Two months ago, Maria Kovalchuk, a Ukrainian model whose last known appearance was at a party in Dubai she attended with two unidentified men “who introduced themselves as representatives of the modelling business,” was found, ten days after the party, lying on a road next to a construction site. Her arms, legs, and spine were broken, and she could not speak; Dubai police said, improbably, that she entered the construction site alone and “fell from an undisclosed height.”

As I reported in a previous piece for the Libertarian Institute, Kovalchuk’s experience is shared by women in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf States: not only travelers like Kovalchuk and Apprentice TV star Selina Waterman-Smith, who was abducted then gang-raped in Dubai; but live-in immigrants like Margaret Mutheu Mueni, who was starved by her employers, and Eunice Achieng, who was found dead in her employer’s rooftop water tank after calling home in a panic predicting she would end up there. These stories and many like them are windows onto the Gulf State regimes, where an immigration boom is feeding a modernization push that goes under the heading of “Harsh Enlightenment.”

The calling cards of this “Enlightenment” are death, dismemberment, abuse, displacement, and harassment. Its fallout begins with service workers and tourists from Kenya, Ukraine, and America; expands to laborers from Bangladesh, India and Nepal; and ends with white collar employees, many of them women, from across the west who end up the subject of harassment by male co-workers looking to “let off steam.” The “eco-friendly,” high-tech, AI-based surveillance cities this boom is creating have been described as “modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah[s]; all concrete glass & lights but…built on…criminals & prostitution.” Their construction has cost the lives of, at least, an estimated 21,000 migrant laborers, as well as the attrition of hundreds of international white collar employees.

The enabler and driver of this false Enlightenment is weapons funding from America, with the Gulf States, particularly the Saudis, our most reliable weapons customers since 1945 in exchange for supplying us with oil. America has provided Saudi Arabia an estimated $140 billion in military assistance since World War II and is providing the United Arab Emirates with “$29.3 billion in active government-to-government [military] sales,” while also giving significant military assistance to Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait. It is, in short, the “net security provider for the [Gulf] region.” This relationship has allowed the kingdoms the security to focus on building their economic influence, even as detritus of America’s dependency has steadily piled up: from the 9/11 attacks by Islamists de facto tolerated by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; to endless wars in Yemen in an effort to contain the Gulf States’ regional rival Iran. …

Of course, the pattern of brute colonial extraction of resources repeating itself across countries is nothing new. What is new today, what is possibly unprecedented, is that the colonial regimes like those in the Gulf States are not just extracting from countries weaker than them but preying on those which are stronger. They are infiltrating America, the world’s most powerful nation: relying on our military to stabilize their countries while “giving back” to ours with investments in our “growth” and real estate, to the detriment of our collective future as Americans.

In this future America, an influencer like Maria Kovalchuk, if she’s American, won’t have to pay the cost of the ticket to go to Dubai. She’ll only have to take a greyhound to New York or San Francisco or Miami, or maybe to the tonier sections of the ten new freedom cities meant to embody the American Dream. Members of an aspiring working class, American versions of Margaret Mutheu Mueni or Eunice Achieng, won’t have to travel across an ocean to be exploited in San Francisco high rises; they will come from Compton, or Miami Gardens, or the Bronx. Amid all the post-election political talk of renewing America, this reality—new feudalism under the guise of “harsh Enlightenment”— might be the one we’re starting to live with even as no one calls it by its name.