Placeholder AbstractEgypt’s relationship with the Non-Aligned Movement was deeply interlinked with its attempt to increase its status in the Middle East in particular and in the world at large. Although the royal government until 1952 and the military regime afterward toyed with various forms of neutralism, Nasser bought into the Nehruvian conception of Non-Alignment only by 1956 after talks with Yugoslavia’s Tito. Both Nasser and Tito pushed, against Nehru’s opposition, for five years to establish the Non-Aligned Movement. However, the Non-Aligned Movement was quickly drawn into the quicksand of both world and Middle East politics. Its foundational conference in Belgrade in 1961 was overshadowed by the Berlin Crisis and the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing. The 2nd conference in Cairo in 1964 served Nasser to escape its isolation in the Middle East. The Israel-Arab war in June 1967 almost lead to a quasi-alliance between the socialist world and the Non-Aligned Movement. The 1970 conference in Lusaka was overshadowed by Black September in Jordan, which caused Arab leaders to skip it in favor of an Arab League emergency meeting in Cairo, after which Nasser suddenly died. His successor Sadat moved Egypt from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American position in the early 1970s in order to engage in some form of talks for a modus vivendi with Israel, just as the Cuba and then North Korea and unified socialist Vietnam was trying to seize the Non-Aligned Movement and move it towards the revolutionary, anti-American left. While the Egyptian-Israeli peace in 1979 led to Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League, the moderates in the Non-Aligned Movement prevented a similar development in that movement. Still, Non-Aligned indecision during the 3rd Indochina War (1978-79), the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1979-88), and the Iraq-Iran War (1980-88) estranged Egypt from its own creation—the Non-Aligned Movement.