(Awasa Guardian) Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has successfully pushed a renegotiation over Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd) as the dam approaches completion. The White House and the World Bank have gotten involved as mediators, effectively sidelining years of trilateral consultations between Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt. 

Analysts familiar with Cairo’s strategic and diplomatic maneuvers suggest that such international mediation is a major loss for Ethiopia, after years of successfully gaining consensus from Nile Basin countries against Egypt’s monopoly.  Both President Trump’s US administration and the WB are not impartial actors in this negotiation, since el-Sisi has exploited Egypt’s pro-Israel card to manipulate US foreign policy; while the World Bank has opposed the GERD since the beginning. Since its peace treaty with Israel that included over $1 Billion in annual US security aid, Cairo has often used its high profile pro-Israel stance to leverage financial and political favors from the United States.

President el-Sisi is also taking advantage of political unrest inside Ethiopia and his chairmanship of the African Union (AU) to alter AU’s previously pro-Ethiopia stance. With additional favorable geopolitical circumstances, including Egyptian security’s increasing presence inside Sudan, analysts believe a military option against Ethiopia’s dam is being considered in Cairo.

However, American media has often depicted President Trump’s obsessions with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, an award recently given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Dr Abiy Ahmed. In addition to ending the stalemate in the Korean Peninsula, averting a potential war between Ethiopia and Egypt will likely help Trump’s case for the award. He has reportedly floating the idea of “cutting the ribbon” for the inauguration of the GERD in 2020 by visiting Ethiopia, which would be his first travel to the African Continent. 

With the unusual involvement of the US Department of Treasury during the White House meeting, Ethiopian diplomats urged  Addis Ababa to seek a monetary compensation in exchange for delaying or extending the water filling of the dam’s reservoir. With Egyptian media and ambassadors beating the war drum, Cairo is also looking for financial compensation from western governments and international organizations, if its economy indeed suffers due to the Ethiopian dam, to abandon its military threats.