US President Donald Trump asked his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for American ships to enjoy free passage through the Suez Canal in an April phone call, as the US presses ahead with its bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen.
Trump has made no secret of his belief that US vessels should transit the strategic waterway for free. On Saturday, he publicly demanded as much, saying the canal “would not exist without the United States of America.” One Egyptian MP was reported as characterizing the Trump administration’s moves as blackmail and rubbished Trump’s claim about the canal’s existence, saying it was “purely Egyptian”.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Trump raised the issue with Sisi directly this month. The two leaders spoke on April 1.
An Egyptian readout of the call stated that the two leaders “discussed developments in the Middle East and mediation efforts to restore calm to the region, which reflects positively on navigation in the Red Sea.”
At the end of 2024, Egypt’s presidential office said the country had lost at least $7bn in Suez Canal revenue.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump told Sisi the US wanted Egyptian support for its campaign against the Houthis, including military assistance, intelligence sharing and funding, because the US bombing campaign would help to restore traffic through the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Sisi sidestepped the request and told Trump the best way to address the Houthi threat was a ceasefire in Gaza.
The conversation dovetails with Trump’s public messaging on the Suez Canal. His reasoning also aligns with that of private discussions between US senior officials, as revealed in a leaked Signal group chat earlier this year.
“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return,” one person identified in a group chat started by national security advisor Mike Waltz was revealed as saying in The Atlantic.
The person was identified as SM, which appears to refer to Trump adviser Stephen Miller. “If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” the Signal user said.
Trump’s demand for Egypt to provide military support or economic assistance to the US is a stark reversal in the two countries’ post-war relationship, which usually has it the other way around.
The US brokered the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Since then, the US has provided roughly $1.3bn in military aid to Egypt. But ties between Egypt and the US have been dented by Israel’s war on Gaza. US diplomats in Cairo have tried to dissuade the Trump administration from pressing Egypt to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians, Middle East Eye reported previously.
Egyptian officials are already simmering with anger at the US for siding with Israel when the latter seized Gaza’s southern city of Rafah in May 2024 and accused Egypt of being negligent in policing the border.
MEE revealed in March that the UAE, a close patron of Egypt, was lobbying the Trump administration against a plan that Cairo introduced to the Arab League for post-war governance of the Gaza Strip.
According to US and Egyptian officials, the US has told Egypt it is considering cutting military aid. The officials say the threat to cut aid stems from frustration within Trump’s inner circle that Egypt has refused to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians.
#US aircraft carriers pass through the Suez Canal… without fees and #Egyptians watch and cannot do much. #Trump said he won’t pay. https://t.co/Hyz0mVfMpu
— Observer (@nasermoh29) May 1, 2025
Trump’s call for Sisi to support the US bombing campaign against the Houthis is not the first time Sisi has had to resist appeals to become involved in Yemen. Egypt was one of the first countries to leave a Saudi-led coalition that was bombing the Houthis in 2016.
Egypt has a long history in Yemen, and the Arabian Gulf country is often equated to Egypt’s “Vietnam” by Arab officials – a play on the US’s gruelling war in Asia. During the 1960s, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser intervened in Yemen’s civil war, backing so-called Republicans against Royalists.
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