There is something both profound and deeply uncomfortable about the spectacle of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the leader of Egypt and one of the most experienced political survivors in the Middle East, standing before an energy conference in Cairo and addressing an American president with the unguarded desperation of a man watching his country drown.

“I tell President Trump: nobody can stop the war in our region in the Gulf but you. Please help us stop the war. You are capable of doing so,” he said on Monday, his words carrying the weight of Egyptian anxiety as well as that of an entire arc of civilizations that have historically depended on the flow of oil through a narrow body of water most people could not point to on a map.

This is the language of a man who has calculated, correctly, that formal channels have failed, that multilateral institutions are paralysed, and that the only lever left is a personal appeal to a president who responds to flattery and personal urgency. It was also, stripped of its political context, a deeply honest statement of where the world finds itself one month into a conflict that has escalated with a speed and severity that has outpaced every diplomatic framework designed to contain it.

The war between the United States, Israel, and Iran, launched on February 28, has already claimed more than 1,340 lives in Iran alone, and its secondary consequences have fanned across the globe with the cold inevitability of a supply shock. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly twenty million barrels of oil pass daily, representing approximately twenty percent of global seaborne supply, has been effectively disrupted since early March, and the consequences have arrived faster and hit harder than even the most pessimistic analysts predicted. Brent crude climbed to settle at $105 per barrel, up from roughly $70 just before the war began, and the International Energy Agency has described the disruption as the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” 

Sisi’s appearance at the Egypt International Energy Conference was, thus, not incidental. He chose his platform deliberately. Speaking at the Egypt Energy Show 2026 in Cairo, he warned that oil prices could reach more than $200 a barrel, and stressed that the United States holds the key to de-escalation in the Gulf. These were the considered calculations of a government that has watched its economy absorb shock after shock and now faces the prospect of a prolonged, structural crisis of a kind that Egypt’s fragile finances were not built to withstand.

Egypt’s particular vulnerability in this conflict is worth examining in detail, because it illustrates why Sisi’s plea carries an urgency that transcends the usual diplomatic theatre of Arab leaders expressing concern about regional stability. Egypt is a net oil importer, depends on imports for about one third of its natural gas supply, and foreign portfolio investors have pulled some six billion dollars out of the Egyptian market because of concerns about higher import costs, the potential loss of revenue from tourism and the Suez Canal, and the risk of a fall in remittances from Egyptians working in the Gulf.

The Egyptian pound has depreciated under the pressure. Israel has also suspended natural gas supplies to Egypt from the Tamar and Leviathan fields, halting flows estimated at approximately 1.1 billion cubic feet per day, a loss that the government has scrambled to replace through emergency LNG imports. Meanwhile, Suez Canal revenues, one of Egypt’s most vital sources of foreign currency, have come under threat as regional shipping patterns fracture under the weight of the conflict.

This is the economic reality behind Sisi’s words. When he spoke of the crisis representing the largest energy disruption in modern history, he described it as a “dual shock” of supply shortages and rising prices that could drive up fuel, fertilizer, and agricultural costs, particularly in developing economies, he was describing consequences that are already visible in Egyptian streets, where the government has ordered malls, shops and cafes to close by nine in the evening on weekdays and has cut back on public lighting.  These are the visible symptoms of a government managing a slow-motion emergency without the financial buffers to absorb a prolonged shock.

But Sisi’s appeal, however urgent in its Egyptian context, also reflects a broader and more troubling strategic reality. Egypt was one of several Muslim-majority countries whose foreign ministers took part in talks in Pakistan on Sunday aimed at finding a route to peace, and yet that multilateral forum, like every other diplomatic initiative since the war began, has produced no tangible movement toward a ceasefire. The architecture of international conflict resolution, painstakingly constructed over decades, has proven entirely unequal to a conflict driven by American executive will and Israeli strategic calculation. The United Nations has condemned. The Arab League has pleaded. Pakistan hosted. None of it has mattered.

This is precisely why Sisi chose to speak directly to Trump, bypassing the institutions and addressing the individual who launched the war and who, by the Egyptian president’s own reckoning, is the only person capable of stopping it. There is a painful lucidity in this approach. Sisi’s speech was delivered shortly before Trump threatened to obliterate Iran’s electricity plants and Kharg Island, where most of its oil is exported, suggesting that even as Cairo appealed for restraint, Washington was contemplating escalation on a scale that would transform an already catastrophic conflict into something potentially irreversible.

The irony of the situation is not lost on those who follow the region closely. Sisi’s Egypt has long been Washington’s most loyal Arab partner, a relationship cemented by billions in annual military aid, by Cairo’s willingness to maintain its peace treaty with Israel regardless of Egyptian public opinion, and by Sisi’s own careful cultivation of successive American administrations. He appealed to Trump in precisely these terms, referencing the U.S. president’s role in brokering the Gaza ceasefire signed in Sharm el-Sheikh in November and framing Trump as a peacemaker capable of repeating that achievement on a larger stage. It was a shrewd appeal to ego, dressed in the language of humanitarianism.

Whether it will work is a different question entirely. The economic pressure on the United States itself is mounting. Oil executives and analysts warn that the Strait of Hormuz needs to be reopened by mid-April or supply disruptions will get significantly worse, and the window for a resolution that avoids permanent damage to global energy infrastructure is narrowing visibly. Ongoing strikes on Persian Gulf refineries, pipelines, gas fields and tanker terminals threaten to prolong the global economic pain for months, even years, as one MIT economist noted, the destruction of infrastructure means the ramifications of this war will outlast the conflict itself, regardless of when the shooting stops.

The countries that will pay the highest price for that prolonged damage are not the ones whose leaders started the war. From Pakistan to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, through Jordan and Ethiopia, developing economies are bearing the brunt of surging energy costs, caught in the double bind of heavy dependence on imported energy and limited financial capacity to absorb the shock.

In Bangladesh, fuel stations have run dry in some districts despite rationing. In Sri Lanka, still recovering from its recent economic collapse, every Wednesday has been declared a public holiday to conserve fuel. In Pakistan, the price of wheat, grown with diesel-powered machinery and transported by fuel-dependent trucks, is rising toward a spike that will arrive at the food table precisely when families can least afford it.

Sisi spoke in Cairo on Monday in the name of humanity and in the name of peace-loving people. Whether Trump will respond to that appeal, or whether the American president will continue to escalate toward the obliteration of the very infrastructure whose disruption is already causing a global crisis, remains to be seen. What is already beyond doubt is that the people who lit this fire are not the ones burning.

By I Constantin