US, May 25 -- In Western Sahara, luxury kite camps, military checkpoints, and geopolitical rivalries now exist side by side. DAKHLA, Western Sahara - The wind begins before sunrise. By midmorning, it sweeps across the lagoon in long, muscular gusts, bending the tents of luxury eco-camps and lifting hundreds of brightly colored kites into the pale blue sky. European tourists in wetsuits skim silently over the shallow water while fishermen haul octopus traps nearby. Behind them stretches the desert: empty, immense and politically unresolved.

For Morocco, this remote Atlantic peninsula is the future. For critics, it is occupied territory dressed as a tourism frontier.

And for travelers arriving from Paris, Madrid or Frankfurt on charter f...