UAE more influential: US scholar

Flooded with oil money and foreign investments, the UAE is influencing international developments like never before, said a visiting US scholar on Sunday.

From putting boots on the ground in war-torn Afghanistan – for reconstruction efforts – to bailing out giant companies from the recent property crash in America, the Emirates is now a ‘player’ in world affairs, Parag Khanna, the director of the Global Governance Initiative, told reporters at the Dubai Press Club.

Before signing "The Second World", his new book on the rise of former colonies in global power struggles today, Khanna said although the Gulf nation is not a military giant, it is “shaping the world order like superpowers.”

“The UAE is a success story. It has fulfilled its destiny as geographic meeting point between the first and second world – a federation of global cities like Abu Dhabi and Dubai [where] foreign legions have blended with indigenous power structures,” he said.

“Oil and sovereign wealth funds like ADIA [Abu Dhabi Investment Authority] now play a role on Wall Street.”

In November last year, ADIA became the biggest stakeholder in Citigroup, the largest US bank, after investing nearly Dh28 billion. No outsider knows how much money in total ADIA commands – such figures have never been officially released.

Though the UAE is a “second world” country, Khanna said, it has all the “trappings of the first world.”

“Money, not Arabic, is the official language of Dubai,” Khanna writes in his almost 500-page book.

“Much like resource-less Singapore, the geopolitical role of the Emirates stems from constantly finding a fresh global niche, and attracting foreign money and talent to capitalize on the inefficiencies around it,” he writes.

“Dubai is appropriately pronounced ‘Do buy’ … Gold was once used to buy everything; now gold is bought with plastic.”

That, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, according to Khanna.

“Dubai can even buy brains: Its Knowledge Village features micro-campuses of the world’s top universities …” he points out in the book, published 2008 by the Penguin Group.

Khanna’s vivid descriptions of daily life in the UAE are partly based on several visits to the country.

“There’s no government that can centralize message management. Let people take away what they want to,” he said.

In his concluding remarks, Khanna said “an axiom in politics” holds that “he who has the money, makes the rules.”

Khanna was here as a guest of the Dubai School of Government.