Schadenfreude has tinged some international coverage of wartime Dubai (looking at you, Daily Mail), but love letters to the UAE have provided an antidote to the derision.
The essays have offered an alternative to the “Dubai-knockers [who] have it down as an airhead’s paradise,” as Janan Ganesh put it in the Financial Times. The city is, in fact, a “blank slate” where its 4 million residents can build (or rebuild) a life, including “the newly middle-class Indian, the sanctions-avoiding Russian, the Uzbek barista, the white-collar economic migrant,” he wrote.
The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, who has lived in Dubai since 2015, evoked his hometown of Kyiv; he was there when Russia invaded in January 2022. Similar to that day, Yaroslav Trofimov wrote, “I felt a sense of personal insult as Iranian missiles started raining.” Disbelief from the West is what’s painful to others: “That millions of residents genuinely trust the country they live in appears to some observers too inconvenient to consider,” wrote one columnist in The National, arguing that resilience will outlast the skepticism.
Journalist Frank Kane — a longtime Dubai resident and unofficial dean of its foreign correspondent corps — expressed his affection by keeping calm, a glass of malbec in hand.