We’ll always have Dubai

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a sonnet called “Ozymandias”. It tells of a desert kingdom that succumbs to the ravages of time, until not much more is left than “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the sand. Looking down at Dubai from a circling plane last month, I had a spooky vision of all its towers and highways as ruins in a not-so-distant future. I ascribed this to the melatonin-and-wine diet that I tend to observe on long flights. A few days later, Iranian ordnance struck the emirate. Count the ways in which Dubai is precarious. It is caught between the desert and the ever-fraught Gulf. Besides Iran, its neighbours include an ambitious Saudi Arabia and an anarchic Yemen. It relies on the hard power of the erratic US, whose Fifth Fleet patrols those unquiet waters. Dubai is not even the sovereign centre of its own state, which is Abu Dhabi. It has little oil. In the home peninsula of a world religion, it allows a degree of hedonism that some might regard as a profane inc

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a sonnet called “Ozymandias”. It tells of a desert kingdom that succumbs to the ravages of time, until not much more is left than “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the sand. Looking down at Dubai from a circling plane last month, I had a spooky vision of all its towers and highways as ruins in a not-so-distant future. I ascribed this to the melatonin-and-wine diet that I tend to observe on long flights. A few days later, Iranian ordnance struck the emirate. Count the ways in which Dubai is precarious. It is caught between the desert and the ever-frau