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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   1449 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 21, 2023

After thirty weeks as @Soriek's passion project, Transnational Thursday is getting added to the auto-post bot. But it hasn't been added to the bot yet, I think, so I'm posting it this week, with apologies to anyone whose plans I've mussed!

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Egypt & Ethiopia

I’ve covered previously here the ongoing negotiations between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile. If it kicks into action it will provide electricity for all of Ethiopia and even allow them to become a net energy exporter. However, Egypt sees it as an existential threat to their already precarious water access (the Nile actually runs south to north, I believe the only major river to do so [edit: not actually so]). Sudan has vacillated between both sides over the years and is currently too burdened with the war to prioritize these negotiations.

Unfortunately, they have now had the final in a series of talks that have stretched over four months, and the two sides have reached no deal (realistically, what middle ground does lie between their positions?) The dam is already producing energy and Ethiopia has said they are going to continue to ramp up energy use with or without Egypt on board. Egypt has said in the past they are willing to take extreme action if this happens, though it’s unclear what is exactly in their power to do. Sudan has previously said that it will not allow Egyptians to move troops overland in Sudan or to fly planes through Sudanese air space to attack Egypt. In fairness Sudan has limited ability to enforce anything at the moment but Egypt is probably not crazy enough to functionally invade their next door neighbor (and essentially ally on this particular issue). It’s unclear as well what the US will do, being allies with both countries and heavily invested in regional stability but also tied up with multiple other conflicts.

For these and other dam negotiations, I'm a bit unclear as to why the impact is so significant.

Isn't it possible for the upstream half of the dam to build up the water necessary to produce electricity, but still provide almost identical downstream flow once this occurs? I understand that the requirement to produce electricity according to demand bumps up against this, and nothing in engineering is as trivial as a layman believes it, but wouldn't it be worth the investment for buffer energy storage to let agriculture and other downstream concerns continue to function?

(the Nile actually runs south to north, I believe the only major river to do so)

St. Lawrence river (the drain of the Great Lakes), plus the Siberian rivers Ob/Yenisei/Lena. All have higher discharge than the Nile.

Thanks, TIL.

I wonder if Egypt might try closing off Ethiopian access to Suez as a countermeasure, they've played that card before in various wars. That's the only non-military hold they have over Ethiopia I can think of. China is Ethiopia's biggest trading partner but they do trade with some European countries, plus the US.

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