Overview
- President Donald Trump sent and posted a letter offering to relaunch U.S. mediation on Nile water sharing between Egypt and Ethiopia.
- He proposed talks guided by technical expertise and U.S. monitoring to ensure predictable drought-year releases for Egypt and Sudan while enabling Ethiopian power generation, with potential electricity sales downstream.
- Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi publicly thanked Trump and voiced support for U.S. efforts, and Sudan’s Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan welcomed the initiative.
- Ethiopia has not issued an immediate response, following the collapse of U.S.-brokered talks in 2020 and the failure of later African Union efforts to deliver a binding deal.
- The dispute centers on Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, inaugurated in 2025, with Cairo and Khartoum seeking a legally binding operating agreement and Addis Ababa favoring nonbinding guidelines tied to its development needs.