As US President-elect Donald Trump begins to assemble his White House team the Egyptian Embassy in Washington has been closely following possible foreign policy appointments.

According to an Egyptian diplomat who has served in Washington, while Trump’s foreign policy decisions during his first term in office tended to reflect his own views and those of a few close aides, including his then senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, “at the end of the day the reporting the foreign policy team makes to the Oval Office is inevitably factored into the president’s own assessments.”

The same diplomat said early signs are not necessarily encouraging, noting that “it looks like Jason Greenblatt is coming back with Trump and this is not going to make Egypt’s task of pushing for a fair deal [for the Palestinian cause] any easier.”

Greenblatt, Trump’s former special representative for international negotiations, is characterised as being “firmly biased towards the Israeli view” by Egyptian and other Arab diplomats who have served in Washington or worked on the Middle East conflict.

According to an Arab diplomat who is well informed on American policy on the Middle East, “Greenblatt is bad news, but Friedman is much worse news for our region.” David Friedman was Trump’s ambassador to Israel and his bias towards Israel is recognised by Arab and Middle East-based European diplomats.

Despite worrying signs when it comes to Trump’s Middle East team, there is optimism in official quarters in Cairo that the Trump administration will deliver a deal on Palestinian statehood. This optimism is not just about the “good political chemistry”, as one Egyptian diplomat put it, between President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and Trump, but about Trump’s desire “to see an expansion to the Abraham Accords, and his key target there is Saudi Arabia.”

In August 2020, shortly before the end of his first term in office, Trump oversaw the White House signing of normalisation agreements between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain. The normalisation made fast and firm progress, with Israel and the UAE coming together in several joint initiatives, including the I2U2 economic and technological platform that brings together India, Israel, the UAE, and US.  In press statements made during his campaign, Trump said that he would get Israeli-Saudi normalisation on track within the first year of his presidency.

With Riyadh publicly committed to conditioning any normalisation with Israel on the launch of a “credible and irreversible path” towards Palestinian statehood, Cairo is banking on being able to use the Saudi position and Trump’s objectives to promote political movement towards Palestinian statehood.

Egyptian diplomatic and political sources also note that Cairo is well aware that unlike outgoing US President Joe Biden, who had very little impact on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump, “despite an up and down relationship with Netanyahu”, is capable of putting pressure on the Israeli prime minister.

President Al-Sisi was among the first leaders in the region to call Trump to congratulate him following his victory last week. According to a statement from the press office of the president, during the phone call Al-Sisi “emphasised Egypt’s interest to continue joint work with President Trump in his new term, in light of the strategic nature of the long-standing relationship between our two countries and the special cooperation between both sides during his first term, so as to benefit both the Egyptian and American peoples and contribute to stability, peace and development in the Middle East.”

Clearly, any path towards a “deal” will have to start with an end to the Israeli war on Gaza — something that several sources in Cairo say they are confident Trump can secure “sooner rather than later”.

According to regional diplomatic sources, Trump is already working with the Biden Envoy to Lebanon Amos Hochstein to find a way to end Israel’s war on Lebanon. “The deal is not fully done yet, some details are still being ironed out, but it is in the works and Trump’s team is in direct contact with Hochstein,” said one source.

On 13 November, Trump and Biden were scheduled to meet in the White House for a hand-over session during which the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon would inevitably have been allotted time for discussion.

According to Paul Salem, vice president for international engagement at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, Trump’s focus on the Middle East will mostly serve American interests, including securing oil supplies from, and arms sales to, Arab Gulf countries, and limiting Chinese economic expansion in the region.

Speaking this week at a lecture organised by the American University in Cairo’s Alternative Policy Solutions project, Salem argued that Arab capitals need to try to influence the line that Trump takes on the problems of the region.

An Arab summit that convened in Riyadh on 11 November adopted a statement that made it clear that expanding Israel’s integration in the region is inextricable linked to finding a solution for the plight of the Palestinian people, 200,000 of whom have been killed or injured in Israel’s 14-month war, the majority of them women and children.

On the sidelines of the summit, Al-Sisi held talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Jordan’s King Abdullah and acting Lebanese Prime Minister Naguib Miqati to coordinate positions vis-à-vis the new Trump administration.

Managing Middle East issues is not the only item on the agenda of Egyptian-American cooperation. Cairo, sources say, is also keen to “re-engage” Trump in managing the dispute with Ethiopia over the operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. This month, Addis Ababa said construction of the dam on the Blue Nile, source of 80 per cent of Egypt’s share of Nile water, is now complete.

Egypt is also keen to expand security cooperation with the US on the Horn of Africa and Red Sea and is keen to bolster economic support and cooperation.

According to Middle East Council on Global Affairs visiting fellow Ahmed Morsy, if the Trump administration “returns to transactional politics and deals in the Middle East, as it is likely to do, Egypt must be prepared with medium- to long-term strategies to [secure] influence” on the future management of regional conflicts in line with Egyptian interests.

These strategies, argued Morsy, “should not only be focused on the immediate neighbourhood but be proactive and expand engagement within Africa, particularly the Horn of Africa region.”

While pressing economic challenges might tempt Cairo to put Egypt’s immediate economic interests first, Morsy held out the possibility that “by negotiating medium to long-term strategies with the United States Egypt could create” new dynamics and modes of transnational cooperation. This approach, he argued, will be as helpful for Egypt’s interests with the second Trump administration as it is for the future of Egyptian-American relations in general, “regardless of who is in power in Washington”.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly