The United States has focused on the Middle East since World War II, seeking its oil, gas, and other mineral resources and coveting control of its strategic waterways. The old colonial powers and the superpowers of the Cold War era most often backed dictatorial regimes there, because they were easier to control than democracies, and this country also supported the Israeli settler colony as a bulwark of Western interests. President George W. Bush was the first president to depart (at least rhetorically) from America’s romance with regional authoritarians, pledging to “democratize” the Middle East, though he left office with little to show for it. Now, you have to wonder whether, in some strange sense, the shoe is on the other foot and the pathological U.S. support for dictatorships there is now spreading across the Atlantic Ocean, just as the trade winds blow Saharan sand and dust toward the American Southwest.

Here’s something that should sound familiar in the United States today: Qais Saied of Tunisia, elected president in 2019, campaigned against homosexuality and—yes!—African immigrants. In 2021, he lawlessly dismissed his prime minister and parliament and went on to rewrite the country’s constitution so that he could appoint yes-men to its Supreme Court. Then he began jailing his political opponents. In four short years, Saied undid all the political progress Tunisia had made in the previous decade, creating a dictatorship arguably worse than that of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was overthrown in January 2011 in the first of several major Arab Spring youth revolts.

Worse yet—and this should sound familiar, too—Tunisia seemed to sleepwalk into authoritarianism. Trade unionists hoped the president would reject the neoliberalism of the International Monetary Fund, while civil society organizations hoped he would curb the Interior Ministry’s past repressiveness. No such luck. Europe declined to punish the newly developing dictatorship by cutting off aid, instead rewarding Saied with an economic deal in return for his willingness to crack down on African emigration. Of course, such democratic backsliding has been a feature of the Middle East for decades, since local civil society remains weak, pro-regime billionaires have proliferated, and Western governments have seldom reacted negatively to (and all too often rewarded) any move toward dictatorship.

Ironically, in the second Trump era, America’s billionaires and corporate elites have decided that this country should be ruled with some of the same techniques that they and their Middle Eastern proxies have long used abroad.

Now, you might say that the shoe is on the other foot. What Saied did to Tunisia might as well have been a blueprint for U.S. President Donald Trump. Although he hasn’t yet actually tried to rewrite the Constitution, the MAGA leader has been the beneficiary of a decades-long $250 million dark-money plot, led by obscure Federalist Society apparatchik Leonard Leo, to reshape the Supreme Court. The result: a set of justices who are distinctly inclined to let Trump do his damnedest—even expel undocumented residents of the United States to gulags in third-world countries with no court process. Meanwhile, labor union members have too often placed faith in Trump’s pledges to bring back industry by using tariffs to reduce competition. And the centrists of the Democratic Party are the proverbial deer in the headlights, too paralyzed to react effectively as he transforms this country into an ever more autocratic state. They also seem all too inclined to let our democracy slip away, while placing their hopes in a 2026 congressional blue wave that, even if it happens, may be too late to stop Trump from creating his version of a one-party state.

Consider it typical of our times that Field Marshall Abdelfattah al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against the only freely elected Egyptian government since the country’s monarchy was toppled in 1952 had no significant adverse consequences in Washington. In 2014, a leading officer in the Egyptian army, which receives $1.3 billion a year in American aid, made quixotic health claims. Major General Ibrahim Abdel-Atti announced that he had personally “defeated AIDS with the grace of my God at the rate of 100%. And I defeated hepatitis C.” In the process, he confused the foundational nucleic acids DNA and RNA, provoking one Egyptian comedian to suggest that the country’s medical schools should never again accept anyone from Abdel-Atti’s village. However, the North Korean-like pall that has blanketed freedom of speech in Egypt was precisely what permitted such bizarre official behavior, since there was little way for the public to respond to even his most absurd claims.

Yet, imagine this: Abdel-Atti appears almost sane and sober in comparison with the antics of U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has discouraged vaccinations even as a measles outbreak has begun to run wild (and prove fatal in a few cases) 25 years after the U.S. officially eliminated the disease. Kennedy’s proposed treatment for measles? Raw milk and vitamin A. Sadly, overdoses of the latter have caused liver disease in some children.

Kennedy is also working hard to gut the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The damage he’s doing in the Trump era to America’s vital and effective vaccination infrastructure could unleash serial plagues upon the public. And it’s not likely to get better any time soon, given the irrational demagogue now in the White House, just as Egyptians suffer under megalomaniacal generals.

And here’s another Middle Eastern peculiarity inherited from Western colonialism that will sound all too familiar in Donald Trump’s America: the large numbers of noncitizens and stateless people who suffer from a lack of basic civil and human rights. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, imperial Great Britain made treaties with small sheikhdoms along the coast of the Persian Gulf to ensure the security of its shipping and check rivals like the Ottoman Empire. When the British finally withdrew completely from the Gulf in 1972, they left behind postage-stamp countries with vast oil and gas wealth, which did not have a sufficient native-born population to work the rigs or staff the energy companies. The British Empire had often brought into its colonies, like Kuwait and Bahrain, subjects from British India.

The Middle East is a patchwork of citizenship hierarchies, where the line can be drawn capriciously by nationalists, fundamentalists, or monarchs.

After decolonization, such workers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were coded as foreigners in the Arab Gulf. They began laboring under a “guarantor” (kafala) system in which a local entrepreneur would take responsibility for migrant laborers who often surrendered their passports to him for as long as they were in the country. The guarantor would then take a cut of their wages or business profits. No matter how long such migrants lived in those countries, they and their children almost never became eligible for citizenship, and they could have their visas revoked at any time. Others now have trouble even getting in. Typically, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in January announced a ban on visas (for Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis, Somalians, Lebanese, Bangladeshi, Cameroonians, Sudanis, and Ugandans). And that should sound familiar, since the Trump regime has already implemented a visa ban on 19 mainly African and Middle Eastern countries. In short, the policies toward immigrant labor in the two regions seem to be converging.

Countries like the United Arab Emirates have a little more than a million citizens and 10 million mostly South Asian guest workers, some of whom have lived there all their lives or are even second or third generation residents. Such migrant workers, however, have no right to form unions or strike. Any encounter with law enforcement, even a fender-bender, can result in their expulsion. New York University Professor Andrew Ross was typically

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