The Vulture’s Advantage
Iran’s strategy of destruction can’t be allowed to defeat the UAE’s promise of prosperity.
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During times of peace, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a colossal failure, a bankrupt theocracy whose top export is its nation’s best minds. During times of conflict and instability, however, it has a structural advantage. It has an extraordinarily high tolerance for the suffering of its own people, a threshold no rival government can easily match.
For the Islamic Republic, suffering is a point of pride, not shame. Iran’s Gulf neighbors built their model on the opposite wager—that prosperity, not suffering, is the measure of a nation’s worth. The trillion-dollar economies they built over many decades, Tehran can threaten to destroy with $20,000 drones. This is the vulture’s advantage.
When Donald Trump launched his attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, he believed the war would destroy Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs, its regional proxies, and perhaps the regime itself. Nearly three months later, the most urgent question is no longer whether Trump can change Iran. It is whether Iran can change the Middle East—and the global economy with it. As the world has now learned, the Strait of Hormuz and its surrounding geography supply a fifth of the world’s oil, a third of its fertilizer, and enormous volumes of aluminum, petrochemicals, and helium—the inputs that yield semiconductors, MRI machines, automobiles, fiber-optic cables, and crops. American might may temporarily reopen the strait. But what cannot be as easily restored is the confidence of a region whose energy, capital, and connectivity underpin the global economy.
The front line of this war is the United Arab Emirates. Since February 28—a date that many Emiratis now liken to America’s 9/11 and Israel’s October 7—Tehran has attacked its southern neighbor with nearly 3,000 missiles and drones. Less than 10 percent of these attacks have targeted the U.S. military presence in the UAE. More than 90 percent have struck the sites that have made the UAE an international hub of transportation, trade, finance, and tourism—among them, Dubai International Airport, the Dubai International Financial Center, the Burj al Arab hotel, and Jebel Ali ports. Tehran’s goal, declared plainly on Iranian state television early in the war, was to “kill the idea” of Dubai.
On the surface, this seemed a perverse objective: The UAE sought to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran; it prohibited the United States from using its airspace; it is home to one of the largest Iranian diasporas in the world, with as many as half a million residents of Iranian origin. And given Iran’s economic isolation, the UAE is Tehran’s top import partner and indispensable conduit to the global economy. Emirati officials have looked the other way as Iranian political and military officials parked billions in assets there.
UAE officials believed this accommodation would inoculate them from Iranian strikes, yet they were the target of more attacks than virtually all other countries combined. The war gave Tehran a pretext to lash out at what it has always resented: a smaller neighbor, led by Bedouin Arab tribes allied with the U.S. and Israel, whose modern success has been a rebuke to Iran’s traditional theocracy. Every year, millions of Iranian citizens visit the UAE and return home lamenting what their country could have been. Tens of thousands have not returned at all.
Babak Namazi, an Iranian American who has lived in the UAE since 2010, told me that the country “has always been a safe harbor of stability, dignity, and happiness” for his family. “Our children were raised here, and we have built our lives around the values of openness and community that the country represents. We’re here for the long term.” Namazi knows the alternative intimately: His father and brother were also UAE residents who returned to Iran to contribute to their homeland, only to collectively spend more than 10 years as hostages in Tehran’s Evin Prison.
The divergent paths of these two nations tell a story of leadership. Five decades ago, the founding leader of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, approached the same elevator of history. Zayed had recently united the UAE’s warring tribes. He looked at his resource-rich desert backwater and posed a single question: What could Emiratis build? Khomeini was a dissident Shiite cleric who had spent decades in exile nursing a revolutionary ideology. He was consumed by a different question: Who must be destroyed? Zayed was fueled by a desire for progress; Khomeini, by an urge for vengeance. One pressed the button going up. The other pressed the button going down.
The falcon has been the UAE’s national symbol since Sheikh Zayed chose it out of admiration for its vision, speed, and precision. The UAE has spent five decades trying to govern like the falcon, building soaring companies, skyscrapers, and cities at a breakneck pace. Iran’s ancient culture is linked to mythical birds, such as the Simorgh and the Homa, which symbolize wisdom and fortune. Under the Islamic Republic, however, Tehran has acted like a vulture, finding opportunity not in success but in conflict and on the carcasses of failing states.
The difference is vision. The UAE calls its national plan “We the UAE 2031.” Iran remains committed to the principles of its 1979 revolution. Vision 2031 elevates aspirations; Vision 1979 amplifies grievances. Vision 2031 is premised on partnership with America and Israel; Vision 1979 is premised on enmity toward both. Vision 2031 has sought social opening; Vision 1979 is anchored in social repression.
The results of these divergent visions are self-evident. In 1975, the UAE’s economy was roughly one-quarter the size of Iran’s. Today it is larger, despite that Iran has nearly 20 times the territory, eight times the population, and far greater resources. The UAE’s passport ranks No. 1 in the world, ahead of Singapore’s. Iran’s is No. 84, just two points above North Korea’s. Last year, the United Nations World Happiness Report, which measures the wellbeing of nations, ranked the UAE 21st in the world (ahead of the U.S., the U.K., and Canada) and first in the Arab world. Iran, which has the world’s highest per capita execution rate and massacred thousands of its own protesting citizens in January, ranks 99. The Islamic Republic has been losing an estimated 150,000 educated citizens annually to brain drain, at a national cost of $150 billion. The UAE, meanwhile, attracted 173,000 highly skilled workers in 2024 alone, making it the fourth most popular destination for skilled talent in the world.
During times of peace, the falcon wins. But during times of conflict, the vulture enjoys an inherent advantage: Destroying an airport is easier than building one; frightening investors is easier than attracting them; closing a strait is easier than creating a global city.
The territories that Iran dominated prior to October 7, 2023—Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza—were all failing states. The Islamic Republic’s proudest creations over recent decades were regional militias and underground missile factories, built for destruction. Its national slogans, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” are resoundingly negative. The last three months have been a distillation of the past five decades: The UAE builds; the Islamic Republic destroys. Building takes decades. Destroying takes days. Stability requires hundreds of billions of dollars in defense, intelligence, and cybersecurity. Instability costs almost nothing when $20,000 drones can halt the world’s main energy corridor and its most heavily trafficked international airport.
Iran’s targeting was not random. Its missiles struck the Oracle data center in Dubai to deter future tech investment, struck Dubai International Airport to sabotage the world’s busiest international hub, and struck the Dubai International Financial Center to frighten away global capital. Raja News, a hard-line outlet close to Iran’s leadership, declared the UAE “More Deserving Than Tel Aviv” of Iranian missiles. A government adviser suggested on state television that Tehran could “send the Emiratis back to their camel riding days—if needed, we will occupy Abu Dhabi.” Just as Kuwait, once the wealthiest Gulf nation, never fully recovered after the 1991 Gulf War, Tehran’s aspiration is not to emulate the UAE but to sabotage it.
The clearest measure of the difference between Tehran and Abu Dhabi is their stances toward the Palestinian territories. The UAE has delivered more than $2.5 billion in humanitarian aid to Gaza—more than 40 percent of all international aid. Iran, in contrast, has been Hamas’s primary military patron, providing an estimated $100 million to $350 million annually to its military wing. One primarily funds hospitals. The other primarily funds rockets. “Iran is one of the countries that helps Hamas most,” Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, told an interviewer in 2021. “The only country that ignores the limits imposed on Hamas is Iran. It helps us militarily in training, weapons, and expertise.”
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has yet to be seen or heard since succeeding his father two months ago, has doubled down on Vision 1979. His maiden address was littered with the words martyrdom, revenge, and resistance; the words modernity and prosperity were absent. His counterpart across the Persian Gulf has spent his life pursuing exactly those absent words. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, popularly known as MBZ, has never forgotten that stability in the Middle East is fleeting and that instability is enduring. Decades before Dubai, the cosmopolitan financial hub of the Middle East was Beirut, a city still scarred by a ruinous civil war that ended more than 35 years ago. MBZ’s own advisers have warned that “a single Iranian missile could send the expats fleeing.” Despite thousands of Iranian missiles, however, so far the UAE has seen little capital or human flight.
According to recent reports, the UAE has struck back inside Iran and doubled down on its security cooperation with the United States and Israel. Tehran may have hoped that attacking the Gulf would have driven a wedge between Abu Dhabi and Washington. In the words of one senior UAE official, the strategy instead has had “the opposite effect.”
Two decades ago, the comedian Jon Stewart described Dubai’s odd mix of conservatism and hedonism as what happens when “Las Vegas and Saudi Arabia have a baby.” The UAE has matured considerably since then, becoming a haven for families and international tourists. Although serious shortcomings remain—including restrictions on free expression and the exploitation of migrant workers—these are the critiques of a country that aspires to be judged by international standards, not one that massacres its own citizens en masse for protesting. In recent years, the UAE has drawn far more international criticism for its external than its internal conduct, most egregiously for supporting proxy forces beyond its borders: the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan (a militia accused of genocide) and separatist factions in Yemen. Proxy warfare has defined the Islamic Republic’s character. It has undermined that of the UAE.
The two nations regard each other with mutual contempt and mistrust. “Before this war, we would have been happy with only a nuclear deal,” a senior official in Abu Dhabi told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss a volatile diplomatic relationship. “Now we require a deal that will address their ballistic missiles and drones. They’re not defensive weapons for the Iranians; they’re offensive.” Emirati officials believe that the Islamic Republic is more brittle than it appears. “We don’t see this regime being able to continue,” the official said. “The military and economic devastation has been substantial.”
Tehran views the UAE as an artificial American-and-Israeli satellite at odds with regional trends. “The UAE realizes that it is sitting in a very fragile and weak glass house,” an Iranian military source told an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps news outlet, “and the lack of security poses a lethal danger to it.” Tehran’s triumphalism may not survive when hostilities end, leaving the Islamic Republic responsible for addressing 70 percent inflation, a worthless and sinking currency, and a society it has massacred.
Ultimately, the war’s legacy in the Middle East will not be settled by what Iran signs or what Trump declares. It will be judged by which vision prevails: a forward-looking model of economic dynamism, or a backward-looking obsession with ideological grievance. Iran is a power large enough to survive its self-inflicted isolation. The UAE and its neighbors, however, rely on a stability that only American power can sustain. Trump’s war has thus far generated the instability on which the Islamic Republic feeds, and imperiled the stability on which the UAE depends.
Winston Churchill once said that to build is the “slow and laborious task of years,” whereas “to destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.” Trump launched a regional war that the UAE cannot win against Iran. He must now ensure that it ends with a regional peace that does not allow the Islamic Republic to win against the UAE.