The Renaissance Dam:

Unknown to me at the time, the world was actually already on the brink of another world war, with all of it starting due to a conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia over the renaissance dam, a structure made with the purpose of creating enough energy to power the countries of Sudan and Ethiopia at the expense of having less water in the Nile.

At the time that Ethiopia was still planing the construction of the dam, the situation was evaluated as at worst only being able to cause a minor conflict, which is why the US tried very little to better relations between Egypt and Ethiopia apart from holding a conference to try and get both of them to come to an agreement.

Sadly, despite its best efforts, Egypt was not able to convince Ethiopia to stop the construction of the Renaissance dam. Eventually, as time passed, tensions between the two countries increased at a rapid rate, so in a final attempt to get Ethiopia to stop the construction of the dam, Egypt called on its ally Isreal.

Ethiopia didn't back down though, as not only did it already have the support of Sudan, but it also knew that compared to itself, Egypt's abysmal military would not be able to do much actual damage to the country, plus, when it came to Isreal, if things somehow managed to start going south, it wouldn't take much to convince Sudan to join the war, as it was also going to benefit from the dam.

Egypt knew that the effect that the dam would have on itself would be enormous, as its entire economy was based around agriculture and it got almost all of its water used for farming from the Nile. Meaning that if the Dam was constructed, and it reduced the water in the Nile by 30% outside the delta and 25% within the delta as estimated, Egypt would be done for.

With no other choice left, Egypt was forced to declare war against Ethiopia in one last attempt to save itself. Of course, Egypt knew that it had zero chance of beating Ethiopia and Sudan, even with the help of Israel, its plan was to try and raise enough awareness to get other countries involved and basically get saved.

Sadly, although the UN did try its best to bring the problem to the attention of the other countries with the hopes of helping Egypt out, all of the other countries avoided the problem under the excuse that they had their own problems to deal with and that they didn't have the ability to help even if they wanted to.

As for the US, Egypt's final hope, it decided to not intervene because it was currently focusing more on fixing its own problems and that it would only be able to help prevent Egypt from being invaded or attacked to their credit though, at the time the US had actually started to make important progress when it came to improving its own infrastructure.

And so Egypt's final attempt ended up being futile, and although they would not get invaded, the damage from the dam would still remain, for even if the UN sent its forces to stop the war, Ethiopia would still win, as despite how it looked, Ethiopia wasn't the aggressor, but was simply defending itself, plus it wasn't planning to invade Egypt in the future anyway.

Despite how hard they fought, the Egyptian and Israeli forces were only able to make it through Sudan (which was not heavily defended), not being able to break through to Ethiopia, even if they got there with all of their forces, they would have still been no match, as not only did they have to fight Ethiopia's strong military, but also fight in terrain that benefited the defenders.

After some final attempts to break through into Ethiopia, Egypt was forced to retreat and try to re-establish a relationship of peace with Ethiopia again, Ethiopia was more than happy to accept as it had not really lost much during the 'war' and only asked for Egypt to pay reparations for all of the things they had lost (which as stated before wasn't much).

To the outside world, the end of this small conflict had come and they thought that life would move on like usual, as predicted though, after the dam finished construction Egypt's agricultural land began to diminish in size only stopping when its total land that could be used for agriculture declined by 46%.

This led to what at the time, was the biggest humanitarian crisis in history, with the 23% of Egypt's population that were farmers being the most affected by this change, needless to say, the Egyptian economy crashed, and tons of people that had been on the fence decided that they had to leave the country until things went back to normal.

When agricultural land began to diminish in size, the populous was understandably scared, but the government tried its best to assure it that the estimates were wrong and that the amount of agricultural land in Egypt would not diminish much more than it already had, with the current loss being the expected amount.

Of course, very few people actually bought into this, especially since Egypt went to the extent of declaring war in order to try and stop this from happening. This led to lots of people leaving Egypt until everything returned to normal, with the plan of staying in Southern European countries for a while.

At first, Southern European countries saw this as a positive since an increase in tourism would only help their economies, that is until it became apparent that Egypt wasn't going back to normal for a long time, and some of the people that had come there temporarily were beginning to consider attempting to apply for citizenship.

Now having around 30 million people that were beginning to consider applying for citizenship, the Southern European countries reasonably began to freak out, not because of the number of people, but because almost all of them had all come here with only enough money to make due for a couple of months before having to go back to Egypt.

Meaning that if they were accepted, they would have a hard time integrating into society, and more importantly, getting jobs, especially when the number of people trying to do the exact same thing at the same time was this big, so in an attempt to prevent this problem Southern European countries added temporary requirements to becoming a citizen.