwork for?

For officials in Cairo, diplomats who have been stationed in regional capitals and sources in the signatory countries, the answer lies in the fact that the defense pact has little to do with actual defense and is instead largely a question of political alignment. While Egypt maintains strong bilateral relations with many of the coalition’s countries, it is not willing to sign up for what it sees as a Saudi-authored political bloc that would undermine its own ability to maneuver regionally.

In the wake of Friday’s ceremony, comments from the Turkish foreign minister talking up the military heft of the agreement dominated headlines.

Speaking on Turkish television, Fidan said the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is the equivalent of NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense.

For years, there has been talk of a collective Middle Eastern military alliance modeled after NATO, dubbed Arab NATO. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have vied for a leading role in building out such an architecture.

“That is why you establish a security pact. That is why other countries ultimately decide to join an alliance — to benefit from one another’s protective support,” Fidan said on Saturday.

NATO’s Article 5 states that “an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all members, and triggers an obligation for each member to come to its assistance.”

Though Fidan used the analogy to speak to the strength of the new agreement, Article 5 offers little actual precedent for collective defense.

The article has only been invoked once in the history of the treaty’s existence: after the September 11 attacks on the United States. But rather than being the key force backing the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, NATO only conducted small, “symbolic” operations to support its largest member.

Beyond analogy, a Turkish official speaking to Mada Masr downplayed the actual binding nature of the Mecca agreement.

“The …