This is ironic: the United Arab Emirates is a country made up of seven different sheikdoms. The reason those sheikdoms are now "united" is that in the nineteenth century, their leaders signed treaties granting the United Kingdom control of the sheikdoms' defense and foreign affairs. The nineteenth century, it turns out, was a time of rampant piracy in the waters off the coast of the UAE, and those pirates were doing significant harm to UK commercial interests in India. Further treaties signed toward the end of the 19th century prevented the sheikdoms from disposing of any territory to or entering into agreements with any nation other than the UK. These treaties -- what you might call "colonialism light" -- served to protect the UK's "colonialism heavy" interests in India.

In a sense, then, the United Arab Emirates, as a country, was born out of the first intersection between globalization and security. Western powers sought out and encouraged its creation as a means of stopping piracy -- that era's equivalent of terrorism -- and in the interest of global economic exchange.

Over the last several weeks, though, many members of the United States Senate have sought to include the UAE among the "bad guys" in this current generation of the conflict between globalization and national security. No longer is that country an ally of the West in seeking secure global economic expansion, but rather it is a threat to that process.

There are two important factors at play here. The first is a clear and obvious racism among American political leadership. Or, at the very least, an attempt by our political leadership to play to the most base and xenophobic sentiments of its voting constituency. Because the UAE is located on the Arabian Peninsula and has the word "Arab" in its name, the theory goes, any access it has to American borders will increase our vulnerability to terrorism. Some Senators have shown themselves to be equally xenophobic, if somewhat less racist, by extending this logic to all foreign entities. Still others only have problems with foreign governments but not foreign companies operating our shipping terminals.

Until this time, foreign operation of our terminals has not been a problem -- political or otherwise. Anything being shipped to the United States enters our borders at one of 15 ports around the country. These ports are divided up into roughly 100 terminals. The largest US-based company operating these terminals currently runs 7 of them. The next largest operates 1. About a dozen are operated by various city or state governments. That leaves roughly 80 in the hands of foreign entities. Eighty out of 100. Among these foreign entities are companies significantly owned by the governments of Singapore and China (by some estimates the second largest military spender in the world and a significant threat to future American security). Additionally, the Venezuelan government (no ally of the Bush administration) has significant interest in another port operator.

That port ownership by a company associated with the government of the UAE has caused such a stir in the face of massive and long-standing foreign ownership of US ports is odd, to say the least. Even Bill O'reilly knows it's bogus (but he's still offensive about it).

Yet, in some ways, now is the time for this kind of controversy, and this is where that second factor comes in. The Bush administration has rigorously and single-mindedly adhered to three ideologically driven narratives throughout the course of its presidency, and those narratives are starting to butt heads. What we here at 90ways referred to yesterday as a "non-story" has become a story simply because of the Bush administration's zealous adherence to free-market fundamentalism, its campaign to democratize the globe, and its war-on-terrorism fear mongering. From a globalization perspective, sure these guys from the UAE ought to be able to run these shipping terminals. I mean anything goes in the name of economic efficiency, right? But from a spreading democracy perspective, we should not be doing business with the leadership of the UAE. The country the sheiks run is anything but democratic. And from a war against terrorism point of view, we ought to do everything we can to maintain good relations with the UAE. They are one of our strongest allies in the Middle East and, for the most part, politically moderate by our reckoning.

Politics has always been complicated, I guess. And the United States government has a long-standing tradition of saying one thing while doing another. I'm sure it is not alone. In the real world, people have to make tough choices and compromise their moral beliefs from time to time to reach a tenable practical solution. But when an administration rests its presidency upon the cultivation of "you're-either-with-us-or-against-us" sentiment among its base voters, small compromises turn into big problems.

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