View / Abu Dhabi, and Gulf, turn focus to self-reliance

After two months of canceled or muted events across the Gulf, thousands flocked today to “Make it in the Emirates,” the biggest business convening since the war began. There will be others — a few over the summer and more in the fall — as governments try to project optimism and resilience, reinforcing that the Gulf’s golden era is on pause, not in decline.

Traffic snarled around Abu Dhabi’s convention center, a rare nuisance these days for UAE drivers. More than 1,200 companies were exhibiting at the annual gathering, which serves as a platform to promote manufacturing and industrialization.

Opening the event, Sultan Al Jaber — the UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology and CEO of ADNOC — said the UAE’s push to expand energy output, localize industry, boost trade, and place big bets on AI is aimed at securing “sovereignty and resilience.” Last week’s decision by the UAE to exit OPEC, he said, will help accelerate investment in energy capacity, feeding into that drive.

“The economies of the future will be built on three foundations: energy that powers, technology that thinks, and industry that produces … the UAE brings these pillars together within one integrated ecosystem,” he told a packed auditorium. Yesterday, ADNOC said it will spend $54.5 billion on its domestic energy industry through 2028, another signal that there is no retrenchment in the face of Iranian attacks.

Outside the conference hall, the mood broadly matched this message. In conversations with executives and officials, there was no denial about the impact of the war on business or the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but no one was going to bet against the UAE or the Gulf more broadly.

The past two months have been a test of defenses and supply chains. Assuming the ceasefire holds and trade through Hormuz resumes, the rest of the year seems to be pointing to a recovery phase defined by greater self-reliance. Or, as Badr Jafar — special envoy for business and philanthropy to the UAE’s minister of foreign affairs — put it, invoking an Arabic saying: Nothing relieves an itch like your own nail. (Jafar, who is also CEO of Crescent Enterprises, is an investor in Semafor.)