Tehran and the new government in Cairo indicated on Monday that they are rapidly working to melt the ice that has frozen relations between the two countries for the last three decades. The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are concerned that Egypt’s new direction will unhinge the Middle East’s delicate balance of power.

Iran announced on Monday that it has appointed an ambassador to Egypt for the first time since the two nations halted diplomatic relations in 1978, after Cairo signed the Camp David Accords with Israel and granted asylum to the deposed shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Also on Monday, Cairo confirmed that Nabil Al-Arabi, Egypt’s new foreign minister, is contemplating a trip to the Gaza Strip, a location controlled by Hamas, an Iran-backed Palestinian Islamist organization that Cairo has shunned until now.

Several Iranian and Egyptian tourism firms also signed a deal in Tehran on Monday, stipulating that each month 10,000 Iranians will visit Egypt, and 60,000 Egyptians will travel to Iran.

The reports come three weeks after a landmark meeting between Al-Arabi and a high-ranking Iranian diplomat, after which Al-Arabi declared that Egypt had “opened a new page” with Iran.

The new Egyptian government has also made overtures to Iran’s ally Syria, as demonstrated last month when Egypt’s new intelligence chief made Syria the destination of his first foreign visit.

The West’s concern over Egypt’s desire to resume relations with Iran is intensified by the belief that the thaw evidences a wider shift in Cairo’s foreign policy. American and Israeli officials fear that such a reorientation on Egypt’s part will bolster the power of Iran and its proxy terrorist outfits, Hamas and Hezbollah.

In defense of Egypt’s new direction, officials in Cairo say that the new diplomacy is less about expressing solidarity with Iran and more about Egypt attempting to regain lost diplomatic prestige.

For now, Egypt’s military remains pro-America and pro-Saudi Arabia, but Riyadh, like Washington, is eying Egypt’s political realignment with dread. Saudi Arabia doubts that it can rely on the new Egyptian leadership to check Iran’s aims to dominate the Middle East.

This concern is well-founded.

As far back as July 1993, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry used clear Bible prophecy to predict that a radical shift would launch Egyptian politics into the Islamist camp, and that shift is now under way. Egypt’s strides toward Iran show that the end result of Egypt’s Jasmine Revolution will not be the democratic Egypt that Western analysts have hoped for, but the birth of another radical Islamist nation, and a more powerful Iran.