In a turbulent year, the UAE has passed a severe stress test. Airport volumes and flight schedules are nearly back to normal, thousands of new business licences continue to be issued at pace, and the country has retained its top ranking in the latest Henley and Partners Global Wealth Migration Report. But the more important lesson is not that the UAE proved durable under pressure. It is that in a connected economy, no city weathers a storm alone.
Commentators often cast leading economic centres as zero-sum competitors. That misreads the nature of the global economy. The top 10 cities account for nearly 20 per cent of global gross domestic product. These cities form a network: they are not merely connected by flows of capital, technology and people; they are defined by them. What each city is depends to a substantial degree on what moves between them. You cannot remove a node without altering the whole.
That may sound abstract. So consider who owns London’s prime real estate, who invests in the Wall Street credit funds that underwrite American business, who backs Silicon Valley’s venture firms, or where the hyperscalers place their biggest data centres – and how airlines, ports, exchanges and universities lace one hub to the next. For all those who think globalisation is dead, these are not incidental interlinkages. They are the sustenance of globalisation itself. Cities still compete for headquarters, capital and talent – but they also depend on one another for liquidity, customers, data and credibility, and it is hard to describe them as a “team of rivals” anymore.
The UAE understands this instinctively. Over the past five decades, its seven emirates have grown into a federation far greater than the sum of its parts. Their strengths overlap and compound – among them Abu Dhabi’s capital markets, Dubai’s trade and logistics, and the east-coast ports of Sharjah and Fujairah that give the country its own gateways beyond the Strait of Hormuz. Specialisation need not mean fragmentation, and competition can co-exist with co-ordination. What is true within the federation is true between nations.
The defining divide in the global economy is no longer geographic. It runs between the places wired into global flows and those bypassed by them – a divergence that has fuelled real grievance and reshaped politics in many countries. Those who work across these hubs are the first to feel it when a disruption in one node ripples through the system.
That is why the ability to stay open under pressure has become a competitive advantage. Talent and capital are drawn to places that keep functioning when others seize up. The UAE has absorbed repeated shocks – oil-price collapses, global financial crises, a pandemic and recent regional disruption – and emerged from each more capable and better connected. Since 1990, its economy has grown roughly fourfold in real terms, while its population has grown more than fivefold as global talent votes with its feet.
Anti-fragility is not a slogan. It is a measurable outcome of the access to markets, capital, infrastructure, institutions and talent that these cities provide their residents.
Singapore offers another instructive example. It is a small, open and deeply trade-dependent city-state that has weathered its own share of storms – separation from Malaysia in 1965, the Asian financial crisis, the Sars epidemic – each time strengthening its institutions and diversifying its economy. A closure of the Strait of Malacca would not be a Singaporean problem alone; it would strike Asia’s energy security, global manufacturing and technology supply chains, and trade flows far beyond the region.
This year’s disruption around Hormuz has sharpened the question every global hub must now confront: how do we build systems that are efficient in normal times but adaptable in abnormal ones? The instinct is to treat these as opposites – to assume adaptability must be bought at the cost of efficiency. The past year suggests otherwise.
The cities that adapted fastest were those already most deeply connected, because alternatives only exist where relationships already do. The UAE’s east coast makes the point. Khor Fakkan handled about 1,500 containers a week before the disruption; by July, it was moving more than 50,000, with more than 8,000 lorries a day carrying cargo inland and onward to ports across the upper Gulf.
That capacity was not improvised in a crisis. It was built years earlier, through corridors and partnerships that already existed – which is precisely why they could be scaled when they were needed.
The UAE and Singapore show what those partnerships look like in practice. Bilateral trade stands at more than $20 billion and has evolved well beyond oil and gas; Singapore holds more foreign direct investment stock in the UAE than any other Gulf country, and the UAE is the largest Gulf investor in Singapore. Last year, the two completed a first-of-its-kind digital cross-border trade finance pilot and signed an AI co-operation agreement. The UAE’s ties with southern China’s Greater Bay Area follow a similar pattern: trade with Hong Kong has reached $15 billion, Abu Dhabi Global Market has launched financial-services partnerships with Shenzhen’s Futian District, and Guangzhou has become a key source of the electric vehicles increasingly popular in the UAE market.
These are not isolated deals. They point to a larger model: trusted urban nodes building the financial, technological and logistical links that keep global commerce moving.
Knowledge moves the same way. New York University Abu Dhabi is not a branch campus but one node in a network it co-anchors with New York and Shanghai. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence draws faculty and doctoral researchers from dozens of countries and sends their work back out into the world. Singapore has built comparable research alliances with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others. And of all the flows between cities, knowledge is the one that is never zero-sum: a discovery shared between laboratories in Singapore, Boston and Shenzhen leaves all three better off.
That logic also drives the new corridors taking shape. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor and the Middle Corridor through Central Asia – with the ports and rail links they entail – are part of a wider shift away from overdependence on single chokepoints towards a distributed web of routes and gateways. Athens, Istanbul and Mumbai see the opportunity too: cities that treat East-West connectivity as an investment, not an afterthought, stand to prosper from it.
Cities cannot choose their geography, but they can choose their partners – and this co-operation now needs to go further. That means aviation hubs with spare capacity rerouting passengers and cargo when another is constrained; ports sharing real-time data to protect critical shipments; financial centres accelerating mutual recognition of licences and listings; and technology corridors building enough redundancy that no single data node or communications link becomes a point of failure.
This is not a call for naive interdependence. Connectivity transmits risk as well as opportunity: financial contagion, pandemics, cyber-attacks and supply shocks all travel through networks. But the answer to networked risk is not isolation. It is better network design – more redundancy, more transparency, more trusted partners and more capacity to absorb disruption before it cascades.
Platforms such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group already let urban leaders share hard-won lessons on climate, housing and public safety. The next generation of co-operation must extend that instinct to trade corridors, financial systems, digital infrastructure and crisis response.
Urbanisation is humanity’s collective story. We are becoming a civilisation of networked cities, bound together by flows of people, goods, ideas and data. The question is whether those networks are allowed to fragment under pressure, or whether their most stable nodes reinforce one another. The UAE’s emirates have never merely survived a crisis – they have used each one to accelerate.
In the next era of globalisation, the cities that matter most will be the ones others can depend on when the system is under strain. Because in a fracturing world, those that stand alone will eventually stand exposed.
Badr Jafar is Special Envoy to the UAE Foreign Minister for Business and Philanthropy, and chief executive of Crescent Enterprises. Dr Parag Khanna is founder and chief executive of AlphaGeo and the internationally bestselling author of seven books
