Egypt's President, Abdel Fattah El Sisi, will be looking to enhance his country's status as one of Washington's top partners when he meets the US President Donald Trump this week on the sidelines of the G7 summit in France.
Egypt has been a close US ally since the 1970s when it broke away from an alliance with the Soviet Union and aligned itself with the West, relinquishing its socialist ideology and embracing free-market policies.
It signed a US-brokered peace treaty with Israel in 1979, ending three decades of wars with its neighbour and moving closer to the US, which rewarded Egypt with billions of dollars in aid as part of a programme that runs to this day, with $1.3 billion worth of military assistance per year.
The time may have come again for Egypt to receive new, albeit different, assistance from the US for its role as a mediator that helped pause the Gaza and Iran wars.
"Egypt has in recent months ... pressed on with sincere and serious efforts in coordination with regional and international partners to reach this point; ending the [Iran] war and open a new page that reinforces the region's security and stability," Egypt said in a statement welcoming the deal agreed by the US and Iran to end their conflict; and openly acknowledging for the first time its mediation role.
Sources familiar with the thinking of the Egyptian government say Cairo is now looking for significant help from the Trump administration on a wide range of issues, including relying on and supporting it as an ally in both the Middle East and Africa.
Foremost of these issues is Cairo's wish to see the Trump administration lean on Ethiopia to resolve a years-long dispute over the Nile dam built by Addis Ababa that Egypt claims could reduce its share of the river's water, something it says would spell disaster for its vital agricultural sector.
Mr Trump said early in his second term in office that he would mediate in the dispute. But his administration has not actively followed up on the issue and was later distracted by the Iran war in late February.
Closer to home, Egypt wants to see Mr Trump shift his focus back to Gaza, where a 20-point plan he announced last year to end two years of war there between Israel and Hamas has been largely derailed, with only some of its first-stage provisions implemented.
"Egypt expresses once again its aspiration that the end of the war will restore international focus on the tragic humanitarian and security conditions suffered by the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank; and allow the resumption of the implementation of the second phase of President Donald Trump's [Gaza] peace plan," said the Egyptian statement.
Egypt's interest in a peaceful and stable Gaza, which sits across its eastern border, is rooted in fears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government – the most right wing in Israel's history – would enact frequently mooted plans to push Gaza's 2.3 million residents out of the Palestinian enclave and resettle them in the Sinai peninsula.
That, if it happens, would burden Egypt with an additional population of refugees – Cairo claims to be already hosting millions – and turn it into a direct party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mr Netanyahu has recently said he has ordered his military to occupy 70 per cent of Gaza, well above the 53 per cent it controlled under the US-sponsored ceasefire when it came into force in October.
Egypt, moreover, wants President Trump to give it more freedom to export weapons, both indigenous and manufactured under US licence, to African nations looking for bargains, said the sources.
Specifically, Egypt wants to use this leeway to bolster the capabilities of Horn of Africa allies it has been courting as part of its drive to isolate and increase the pressure on Ethiopia to agree to a legally binding deal on the running of the dam.
“Egypt wants to present itself to the Trump administration as a strategic ally" that can fill the voids, said one of the sources in Cairo.
This week's G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, will be President El Sisi's second since he was first elected in 2014, with the first one back in 2019. His participation this time round is perhaps testimony to the outsized role played by his country.
Saddled for decades by seemingly endless economic crises, periodically bedevilled by extremist violence, but with an army rated as the region's largest, Egypt sees itself as a regional powerhouse qualified to mediate in conflicts, chiefly because of its ability to speak to everyone, from Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon's Hezbollah to Yemen's Houthis and the Iranians.
“Egypt has an important role to play at this summit,” an adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters on condition of anonymity. Egypt, he added, “has a prominent role to play given its weight and credibility on the regional stage”.
