The internet has always had a habit of flattening entire places into symbols, but few cities have been reduced to caricature as aggressively as Dubai. Over the past week, as tensions escalated following the outbreak of war involving Iran, the United States, Israel, and several Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) suddenly became a target of online hostility. Because the country hosts American military facilities, commentators across social media began openly celebrating the possibility that it might be attacked. Some posts framed such violence as deserved, while others treated the idea of Dubai being destroyed with a level of detachment that would be unthinkable if the city in question were Western. Beneath the memes and slogans, however, something deeper surfaced: a worldview that has long shaped how the West imagines the Middle East.
To many of the loudest critics online, Dubai is not a city filled with ordinary human lives. Instead, it exists as a symbol. It is frequently described as artificial, decadent, morally corrupt, or even illegitimate. The city becomes shorthand for a fantasy of excess built on exploitation, a place that supposedly should not exist and therefore deserves little sympathy when threatened. What is striking is how closely these arguments resemble a much older intellectual framework that scholars of colonialism have been analyzing for decades.
In his landmark 1978 book Orientalism, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said argued that the West historically constructed the “Orient” not as a real place but as an imaginative geography shaped by power. According to Said, Orientalism functioned as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The East was repeatedly depicted as irrational, decadent, and incapable of producing modernity on its own terms. Progress, within this worldview, could only originate from Europe or North America. When prosperity appeared elsewhere, it was assumed to be either fraudulent or derivative.
Seen through this lens, the contemporary hostility directed at the Gulf begins to look familiar. The rapid transformation of the United Arab Emirates has challenged long-standing assumptions about where modernity is supposed to come from. In just a few decades, the country has turned itself into a global hub for aviation, logistics, finance, tourism, and trade. Dubai International Airport consistently ranks among the busiest in the world for international passengers. Emirates Airline connects cities across continents with an efficiency that rivals or surpasses many older Western carriers. Ports in Jebel Ali facilitate trade routes stretching from Asia to Europe and Africa. These developments did not emerge from London, Paris, or New York, but from a desert federation that only formed in 1971.
That shift unsettles people who grew up internalizing a particular hierarchy of civilization. When success appears outside the traditional centers of Western power, it often gets framed as artificial or morally suspect. Dubai’s skyline is frequently described as a “mirage,” its growth dismissed as an illusion sustained only by oil wealth, even though oil today contributes a relatively small share of the emirate’s GDP. The language used to critique the city rarely resembles the vocabulary applied to Western financial capitals that have also thrived through global trade, migrant labor, and speculative investment. London’s skyscrapers and New York’s financial district are treated as natural expressions of economic dynamism. Dubai’s towers, by contrast, are frequently portrayed as an aberration.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote that power shapes not only institutions but also knowledge itself. The frameworks through which societies interpret the world determine what counts as legitimate success and what does not. In that sense, the discomfort surrounding Dubai is not merely about architecture or economics. It reflects a deeper unease about a region that has begun to operate on the global stage with a degree of autonomy.
One of the most striking features of the UAE is its demographic reality. More than 200 nationalities live and work within the country. Languages from every continent can be heard in the streets of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Engineers from India collaborate with designers from Europe, entrepreneurs from Africa, and researchers from North America. The result is an unusually dense concentration of global talent operating within a single urban ecosystem. Critics often reduce this diversity to simplistic narratives about labor exploitation while ignoring the complexity of the human stories involved.
None of this is meant to deny that serious debates exist around labor rights in the Gulf, just as they exist in nearly every major economy. Construction workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia have faced scrutiny in the lead-up to global sporting events. Migrant labor systems across the region have undergone reforms in recent years precisely because these conversations have taken place. Yet it is telling that the existence of migrant labor in Dubai is treated as uniquely scandalous, while similar reliance on migrant workers in Western economies receives comparatively little moral outrage.
Agricultural industries in Southern Europe depend heavily on migrant labor from North Africa, and The United States relies on undocumented workers to sustain large portions of its agricultural and service sectors. Gulf critics rarely frame these systems as proof that Western cities themselves should be bombed or destroyed. The selective outrage reveals an inconsistency that cannot be ignored.
The sociologist Stuart Hall once noted that cultural narratives often rely on “the spectacle of the Other.” Entire societies become symbols through which audiences project anxieties about globalization, capitalism, and power. Dubai has increasingly occupied that role. Images of influencers, luxury cars, and rooftop pools circulate endlessly online, reinforcing the impression that the city is nothing more than a playground for crypto traders and social media personalities.
Anyone who actually lives in the UAE knows that this stereotype captures only a tiny slice of reality. The majority of residents wake up early, commute to offices, teach in schools, treat patients in hospitals, and send money home to families in other countries. Teachers from the Philippines build careers in international schools. Doctors from Egypt work in advanced medical centers. Entrepreneurs from Lebanon open restaurants that employ dozens of people. Many residents arrived after escaping wars in Syria, Palestine, Sudan, Yemen, or elsewhere. For them, the UAE represents stability in a region that has experienced its share of upheaval.
Reducing this entire human landscape to a caricature of influencers and escorts reveals more about the observer than the place being observed. Cities throughout history have attracted people chasing wealth, fame, or opportunity. Look at Los Angeles, for instance, which has its share of aspiring actors and entertainment moguls. Even if the UAE was made up strictly of influencers promoting Dubai chocolate and labubus, which it’s not, the presence of ambition does not invalidate the humanity of the people who inhabit those spaces.
The online rhetoric that has accompanied the current geopolitical tensions has made this dehumanization painfully clear. When commentators celebrate the idea of missiles striking Dubai, they are not imagining a city filled with teachers, nurses, taxi drivers, students, and families. They are imagining a symbol they have already stripped of human meaning. Thus, violence becomes easier to cheer when the victims have been reduced to a stereotype.
Another recurring argument centers on the UAE’s political decisions, particularly certain alliances and its security partnerships with the United States. Critics often point to the presence of American military bases in the region as evidence that Gulf states deserve whatever consequences may follow. Yet this line of reasoning collapses under even the most basic scrutiny.
According to global defense analyses, roughly 95 countries host American military facilities in some form. These bases span Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the United Kingdom host significant American military infrastructure. No serious commentator argues that Berlin, Tokyo, or London deserve to be bombed because of those arrangements. The logic appears to apply selectively when the country in question is Arab or Muslim.
The presence of American bases in the Gulf did not emerge in a vacuum. Understanding why American bases exist in the Gulf in the first place requires looking at the region’s modern history. During the late twentieth century, smaller Gulf states faced genuine fears of expansionism from larger neighboring powers. The most dramatic example occurred in 1990 when Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait. Iraqi troops crossed the border in August of that year and declared Kuwait to be Iraq’s nineteenth province. The invasion shocked the region. Kuwait was a small, oil-rich state with limited military capacity, and its occupation raised immediate fears that Iraqi forces might push further south toward Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies.
The resulting conflict, known as the Gulf War, brought together a large international coalition led by the United States. The war demonstrated just how vulnerable smaller Gulf countries could be in the face of regional aggression. For leaders across the Gulf Cooperation Council, the lesson was stark: collective defense arrangements and security partnerships with powerful allies were essential for survival.
Concerns about expansionism were not limited to Iraq. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, tensions between Iran and several Gulf states intensified. During the 1980s Iran fought a brutal eight-year war with Iraq that destabilized the entire region. In the later stages of that conflict, Iranian naval forces targeted oil tankers in the Persian Gulf during what became known as the “Tanker War,” threatening shipping routes that were vital to global energy supplies. Gulf states watched these developments closely, aware that their economic lifelines depended on safe maritime passage.
These historical experiences shaped the strategic decisions that followed, such as strategic partnerships with Western powers. These arrangements were not simply ideological alignments, but pragmatic responses to perceived threats. It makes sense that small states situated in a volatile geopolitical environment would seek external alliances as a form of deterrence.
It goes without saying that acknowledging this history does not require endorsing every decision made by any government. It simply recognizes that international alliances often emerge from complicated calculations about survival and stability. Critics who ignore that context risk replacing analysis with moral theatrics.
Another paradox becomes apparent when Western commentators claim the moral high ground in debates about the Gulf. The US and Europe are by far the number one exporters of terrorism, violence, and aggression in our modern world. Citizens of these places participate in political systems whose military actions have shaped conflicts across multiple continents. The taxes paid by those citizens directly contribute to defense budgets that finance interventions, drone campaigns, and arms exports worldwide. Yet Western societies rarely frame ordinary American or European civilians as collectively responsible for those policies. Why is it so hard to extend this same grace to residents of the GCC?
When violence occurs in Western countries, commentators quickly remind audiences not to conflate governments with their populations, yet that principle mysteriously disappears when the victims are non-Western. The willingness to assign collective guilt to entire populations in the Middle East reveals an uncomfortable double standard.
The historian Frantz Fanon wrote extensively about the psychological legacy of colonialism, arguing that colonized societies often internalize the hierarchies imposed upon them. Even individuals who belong to those societies can end up repeating the language and assumptions that once justified domination. This dynamic helps explain why some critics from within the Arab or Muslim diaspora adopt the same frameworks used by Western commentators. Operating within the same intellectual ecosystem makes it easy to reproduce the same narratives, even when they undermine one’s own region.
The tension that occasionally emerges between Gulf Arabs and other communities across the broader Middle East and North Africa serves only one long-standing geopolitical strategy: divide and conquer. Fragmentation weakens collective agency because when communities spend their energy attacking each other, they leave the broader structures of global power untouched.
For many residents of the UAE, the current moment has revealed how fragile global narratives can be. One day Dubai is celebrated as a symbol of globalization, attracting millions of tourists each year. The next day it becomes a punchline in discussions about geopolitical conflict. The human beings who live there remain the same in both scenarios.
This reality complicates simplistic narratives about the Gulf as merely a site of excess or exploitation. It is also a place where millions of people have built lives, careers, and communities. When outsiders wish destruction upon it, they are not attacking a concept, but targeting a society filled with human relationships.
Ultimately, the ease with which some people cheer for violence against Dubai reveals less about the city than about the narratives through which the world still interprets the Middle East. The persistence of Orientalist thinking means that success outside Western centers of power continues to be treated with suspicion. When a place like the UAE challenges those assumptions, the reaction can be hostility disguised as moral critique.
Criticism of any government or society is legitimate and often necessary. No country exists beyond scrutiny, period. Yet critique becomes something else entirely when it slides into dehumanization or collective punishment. The difference between analysis and prejudice lies in whether we recognize the humanity of the people being discussed.
As Edward Said warned decades ago, Orientalism persists not because individuals consciously intend to perpetuate it, but because its assumptions have become embedded within cultural discourse. Undoing those assumptions requires examining the stories we tell about places like Dubai and asking why they resonate so easily.
Until that conversation happens, the world will continue to misunderstand what cities like Dubai actually represent. They are not symbols, mirages, or punchlines, but societies filled with people who, like anyone else, are trying to live their lives in a complicated world. And that alone should be reason enough to resist the casual cruelty with which their destruction is sometimes imagined.
