Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s arrival in Egypt today marked the first visit by an Iranian president since his country’s 1979 revolution. He was in Cairo to attend a two-day summit starting tomorrow of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The president of predominantly Shiite Muslim Iran met today with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood is a mainstream Sunni Islamist group. Ahmadinejad also met with a grand sheikh who is considered Egypt’s top scholar of Sunni Islam.

Morsi visited Iran shortly after taking office in June 2012 for a conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has been to Egypt three times during that period. The contacts indicate a mending of relations between the two countries that were broken off after Egypt’s decision to recognize Israel and sign the Camp David Accords.

But the exchanges aren’t likely to portend a new alliance between Egypt and Iran, according to Joshua Stacher, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Morsi illustrated that when he took the occasion of his August visit to Tehran to denunciate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran.

In an interview with USIP’s Garrett Nada for the Iran Primer website, Stacher outlines why there is still more that separates these two countries than brings them together. Stacher, who is on leave from his post as assistant professor of political science at Kent State University, is author of Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt & Syria.

What do you think the effects might be of the new ties between Egypt and Iran?

Viola Gienger is a senior writer at USIP.