On Sunday, March 22, the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, maternal brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, put on a brave face. The evening prior, President Donald Trump declared that if the Strait of Hormuz was not opened within forty-eight hours, he would order strikes on Iranian power plants. The announcement prompted Iran’s military command to specify that any such attack would bring destruction to the energy, IT, and water facilities servicing the American military within the Gulf. Because the power stations and desalination plants on the target list were public utilities, serving resident populations as well as the range of forces directed by US CENTCOM, Iran’s prospective retaliation imperiled practically everyone living in the UAE. Paying little heed to the fact that his own allies were driving the escalation—and, indeed, had started the war itself—the UAE’s foreign minister responded to Tehran’s threat by proclaiming, “We will never be blackmailed by terrorists.”

The UAE’s chief diplomatic advisor and media liaison, Anwar Gargash, expressed a similar sentiment. A mandarin hailing from a prominent merchant family in Dubai who has been deeply embedded in al Nahyan family business for more than two decades, Gargash denounced Iran’s “thuggery” and asserted that the whole ordeal had affirmed the wisdom of the UAE’s alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv. Then, over the days that followed, he laid out rather maximalist war aims, at least for a party yet to join the hostilities.

A return to the status quo, Gargash posited, would no longer do. Iran’s nuclear ambitions and ballistic and drone capacities needed to be diminished substantially, and with them the Revolutionary Guard’s ability to menace the Strait. Alongside Sultan al Jaber, the country’s minister of industry and advanced technology and the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Gargash pressed through diplomatic channels for the formation of an international “Hormuz Security Force” that could help realize these ends. On April 2 a Bahraini-Emirati attempt at securing a UN Security Council resolution to support the initiative collapsed in the face of Russian, Chinese, and French vetoes.  

All these maneuvers exhibited a striking disregard for where bargaining power actually lay. The limits of Israeli and American airpower were becoming more apparent with each day. Also increasingly evident were the resolve and resilience of Iran’s war economy and the White House’s sensitivity to both energy prices and equity valuations—culminating in the Trump administration’s acceptance of Tehran’s cease-fire terms on the evening of April 7. In this respect the UAE’s hawkish thinking on Iran shares much with the sophomoric reflections issued forth from Pete Hegseth’s Department of War.

It remains to be seen whether the negotiations that commenced in Islamabad on April 9 will yield a lasting peace. Israel’s horrifying bombardment of Lebanon on April 8, which killed at least 254 people and injured more than a thousand, cautions against optimism. In any case, however, the unreality that has pervaded Gargash’s statements and the UAE’s general outlook is revealing—if not altogether surprising. Over the course of recent months, Emirati leadership has experienced a profound loss of certainty. For roughly fifteen years few roadblocks had stood in the way of the UAE’s leaders as they schemed to fashion a deterritorialized empire with its center in the desert archipelago of Abu Dhabi. With verve, MbZ and his lieutenants laid claim to the mantle of regional power, weaving together a network of clients, security partners, ports, and commodity and financial flows that extended from Addis Ababa, Darfur, Somaliland, and Chad across the Red Sea into southern Yemen and up through the North African reaches of Libya and Egypt.

For a long while the network delivered sizable benefits to its architects: the capacity to project force and swing political outcomes; logistical control over the movement of goods, people, and weapons; and a portfolio of profitable investments, to name a few. But it was always precarious. Sustaining dominion required open seas, Saudi Arabian quiescence, American commitments (and the rest of the world’s deference) to the Carter Doctrine, and, critically, total quiet on the home front. Since the start of the US and Israel’s war, each of those pillars have come under assault. Amidst all this tumult, in Abu Dhabi a certain vertigo seems to be setting in. Staring at a world turned on its head, the al Nahyan family is evidently struggling to reckon with its new reality.  

*

To grasp how we got here, we have to understand how the UAE came to play such an outsized part in regional and global affairs. Upon the end of Britain’s hundred-and-fifty-one-year protectorate of the Trucial States in December 1971, the sheikhdoms that would go on to form the UAE were gradually incorporated into the US imperial project. British and to a lesser extent French interests were to continue steering oil production for some time still: the equity structure of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, established during the UAE’s inaugural year, attested as much. The British government also persisted in helping steer the new country’s political course. Having acted as guarantor to the al Nahyan family since the days of Napoleon—and having trained generations of heirs at Sandhurst—London saw to it that retired military officers would serve as senior advisors to the Emirati royals well after they were granted independence. But though these European attachments remained, the UAE was steadily pivoting toward Washington—this being, after all, the era of the pax Americana.

Following Saudi Arabia’s lead, in 1974 the UAE agreed to price oil in dollars and to recirculate windfall earnings within American capital markets, principally by purchasing treasuries, making deposits and loans with US commercial banks (onshore and offshore), buying arms, and doling out contracting work to engineering firms like Bechtel and Halliburton. In 1978 policymakers opted to de facto peg the Dirham, too, to the dollar—and to absorb the major revenue losses the country was incurring as a result of pricing oil in dollars at a time when the dollar was rapidly depreciating in value. At a decisive juncture, these offers of tribute buttressed American control over the global financial system.

With the thawing of the cold war and winding down of the first Gulf War, the UAE would also lend the US a blunter tool. Although officials declined for decades to publicly acknowledge as much, during the early days of the Clinton administration al Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi began hosting American Air Force units. Starting in 2002 it hosted the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing, which had a large part in the US air campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq during the 2000s and in the later fight against Daesh.

Over the course of these decades Emirati leaders inclined toward financial conservatism and a conciliatory external posture. Economically, the Central Bank of the UAE and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA)—the UAE’s largest sovereign wealth fund, instituted in 1976—concentrated their investments in low-risk assets like US treasuries. Politically, UAE leaders respected Saudi Arabia’s regional seniority; Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, also refrained from grandiose foreign policy designs for the sake of balancing its interests with those of Dubai, its sister emirate, then busy cultivating its reputation as a hub where all were welcome to make and park money.

But during the 2000s the UAE’s political economy transformed in a manner befitting the grander ambitions of an ascendant generation of royals. This shift broadly corresponded with the political rise of the Bani Fatima, the six brothers born to Fatima bint Mubarak al Kitbi, the most prominent wife of the UAE’s founding president, Zayed bin Sultan. Led by their eldest member, Mohamed bin Zayed (MbZ), the brothers adopted a more front-footed approach to economic management and geopolitical competition.

In 2004 MbZ was named crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and thus heir apparent to the presidency of the UAE. His ambition was immediately evident, most obviously in Washington. Prior to MbZ’s arrival on the scene, the UAE had avoided making its presence felt loudly in the nation’s capital, which Emirati leaders considered a preserve of the Israeli and Saudi lobbies. But in 2006, when Chuck Schumer led the way in blocking the Dubai-based ports and logistics operator DP World from acquiring six US seaports by smearing the firm with accusations that it might facilitate terrorism, MbZ resolved to develop the UAE’s sway in the corridors of US power.

Working with his trusted ally Yousef al Otaiba—who was named ambassador to the US in 2008 and retained close business relations with Tom Barrack, a longtime donor to the Republican Party presently serving as ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria—the crown prince oversaw the construction of a formidable influence operation. Emirati money flooded into Washington’s leading foreign policy think tanks, setting in motion a vast network of lobbyists and public communications and government affairs consultancies. With al Otaiba running point, the UAE’s Washington operation also commenced its long courtship of Israel, convinced that the latter’s allies in the city could further shore up the al Nahyan family’s position.

Around this time—and particularly upon the outbreak of the global financial crisis—the UAE, like many other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, became an increasingly sturdy ballast for a wavering American economy, a development that undoubtedly buoyed their efforts to cultivate influence. During the desperate days of fall 2007 the ADIA helped rescue Citigroup, though the investment ended in contentious litigation. The next year, as the Federal Reserve leaned aggressively into quantitative easing, the UAE joined Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait in buying up US treasuries to steady the US financial system. As the Obama administration hitched the prospects of recovery to the tech sector, it was again Gulf capital—much of it deployed by state-controlled funds like the ADIA and Mubadala—that injected a great deal of the requisite liquidity. The same pattern would hold as Silicon Valley initiated its startling, costly gambles on artificial intelligence.

At first the UAE’s political and financial ventures in the US were essentially risk-averse, aimed at retaining Washington’s favor and protection, sidestepping costly fiascos like what happened to DP World, and earning a buck. Then, in 2009, financial market turmoil forced Dubai to request a $20 billion bailout from Abu Dhabi. Now that it was a creditor to its sister emirate, Abu Dhabi would no longer need to respect Dubai’s preference for a light, nonconflictual foreign policy, and MbZ adopted a set of expansionist regional goals to which the UAE’s influence operation in Washington soon became tethered.

Once he started unilaterally driving the UAE’s external affairs, MbZ proved a fiercely ideological character. Starting at the close of 2010 he watched with alarm as popular uprisings rocked the Arab world­. Tunisian, Egyptian, and Yemeni streets swept authoritarian incumbents from office; an intifada in Bahrain threatened a fellow traveler in dynastic autocracy. MbZ’s abhorrence for people’s government was perhaps exceeded only by his resentment over a rather expansive signifier he called “Islamism.” To his eye, the likes of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood existed within a shared, narrow continuum, varying more in method and form than in essence. He feared, moreover, that a democratic government anywhere in the region—especially one led by the Brotherhood—might exert a contagion effect on its neighbors, and that changes in systems of rule could lead to changes in the conditions for capital accumulation. To foreclose those outcomes, the crown prince mobilized an aggressive, often exceedingly violent response.

Targeted first at theaters within the Middle East and North Africa before expanding across the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, MbZ’s strategy was designed to beat back the democratic example, lift up reliable clients, and secure crucial material interests. The UAE’s interventions during these years typically involved dispatching cash and armaments to favored parties, such as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Khalifa Haftar in Libya, and the Southern Transitional Council in Yemen. It also entailed maneuvering via diplomatic channels and running influence campaigns tailored to the mores of western capitals: the UAE expended much effort, for instance, at shaping policy and public discourse concerning Islamism, Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood in France. The goal was a networked, deterritorialized system of control. By stitching together a web of outside partners and holdings, a tiny collection of city-states bearing little in the way of population, arable land, water, or non-petroleum natural resources could make a bid for regional hegemony. 

*

That an outpost as small as the UAE could aspire to such an outsized role reflected a peculiar set of historical conditions. Among them was the steady march of neoliberal globalization. Prior to the rupture of the first Trump presidency, the order of the day remained free trade, free capital movements, the inviolability of intellectual property, and, less openly, the prerogative of wealth to seek privacy from the state. MbZ and his younger brother Tahnoun deftly designed their plans for an Emirati sub-empire—as the Brazilian theorist Ruy Mauro Marini might have called it—to exploit these conditions.

For one thing, the UAE earned itself the blessings of great powers and transnational capital alike by energetically extending the circuitry of global wealth accumulation. Across the 2010s and 2020s Emirati petroleum products flowed to East Asia at a vast scale, as did the country’s investments in Chinese refinery and petrochemical production. Cognizant of China’s standing as the engine of worldwide growth, the UAE also used a range of means to help facilitate the movement of Chinese capital abroad, including currency swaps, sales of liquefied natural gas in yuan, and the marketing of panda and dim sum bonds within the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). The DIFC likewise furnished a major conduit for Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative in Africa and west Asia; as of 2023 Chinese banks held more than a quarter of the center’s assets.

Jebel Ali Port in Dubai and Khalifa Port in Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, became hubs par excellence for planet-spanning, just-in-time supply chains, fastening together commodity and aid flows across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The same free ports also proved invaluable at keeping private earnings away from the prying reaches of taxmen: according to Global Financial Integrity, between 2013 and 2022 the UAE’s total trade value gap—a proxy figure for trade misinvoicing, a practice commonly used in conducting illicit financial flows—exceeded $450 billion.

Likewise abetting tax avoidance and evasion were the DIFC and Abu Dhabi Global Market. Designated as tax-free special economic zones, these competing offshore financial hubs offered the ultrawealthy of the region as well as of East Asia and Europe discreet homes where they could squirrel away their riches for generations: family offices, trusts, hedge funds. For the more unsavory, the UAE could offer alternative mechanisms for cleaning ill-begotten gains. By the mid-2010s Dubai’s gold and property markets had become favored waystations for drug dealers, oligarchs, and warlords alike. The rampancy of the money laundering earned the UAE regular reprimands from the G7’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF). After intensive lobbying, the UAE was removed from the FATF’s Grey List in 2024, to the chagrin of watchdog organizations like Transparency International and the Sentry. But even the FATF’s censure amounted to a perfunctory slap on the wrist: before long the UAE had emerged as a critical refuge for elite wealth preservation and a channel through which riches of gray and black provenance could slip back onto the balance sheets of legal enterprise.

More tertiary contributions were made to capital’s cause as well. By hosting the world’s fourth-largest Islamic finance market, the UAE had a major part in linking trillions in savings from religious conservatives—who avoid traditional banks due to Islamic prohibitions against the charging of interest—to international capital markets. By getting Russian oil to buyers and providing sanction-workarounds for Iranian firms, the Emirates limited the broader fallout created by US Treasury interventions. By developing logistics zones outside the laws prevailing in the host country, the UAE’s major port operators helped open the Horn of Africa and countries further inland for extraction and exploitation. And by creating markets for asset classes like carbon credits, the country set things up for the future, too. Dubai launched the AirCarbon Exchange platform in 2019, where carbon credits can be traded; an Emirati company called Blue Carbon LLC began purchasing enormous amounts of African forest lands in 2022 to provide liquidity for the carbon credit market. These moves did more than lend a moralistic veneer to international businesses with little interest in an energy transition—they allowed investors to profit off of the ecological nonsense that is carbon offsetting. All in all, the UAE acted as capital’s emirate—an indispensable, multi-valve artery of a grimy and intertwined global economy. 

*

But if MbZ’s regional designs were synched to capital’s incentives and restraints during a time of globalization, they were also calibrated to take advantage of regionally specific political conditions. During the 2000s and 2010s the United States edged away from the laws of nations that had, however inconsistently, persisted over the previous sixty-odd years. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the so-called war on terror, revealed that respect for state sovereignty was a conditional privilege that the US could retract at its discretion; Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the US’s support for Israel’s wars on Gaza, and the Obama White House’s penchant for murder by drone chipped steadily away at international human rights law. In the Middle East three additional factors came into play: Washington’s endlessly discussed intentions for “pivoting to China,” the Obama administration’s desire to “lead from behind,” and processes of dynastic succession in Saudi Arabia that left the country rudderless for a time as a young and malleable Mohamed bin Salman rose to prominence. With the US making an aspirational retreat from the region, Saudi Arabia drifting into aloofness, uprisings unsettling Arab governments from Tunisia to Syria, and norms around sovereignty breaking down, space opened for an enterprising country like the UAE to make a claim to power.

Across each of its theaters of intervention, the UAE had a consistent set of objectives: choking out democratic transitions, establishing clientelist relations with entities that could ensure the al Nahyan family’s interests, and discrediting the specific alternative that the Muslim Brotherhood hoped to present to Arab societies: a conservative, expressly Islamic democratic system of rule. In many instances the Bani Fatima did this by arming and funding substate, secessionist forces with the aim of breaking down neighboring states so as to more easily manipulate their constituent parts. In Yemen, Abu Dhabi initially entered the mix in order to block the ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood-associated al Islah Party (reportedly by way of a targeted assassination program run by American and Israeli mercenaries). Later, to prevent the Houthis from conquering the entire country, Emirati forces not only sponsored factions within the Southern Transitional Council but also joined the Saudi-led coalition’s aerial bombardment campaigns. In Sudan the Emirates funded and armed the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo (known as Hemedti). At first the goal was evidently to reroute the energies generated by the popular uprising of 2018–2019; later it was to compete (and in the case of gold, occasionally collaborate) with the Sudanese Army for land, ports, and treasure. (The Emirates have long denied arming the RSF, but investigations by such sources as the UN, Amnesty International, and The New York Times hardly leave room for doubt. A former UN weapons monitor, interviewed by the Financial Times, called the UAE’s denials “geostrategic gaslighting.”)

But it would be wrong to consider Abu Dhabi solely predisposed toward secessionist forces or motivated only by a desire to turn their neighbors into failed states. Elsewhere it was with state incumbents—rather than paramilitary challengers—that the UAE reached arrangements that served its national security interests. In Egypt, bent on snuffing out a prominent example of Arab democracy and obstructing the advance of an independent and less pliable ruling class, Emirati leaders helped stage-manage el-Sisi’s 2013 coup before bankrolling his government’s consolidation of power. In Ethiopia, Abu Dhabi offered major backing to Abiy Ahmed Ali, injecting investment capital during moments of financial stress, training the Republican Guard, and furnishing the drones that led the horrific push into Tigray. 

Guiding Abu Dhabi’s general strategy across the board were the country’s aspirations to maritime power. Under MbZ the Emirates sought a vast sphere of influence, which in turn required a vast network of infrastructure. Ports were especially crucial, as were the companies that manage their development: the fully state-owned DP World and the partially state-owned Abu Dhabi Ports Group (ADPG). Both firms expanded rapidly during the 2010s and 2020s. From Egypt’s Port Said to Somaliland’s Berbera and Puntland’s Bosaso, the two corporations secured the UAE’s logistical power over trade movements while also allowing the country’s military to acquire bases for its navy and drones. DP World upgraded and maintained Assab Port in Eritrea, for instance, not only because it was good business but also so that, prior to 2021, Abu Dhabi could have a launching pad for staging its interventions in Yemen.

Where the sea wasn’t available, securing airfields and partners who could ensure the UAE’s access to them was often decisive. Abu Dhabi may have initially underwritten Khalifa Haftar in eastern Libya in the hopes that he would conquer the whole country and thereby secure the Emirates an oil-laden Mediterranean foothold—but even after he failed to do so he and Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno in Chad still retained great strategic value, because they provided the UAE with the air resupply routes it needed to equip the RSF with the means to co-create a catastrophe in Sudan. Across the Socotra archipelago—Yemeni islands seized by the UAE in 2018—the goal was to have eyes and project force next to one of the world’s most important trade corridors, the Bab al Mandab Strait. (Since the early 2020s the Abu Dhabi intelligence doyen Khalifan al Mazrouei has reportedly operated an intelligence base on Socotra’s Abd el Kuri island, alongside Israeli colleagues.)

Like any striving hegemon, Abu Dhabi undertook these engagements abroad not just to secure power but also to accumulate capital. And capital did accumulate. Supported by a coterie of policymakers who depended on Abu Dhabi’s cash injections, its arms transfers, and its capacity to fence illicit product, sovereign and private actors from the UAE could frequently acquire assets for a song. Apart from ports, in Egypt the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds—along with firms majority-controlled by those funds, such as al Dahra Holding Company—purchased positions in banks, health care facilities, reclaimed farmland, prime urban real estate, and a number of petrochemical companies for fractions of their market value, earning quick and enormous returns along the way. In Sudan, arrangements with the RSF—and, to some degree, with the Sudanese state itself—facilitated gold flows out from Jebel Amer in Darfur and consolidated immense agricultural holdings.¹ In Somaliland, the port and free zone at Berbera hosts sizable Emirati investments in solar power generation, light manufacturing, and agroprocessing. Elsewhere on the Horn, the port network helmed by DP World and ADPG has allowed Emirati firms to pump billions into mining operations in Guinea, Zambia, Angola, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Tellingly, the company at the vanguard of the UAE’s efforts to extract copper, rare earth minerals, and gold is International Resources Holding, an entity personally directed by Tahnoun bin Zayed, the Bani Fatima member charged with the conjoined portfolios of national security and investment.

It is difficult to overstate how much suffering this project of regional dominance caused. The UAE contributed not only to el-Sisi’s coup in Egypt but to the campaign of state violence and mass pauperization that subsequently took place there; the fracturing of Somalia; more than a decade of devastation of Yemen; the consolidation of Haftar’s breakaway dictatorship in Libya; the asphyxiation of Sudan’s democratic opposition and the horrifying criminality of the RSF; the massacres perpetrated in Tigray; and a border-leaping renewal of authoritarian cruelty across the region. As an axis of counterrevolution and predation, the UAE has been one of the twenty-first century’s quiet villains.

*

As recently as early December 2025, all these plots and all this pain seemed to have solidly secured the UAE the regional dominance it sought. Since then, however, MbZ’s imperial ambitions have faced headwinds that could bring them toppling down.

The reversal began at the close of December 2025, when Saudi Arabia at last summoned the energy to confront the Emirates’ machinations in the Red Sea littoral and Gulf of Aden. Provoked by the STC’s brazen conquests of borderlands in Yemen’s Hadramout and Mahra provinces, Riyadh leveled airstrikes against the group, forcing the UAE to withdraw all its forces from the country. Meanwhile Mohamed bin Salman’s lieutenants in Washington had reportedly begun lobbying the White House to discipline Abu Dhabi for its meddling in Somalia and Sudan.

Back home, meanwhile, Saudi officials were negotiating military partnerships with Egypt, Turkey, and government actors in Khartoum and Mogadishu in the hopes of curtailing the UAE within a number of important arenas. Economic competition, too, has been growing between the two powers. Since the early 2020s their dueling “vision plans” have pitted country against country on everything from artificial intelligence and tourism to gold processing and corporate headquartering. An intra-Gulf cold war looked in the making.

Any such conflict was delayed by the US–Israeli assault on Iran. But the reprieve for Abu Dhabi was brief: the sadistic, irrational actions of the Trump and Netanyahu governments swiftly clarified just how vulnerable the UAE could be. The country has built indoor ski slopes in the middle of a desert as well as endless monuments to luxury and wealth—but no quantity of riches can take away the reality that the habitability of the UAE’s grand urban centers rests on easily targetable infrastructure.

As became almost immediately apparent, if Iran had retaliated by launching missile strikes on the desalination plants at Jebel Ali, al Taweelah, Umm al Quwain, and Fujairah, along with a handful of the country’s power stations, mass human life in the UAE would have been rendered nonviable beyond the next few weeks. Meanwhile, it took only crashing seven-thousand-dollar drones into several data center facilities—Amazon Web Service’s in March and Oracle’s in April—for Iran to turn the al Nahyan family’s gamble on an AI-powered future into a potential sunk cost. Why, after all, would anyone commit tens of billions in chips and fixed capital going forward if the investment can be wiped out in one drone’s swoop?

Silos filled with grain and other essential food stuffs at Zayed Port in Abu Dhabi and the port of Fujairah have at least ensured that nobody goes hungry. But fresh produce is another story. According to a recent report in The Economist, Iran has been providing 90 percent of the UAE’s tomatoes, cauliflower, and watermelons in recent years, as well as large shares of the country’s cucumbers, lettuce, and eggplant. As early as the first week of March, soon after Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz and imposed a ban on agricultural exports to the UAE, the future of the country’s fruits and vegetables was highly uncertain—an exit signal if there ever was one for the influencer generation that had flocked to Dubai over recent years. Adding to the troubles, the grounding of air traffic and closing of the seas have already complicated Abu Dhabi’s attempts to resupply military clients in Libya and Sudan.

Far more problematic still is the damage the war has done to the political economy of the UAE’s developmental “miracle.” For Abu Dhabi, petroleum rents have always been the sine qua non of economic life. For Dubai, in contrast, the formula has mixed equal parts Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Saint Tropez, and London. An entrepôt doubling as a safe haven for the global moneyed (be they of sordid or proper stock), the city rode its trading networks, offshore financial center, property and gold markets, and tourism receipts to boundless riches.

With the war, both models simultaneously lost purchase. The strait’s closure prevented Abu Dhabi’s oil and gas products from leaving via their normal seaborne channels, just as recurring Iranian drone strikes at the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone—located beyond the Strait of Hormuz on the Gulf of Oman—closed down hopes of a simple workaround. The cease-fire offers relief, but there are no guarantees it holds. And should hostilities recommence and the Houthis decide to enter the mix, salvation via Saudi Arabian terminals on the Red Sea would soon be taken off the table, too. If the outlook isn’t as bleak as in Doha—where a strike on one of the world’s largest LNG facilities is poised to shrink GDP 13-14 percent this year—this paints a distressing picture for the Emirati capital.

As for Dubai, the explosions that rocked the Palm Jumeirah and Burj al Arab hotel in March—totems to the city’s standing as elite refuge—have paralyzed the tourism economy and sent resident capital into flight. Disruption of commodity flows at the Jebel Ali Port have likewise thrown a spanner in the works of the city’s mercantile empire. Support measures from the Central Bank have thus far staunched any terrible bleeding, and the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds can always unload tens if not hundreds of billions in foreign assets if things really turn south. Since the cease-fire air traffic, too, has resumed, albeit at low volumes. Looking forward, though, one cannot help but wonder how long a country that was built on oil rents, open seas, and providing a sanctuary for an international elite may stand when hammers are being taken to all three of these foundation stones.

For Iran’s leadership, the war has established dispositively that the Strait of Hormuz can be shuttered, that American air and sea power can do little about it short of a devastating land invasion, and that the leverage this confers—at least for the time being—requires a major reconfiguration in the regional balance of power. For the Emirates, on the other hand, the events of the past five weeks have shown that a deterritorialized empire can only ever be so robust. Wherever we go from here, none of the possible roads ahead look too good for the UAE. The status quo renders Iran regional kingmaker of the foreseeable future, and US boots on the ground would likely bring wholesale devastation to Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The Emirates’ cityscapes, with their heaven-piercing towers, have long inspired awe. In the light of the past month, however, it bears reminding that these cities are built on sand.