[quote=@Dinh AaronMk]
[@Letter Bee]

My points on Egypt still stand as they did before. Egypt would exist in a delicate balance of social relationships within the Middle East as was carried out by the Ottoman Empire. Similarly Muhammad Ali exists predominately by the will of the Ottomans that granted him permission to be the ruler of Egypt to begin with and ruling Egypt was a balance of maintaining that cordial feudal relationship with the Ottomans as much as it was having to fight them now and then to maintain independence at arm's reach, as with anyone in the greater Levant, Arabian peninsula, and Mesopotamia who would be as much subjects of the Ottomans as they were independent actors doing their own thing on pure vibe.

And besides the fractious conditions of this RP, the European calculus towards the Middle East and larger Ottoman Empire is always how best to use them as the foil to the Russian Empire. Neglecting the Ottoman Empire to allow them to break down too fast creates a void that the Russians could use to surge back from their punishment and bruising during the later alt-Napoleonic timeline, where even the Persians had the opportunity to nip at the Russian frontier and make gains on them after a little over a century of losing.

Internally in Egypt you have to remember that the departure of Napoleon from Egypt would have been still at best bitter, because he was not a popular figure in Egypt at all and anyone doing rapid western modernizations in Egypt could well be seen as just another Napoleon, even if they are Albanian Muslim and not French. But much of the Egyptian industrialization was fueled by European coal and would or could be very vulnerable to being leveraged that way. All those state centralizations and nationalism that Mohammad Ali did? Not only unpopular to his restless Egyptian subjects but also tasteless for European investors and parties who would source Egypt their most valuable coal to run their manufacturing depots.

A large part of this may just be an overall lack of regional players to drive competitive or antagonistic relationships towards Egypt. But skimming the app it's roughly the same as it ever was.
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It's a direct copy-paste as I was using it as an example; not a formal submission. I haven't made a decision on whether to re-apply yet; as you said, Egypt's position is more precarious than the app presents it as, even with a foreign patron.

But as it appears that I'm no longer restricted to the Balkans or Baltics, that widens my options, assuming I do decide to join and find a nation that fits the narrative(s) I want to tell.