Scholar Dalia Ghanem on the End of the Gulf’s Gilded Age
For Gulf states fearing the Iran war’s fallout, “narrative control is economic survival.”
In April, Dalia Ghanem, a scholar based at a think tank in Qatar, published an article with the German Marshall Fund on how the Iran war had abruptly ended what she called the Gulf’s “gilded age.” Barrages of Iranian missiles and drones, fired in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli bombardment, had shattered the Gulf’s image as a luxurious—and well-protected—island of stability in a region wracked by war. “For years, residents of the Gulf’s gleaming metropolises—Doha, Dubai, Riyadh—existed in a state of geopolitical disbelief,” she wrote.
A senior fellow and program director at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, Ghanem had moved to Qatar, like so many expatriates in the Gulf, seeking the regional “exception,” that “rare corner of the Middle East where continuous conflict was a data point for a policy brief, not a vibration in one’s windows.”
So much f…
