The United Arab Emirates: America and Israel’s Frankenstein Monster
On February 24, 2026, Donald Trump, the president of the United States now in the second year of his second term, entered the United States Congress on Capitol Hill and delivered what Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter called “the Oprah State of the Union”: an entertainment opportunity with “tears, cheers” and “spectacle,” where “they handed out medals and honors like Oprah in the early 2000s: ‘You get a car! Everybody gets a car!’”
There, broadcast live from the Capitol, were the signatures of the Trump era compressed into a single speech: the controversies (immigration, transgenderism); the emotionalism (the bereaved guests, the victorious athletes); the dramas (yelling matches, ejected congresspeople); and the record-settings (the speech’s length, its ad hominem), followed, the next day, by the predictable condemnations from the pundit class (“He’s debased this country,” was the headline of the commentary on The New York Times pp-ed page). Lost in all of this hoopla and recoil, which may in fact have been the point from the White House’s point of view, was the substance of the state of the union in our 250th anniversary year.
Namely: a country powered to an astonishing degree by artificial intelligence, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, “might have accounted for as much as half of the growth in gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, in the first six months of the year”; and also powered to an alarming degree by foreign investment from countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates totaling $7 to $9 trillion. Both are core parts of what amounts to Donald Trump’s actual agenda: to use tariffs, buffered by military strikes, as weapons to induce the extraction of raw materials from abroad; then to trade technology or military protection in exchange for foreign investment.
How to measure the cost of this new political economy, one without precedent in our 250-year history, whose contours remain largely unacknowledged? A place to start is with our most eager, and avid, foreign investor, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which in 2025 committed “to deploy $1.4 trillion into the United States across strategic sectors.” This investment amounted to “$200-300 billion allocated for semiconductor fabrication plants; $150 billion for AI data center infrastructure; [and] the balance spread across energy projects and advanced manufacturing.” Specifics of this investment include “a $25 billion…initiative to invest in energy infrastructure and data centers” and “chemical production facilities” as well as a $4 billion aluminum smelter factory to be constructed by Emirates Global Aluminum, “the world’s largest producer of ‘premium aluminum,’” at the Tulsa Port of Inola in Oklahoma. Since the UAE had even before 2025 “invested over $1 trillion in US assets ranging from Chicago’s parking meters to semiconductor manufacturer[s],” this new $1.4 trillion investment means the UAE’s total investments will reach $2.4 trillion. According to the UAE Embassy, “the UAE is America’s #1 source of foreign direct investment (FDI)—and holds the third largest US trade surplus globally.”
There are obvious risks associated with aspects of this investment. “One sticking point” of the deal is reviews of the UAE’s “sensitive technology investments” by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency committee based at the Treasury Department “authorized to review certain transactions involving foreign investment in the United States…to determine the effect of such transactions on…national security.” Nonetheless, “sources indicate [America and the UAE] are working to preempt regulatory hurdles.” Considering that analysts think it plausible that the UAE might pass on sensitive technology to America’s geopolitical rivals, “preempting regulatory hurdles” may have worse long-term effects than the anodyne language implies.
Supporting this concern is the fact that the UAE has a history of undercover maneuvers in America. Indeed, in 2022, “U.S. intelligence officials…compiled a classified report detailing extensive efforts to manipulate the American political system by the United Arab Emirates” including “illegal and legal attempts to steer U.S. foreign policy in ways favorable to the Arab autocracy.” This report, described as “remarkable in that it focuses on the influence operations of a friendly nation rather than an adversarial power,” detailed attempts by the UAE “spanning multiple U.S. administrations, to exploit the vulnerabilities in American governance, including its reliance on campaign contributions, susceptibility to powerful lobbying firms and lax enforcement of disclosure laws intended to guard against interference by foreign governments.”
But, even beyond these obvious sticking points, there are considerably more strings attached to the UAE’s investment in America than there might seem. Not only, as I reported in my immediately previous investigation for the Libertarian Institute, is American-backing enabling the UAE under Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan to commit slow-and-fast-motion genocide in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; to extract and confiscate resources from African citizens in at least fourteen other countries; to subjugate the UAE’s own citizens; and to abuse foreign workers. It is also allowing Mohammed to use his alliance with Israel, probably the closest with the Jewish state outside America’s, to solidify extractions and investments in Africa and expand its commercial and military blanket across the Middle East and into Europe and Latin America and America. In the process the UAE is quietly and steadily infringing on the sovereignty of citizens in countries in five continents. Tracing the expansion of Mohammed’s stealth empire of commerce, technology, and force reveals the unfolding, roving, and so far undiluted threat now penetrating America.
Since 2006 the Israeli-Emirati partnership at the heart of this expansion has accelerated largely out of public view. But it has been carefully traced by scholars like Elham Fakhro. In 2006 and 2009, according to Fakhro, there were the agreements between the UAE’s newly created Space Reconnaissance Center (SRC), “tasked with advancing the UAE’s aerial intelligence, data collection, and technological processing capabilities,” and “a private Israeli satellite operator that works closely with its security services.” In 2007 there was the UAE’s partnership with a retired IDF intelligence officer whose “private security company” was staffed by “retired generals from the IDF and Shin Bet.” In 2008 there was the announcement of “Security Shield,” a new project staffed by these operators to provide “fully integrated security solutions” to “protect the UAE’s utilities and its ‘vital assets’…from attack.” Running parallel to these under-the-table connections was a diplomatic alliance which “evolved around the shared goal of convincing the [Barack] Obama administration not to abandon a policy of containment toward [Iran].” Off of all of these connections came a partnership that, in the way of many partnerships linked by obvious and overriding material interests, has quickly and intensively solidified—at tremendous costs to people and nations outside it.
In Africa, Mohammed has joined the Zionists or acted in their interests in political interventions that also secured resource extractions for the Emirates, which are poor in food and minerals. In Libya, after a western intervention against Muammar Gaddafi secured by Jewish Zionists and their supporters inadvertently led to Muslim-influenced governments, the UAE became a major supporter of the rebel group the Libya National Army led by Khalifa Haftar. In recent years, the UAE has done heavy trade in illicit materials from Libya; in one report, more than “60 [tons] of Libyan gold has reportedly been smuggled into the UAE” and “Emirati officials held secret talks with Haftar to sell Libya’s oil outside of the UN approved channels.” In Egypt, when a military coup was staged in 2013 to overthrow Egypt’s first democratically elected president, the UAE supported it while a precipitating factor for the coup was preserving the Egyptian military’s security alliance with Israel; and today the UAE owns Egyptian agricultural land and has arranged to build and manage several of its ports.
In Tunisia, the UAE encouraged the same sort of successful coup as in Egypt, and afterwards “revived a $5 billion real estate project” in Tunisia and recently “complete[d] a 120 megawatt solar project” there. In Somalia, the UAE recently quietly brokered mutual recognition between Somalia’s breakaway province Somaliland, where the UAE has a claim to the country’s most important port, and Israel. And in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the UAE has funded Rwanda, which is “arming and training the M23 militia accused of indiscriminate killing, rape and mass displacement” to extract minerals on the cheap. Rwanda has done this via firms directly tied to the UAE and to Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire who was sanctioned by the United States government for “opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals” which “cost the citizens of the [Democratic Republic of the Congo] more than $1.36bn in lost revenue from 2010 to 2012 alone.”
One of the takeaways for Mohammed from these involvements in Africa was the food and mineral resources which gave him the economic security to “develop” the United Arab Emirates at the expense of its own citizens—again in partnership with Israel. Indeed, since 2018, according to Elham Fakhro, the UAE has used “a centralized monitoring system that receives live data from surveillance equipment installed across the city…linking thousands of street cameras across Abu Dhabi and enabling the government to track virtually anyone in the emirate through Israeli technology.” This is the type of technology that the UAE has exported in partnership with Israel to countries like Armenia and Azerbaijan, whose populations are being increasingly herded into close living proximity and surveilled.
The other takeaway for Mohammed from Africa was that its resources gave him the economic security to join Israel and sometimes Saudi Arabia in an aggressive remaking of the Middle East.
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