The West and the United Arab Emirates share not just values of prosperity and pluralism but a rich foundational history and a common cultural ancestor few understand. It is this shared heritage Iran tried but failed to damage in their relentless attacks during Epic Fury, writes Eitan Charnoff, Founder & CEO, Potomac Strategy.
I grew up in Washington, D.C., where history is in the stone and the street names and the way people speak. That weight informed my life, the places I chose to call home, and the ones I believe deserve our time, effort, and defense. I find a common home when visiting Brussels, London, and Geneva. I find one just as readily in Abu Dhabi.
Growing up in that hyper-politically oriented environment, I kept returning to a quintessentially American poem. Most Americans know it without knowing who wrote it or why. A poem that transcends geography, connecting America to the old world of Europe, to the artistic brilliance of France, and to a pluralistic Arab present in the GCC. It lives on the base of the Statue of Liberty, written by Emma Lazarus, an American Jew who called New York home. What fewer people know is where she came from. She was Sephardic Jewish, her family having fled Spain after 1492. I always wondered how they carried the long memory of the explosion, after the European Muslim world that had sustained them for centuries came apart.
The poem is called “The New Colossus,” drafted as a fundraising effort to bring the Statue of Liberty from France to New York. Two lines have stayed with me since childhood: “From her beacon-hand… Glows world-wide welcome… I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
The world her family left was Andalusia. For a span that stretched across generations, it was something genuinely unusual in history: a society where Jews, Muslims, and Christians occupied the same civic space, where Jewish scholars reached the heights of medicine, philosophy, and government, where inclusion was not merely tolerated but built into the architecture of daily life. This was not a marginal experiment at the edge of the known world. It was one of the great civilizational achievements of the medieval era, and its contributions flowed northward into Europe in ways that most Westerners have never been taught to trace. The mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy that seeded the Renaissance did not emerge from a vacuum. Much of it passed through Andalusia, through scholars who worked across faiths in the same libraries, translated the same texts, and built on each other’s ideas without demanding that the other first convert. When that world fell, the families who had known nothing else scattered across Europe, the Mediterranean, and eventually beyond.
I cannot say with certainty what moved Lazarus to write what she wrote. Nobody can. But I have wondered, since standing in front of that statue on a school trip, whether the memory of Andalusia lived somewhere in those lines. Whether she was describing what had once been lost and what had been recovered in the new world. True pluralism, sustained by leadership with a genuine commitment to building something larger than any one group’s grievance.
The West tends to tell itself a particular story about where its values came from. That story usually begins in Athens, runs through Rome, passes through the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and arrives at the liberal states of today. It is not a wrong story. But it is an incomplete one. Somewhere between antiquity and modernity, the civilizational current ran through Cordoba and Seville and Granada. Through a Muslim-governed society that kept the classical world alive while Europe was otherwise in ruin, and that demonstrated, for several centuries, that pluralism was not a utopian concept but a functional one. The West carries that inheritance whether it knows it or not. Emma Lazarus’s family carried it literally.
I have lived across the MENA region, including in the United Arab Emirates, and I am privileged to consult in the GCC on the subjects that fascinated me most as a child: diplomacy, geopolitics, and security. What I have watched the UAE build over the past several decades is not foreign to Western values. It is, in a very real sense, a continuation of the same civilizational heritage.
The UAE is living through a defining moment. Since Operation Epic Fury began, Iran has fired thousands of ballistic missiles and drones at this country. A ceasefire is now nominally in place, its durability an open question, its terms contested, the underlying conditions that produced the war unchanged. What the ceasefire cannot erase is what the preceding months revealed. The analysts who spent years predicting Gulf state collapse watched carefully to see if their theory would finally prove out. What they watched instead was a society absorb sustained assault and keep functioning without missing a step.
The UAE did not start this war. This is a country that built its political philosophy around diplomacy and engagement, around keeping every channel open regardless of the difficulty involved, much like western European states do today. The Abraham Accords brought the UAE into open partnership with Israel at considerable regional cost. During the Russia-Ukraine war, Emirati diplomats facilitated prisoner exchanges between parties who would not speak directly to each other. Iran itself was welcome in Dubai. Iranian businesses operated here. Iranian nationals lived, worked, and traveled through this city for decades. The UAE’s answer to a hostile neighborhood was never isolation or confrontation. It was commerce, dialogue, and an insistence that the table was large enough for everyone. Some analysts mistook this as appeasement or weakness. What they failed to understand was that this openness came from a position of strength and confidence. Iran repaid it with ballistic missiles.
Flights continued out of Dubai. Businesses stayed open. The population of this country, which runs close to ninety percent expatriate, did not pack up and leave. People who could have gone anywhere chose to stay. That is not a minor fact but is the central one, and it speaks directly to the sense of belonging both citizens and residents have built here over years.
People do not remain in a place under fire by default. They remain because they have built something there, because the society around them functions, because they believe in something. The UAE’s governing structure differs from what most Westerners grew up with, but many of the underlying values persist in recognizable and even exceptional form: economic opportunity, capitalism, personal security, religious tolerance, and a genuine openness to people from every corner of the world who come willing to contribute and build. Walk through any neighborhood in Dubai or Abu Dhabi and you encounter a cross-section of humanity that almost nowhere else on earth can match. Indians, Filipinos, Egyptians, Britons, Americans, Iranians, Pakistanis, Israelis. They are here because this place works. They know it works, and that knowledge is not easily shaken by missile barrages or the fragile silences that follow them.
That kind of loyalty cannot be manufactured. It has to be proven over years, through consistent people first governance. The UAE’s leadership has simply always delivered.
Iran targeted the UAE for precisely this reason. The missiles were not aimed solely at infrastructure. They were aimed at the idea. A pluralistic, stable, Muslim-majority state with deep partnerships across the West, the East, and everywhere in between, with open commerce and a public commitment to coexistence, is an ideological challenge to everything the Iranian regime claims to represent. Tehran did not merely seek to damage the UAE. It wanted to prove that what the Emiratis has built cannot last. It wanted to demonstrate that a Muslim-majority society in the Arab world that celebrates the diversity of faiths, chooses engagement over grievance, prosperity over perpetual conflict, and partnership with Israel over rejectionism, is ultimately too fragile to survive.
The UAE absorbed the assault and did not flinch. Governance continued, trade continued, and the cranes kept turning over the skyline. What Iran wanted to break, it could not even touch.
Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883, raising money for the pedestal of a statue she had never seen. She was not only describing what America was at that moment. She was describing what it could be, and perhaps, somewhere in the inherited memory of her family’s European history, what she believed human societies at their best were genuinely capable of. She had reason to believe it was possible. Her ancestors had lived it in Andalusia and we live this anew in the UAE.
The West and the UAE are not allies merely because their interests overlap, though they do. They are joined by something older and less frequently acknowledged: a shared civilizational inheritance that runs through Andalusia, through the libraries of Cordoba, through the scholars who worked across faiths and left behind a world more complete than the one they found. That inheritance did not die with the fall of Granada. It scattered, survived, and found new expressions in new places like Paris, London and Washington DC. One of those places, today, is on the shores of the Arabian Gulf.
Those values are not the exclusive property of any one country, any one people, or any one form of government. Shaped by a different culture and a different history, the Emiratis have built something equally worthy of Western recognition and defense. Under sustained assault they proved it. The ceasefire may hold or it may not. The idea, at least, held. The lamp Emma wrote of still burns beside the golden door. It burns not only over New York City, Paris and London but over the Arabian Gulf perhaps brighter now than ever.
Eitan Charnoff is the founder and CEO of Potomac Strategy, a GCC based public affairs and geopolitical consultancy and an expert on drone and missile attack response and rescue operations.
Photo by Ondrej Bocek on Unsplash
