Guardians of the Nile: No Interstate War, No Peace

In 1979, then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat famously declared that the only thing that would lead Egypt to war again was water, specifically the Nile River. Egypt’s dominance over the Nile—which still accounts for 97 percent of the country’s fresh water—has gone unchallenged, and in the hands of his successors, President Sadat’s saber-rattling has remained just that. But times are changing. At the headwaters of the Blue Nile, Ethiopia unilaterally moved ahead with the construction and filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Egypt described the dam as an existential threat.