CAIRO — We’re growing complacent about Egypt — again.

Once more, we’re forgetting the hellish threat a destabilized Egypt would pose to its people, the region and US security. And once more, we’re treating an Egyptian leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as if he were the mayor of a small Midwestern town — and not a vast and impoverished Arab land menaced by sundry Islamists.

Consider The New York Times, which lately has been pumping a steady stream of negative stories about protests and crackdowns, corruption and “Trump’s favorite dictator.” Even assuming every word is true, there is something profoundly ahistorical and reckless about the mainstream media’s anti-Sisi push. What do they think is the alternative?

The leaders of Egypt’s embattled Christian minority have no doubt: There is only one choice, and that’s Sisi and his project — to keep the country together, keep the economy growing, keep the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood at bay.

You will almost never hear the voices of this Christian community, one of the world’s oldest, in all this critical coverage. You should.

“We never tell anyone that we don’t have problems,” says Andrea Zaki, president of the Protestant Community of Egypt. “We have problems, yes. But we have a hopeful trend with the central government and this president.” Sisi, Zaki says blankly, “is pro-religious freedom.”

Zaki isn’t a sycophant, and this isn’t empty pro-government rhetoric. When Sisi visits a newly built community somewhere in Egypt, Zaki says, the local officials invariably try to impress the famously devout president by showing off the new mosque. But Sisi will ask them: “And where is the new church?”

He means it. A new law has lifted a centuries-old barrier on church-building. In the 200 years before its enactment, 500 new churches received building permits. In the two years since, the Protestants alone have received 227 permits.

Under former President Hosni Mubarak, the ruling party typically had one or two Coptic Christians in Parliament; today, there are 38.

In a speech not too long ago, Sisi declared: “If God gave man the freedom to worship or not, who is man to take away that freedom?” These are astonishing words from a paramount leader in this part of the world.

Yes, there are still problems: church burnings, street-level harassment of Christians and so forth. Sisi’s war on terror has left the Muslim Brotherhood cornered, as Zaki notes, but the organization’s radicalism persists: “They hate Copts, they hate Sisi and at some profound level, most of them hate themselves.”

Then, too, local officials haven’t always kept up with the central government’s “new mentality,” Zaki says, and they often don’t apply the anti-discrimination laws already on the books. “The Brotherhood and other radicals have a plan to attack Christians, from time to time and especially when the president is meeting foreign officials — to embarrass the central government.”

Egyptian Christians aren’t naïve. “Biblically in this country,” says Zaki, “we had to choose between life and death, and we decided to choose life” by supporting the 2013 uprising against the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi. “With a religious [Islamic] government, we would have been second-class citizens. We had to choose life.”

A Coptic Christian member of Parliament puts it more starkly still. Under the Muslim Brotherhood’s reign, she says, “We were afraid to leave our houses, we were afraid for our daughters at night.” A Coptic Catholic priest tearfully recalls the day Islamists threatened all unveiled women, even Christian ones, with acid attacks; some Coptic women stepped out unveiled in defiance, and he donned his cassock on the streets in solidarity with them.

Another member of Parliament, Karim Salim, urges me to “tell Washington” to “recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization”; Salim is a Muslim.

Times writers who ceaselessly agitate for American pressure on Sisi from the comfort of 40th Street won’t pay the price of the resulting instability. Christians and moderate Muslims will.

Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor.