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Connor here: This sems will be the theme of a hopeful resort for the Nobel Peace Prize. Elsewhere, the Democratic Republic of Rwanda of the Congolese democracy appears on the brink of collapse, but perhaps the private sector in the United States will still acquire minerals. In the Caucasus, “peace” is fragile and the US try is a thinly disguised effort in a wider conflict.
Still, like so many commentary on Trump, it’s too easy to put all of this at his feet. The author of the next work believes that Ittren believes that for “the modern day of Trump for US State Department experts,” everything will become Hankidra. For that evidence, we simply look at the devastation caused by the last Peace Prize-winning US President and his Uber-Professional Department of State.
Trump may have experts in the modern sector, but the basis for submission of these “peace” deals was actually put into practice by the previous administration of the State Department. Perhaps Team Trump is taking a more rushed approach than the substate wants, but the substance that you left the same low-style change.
Fred H. Lawson, professor emeritus of government at Northeastern University. It was originally published in conversation.
President Donald Trump cheated the United Nations on September 23, 2025 for failing to resolve dangerous international conflicts around the world. “It seems they’re doing it,” he was fed up in his speech to the New York General Assembly.
In contrast, Trump discovered half a dozen serious international conflicts by his own estimate. Among them is the long-standing conflict over the Nile seas that erupted when Ethiopia proposed building a massive dam above the Blue Nile River, threatening Egyptian and Sudan’s water supply.
But as an international relations scholar who studied the conflict, I find it difficult to see how Trump’s intervention is approaching a resolution. In fact, they could have probably made things worse.
Source of conflict
The Nile water is essential for agriculture and public sanitation in both Egypt and Sudan. Its water distribution was regulated in 1959 by an agreement in which Egypt and Sudan guaranteed a large portion of the Nile basin production. The agency of international law prohibits upstream countries, such as the operation of Ethiopia, which manipulates river flows across borders in ways that harm downstream countries.
Map: Conversation, CC by Widear: Route from Natural EarthCread with DataWrapper
Nevertheless, Ethiopia declared in 2011 that it had the right to misuse water resources that arise within its borders. Furthermore, the Blue Nile, which builds dams that acquire electricity, claimed it would provide cheap power to poor Ethiopians and neighboring countries.
Egypt and Sudan were protected on the grounds that the project seriously damages the population and intervened to import international organizations and external authority.
Ambiguous language
Trump was caught up in a Nile conflict at Egypt’s request. Cairo approached mediating Washington in late October 2019 as Ethiopia was intensifying the construction of Grand Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam, which would limit the flow of the Blue Nile. After speaking personally with Egyptian President Abdel Fatta El-Sissi, Trump agreed to be involved directly.
He and the secretary of the Ministry of Finance, Stephen Mnuchin, invited foreign ministers of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia to Washington for consultation.
The opening session for the November 2019 meeting is still underway, with Trump tweeting, “The meeting will go well and debate will continue during the day!”
However, consultations ended with no progress. Instead, all four parties agree to together with representatives of the World Bank to award dozens more over the next three months to hash technical issues.
At these subsequent meetings, Egypt and Ethiopia messed up definitions and metrics. Munucin and his staff were largely on the sidelines, but they reported that they would hold a separate expression of the important Addis Abababa claims about the Renaissance Dam in Grand Ethiopia, separate from questions regarding water management in the Nile River Basin.
More importantly, US representatives allowed inaccurate language to slip into the release of the statement at the end of the December 2019 meeting.
The statement mandated that “the implementation of these technical rules and guidelines regarding dam filling and operation is done by Ethiopia and may be coordinated by the three countries.”
Cairo interpreted this as meaning that all regulations and procedures will be jointly drowned. Addis Ababa believed it had reformed Ethiopia’s right to make a decision entirely on its own.
The discussion explodes
The final round of consultations in January 2020 created a positive agreement that allowed Ethiopia to freely fill the enormous reservoir behind the dam, minimizing the state’s obligation to support Egypt and Sudan during the drought period.
However, Ethiopia limped by accepting draft documents, claiming that the key point remains unstable. Egypt and Sudan refused to review the issues that had already been conceived, but accepted an offer from US Treasury officials to prepare the revised text.
In February 2020, the US Treasury distributed the Annded version, calling Trump, expressing his hope that the agreement would end soon.
Ethiopia felt that Egypt and the United States were pressured to support incomplete texts and were concerned about the domestic political consequences of doing so. The financial authorities then declared that a comprehensive settlement of the dispute is now publicly in the streets of Addis Ababa.
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry has issued a statement saying that President Trump will reach an acceptable deal in support of the US administration’s ongoing efforts. However, the Ethiopian Foreign Minister described Washington’s sudden declaration as “non-diplomatic.”
Ethiopia stagnated for another two months, circulating in response to its own tentative agreement that Egypt and Sudan became uncontrollable.
Washington responds with the hint that he begins to use the Nile to fill the Hargiriceril reels.
In September 2020, the secretary of Mike Pompeo state suspends US$130 million in aid to Ethiopia following the threat from the US. However, the suspension had no impact on negotiations.
Taking over to a continuous deadlock, Trump told him in October 2020 that Egypt would “bloat the dam.”
Ethiopian officials condemned the explosion. The Prime Minister’s Office complained, “The threat and humiliation to Ethiopia’s sovereignty is a false, unproductive and clear violation of international law.” Ethiopia installed anti-aircraft batteries around the dam and declared the airspace above it as a plane-free zone.
The denial collapsed and they remained dormant for the next three years.
Assessing the impact of US medion
Analysts added that Trump’s initial involvement in the Nile conflict exacerbated his bad initial involvement. His praise for his authoritarian leader has inspired him to respond to Egyptian al-Sisi and guide us to trustworthy.
Meanwhile, Trump’s composition against US State Department experts has put him bystanders at the diplomatic corps and entrusted his complicated mission to munitin to his former financial operator and film producer. And his patience and lack of dull language denied denial and alienated Egypt and Ethiopia as well.
Addis Ababa continues to insist that “there is no obligation to request permission from anyone to fill the Renaissance Dam.” In September 2025, Prime Minister Abhiy Ahmed declared that work on the dam had finished and boasted two dams that complemented the other two on the Blue Nile.
Meanwhile, Egypt opened a naval base on the network coast and attached a warship that advanced into the newly created Red Sea Squadron. In July 2025, Badr Abdelatti, an externally mined Egyptian Badr Abdelatti issued a veiled threat of using military tools to resolve Nile conflicts.
Leaving a growing tension, Trump continues to point out the 2019-2020 mediation as a success, as his first administration failed to make progress on the issue.
In July 2025, he told NATO Executive Director Mark Latte that the resolution would only turn the corners upside down. President Alsisi once again praised the president’s involvement, celebrating his hopes that it would create “just a consensus.”
However, there are few indications that the current Trump administration is in a better position to resolve the Nile conflict than its previous one. Since Trump’s second appointment, experienced State Department officials have been fire or resigned, leaving a sensitive foreign policy committee in the hands of private business machines with personal connections with the president rather than diplomats skilled in the skills of handling negotiating in a manageable setting
This development SEM will rarely move Trump out of confidence that he is already settling a conflict over the Nile waters.
