Months ago, when I wrote ‘Building Resilience: The Infrastructure You Didn’t See,’ I argued that the UAE had spent decades quietly building systems designed to protect, ones the world overlooked while it watched the skyline. I believed in every word. What I did not anticipate was how completely the evidence would arrive, or how fast.
Within days of each other, three of the world’s most rigorous institutional assessments landed on the same conclusion about the UAE, all compiled while the war was still underway. The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2026 ranked the UAE first globally in economic performance, first in absence of bureaucracy, first in adaptability of government policy, and fifth overall in global competitiveness, leading Arab and Middle Eastern economies for a tenth consecutive year.
The Institute of International Finance, representing over four hundred of the world’s largest financial institutions, called what the country experienced “a temporary shock to a diversified and resilient growth model” and projected 4.4 percent growth for the coming year.
Standard & Poor’s reinforced the assessment from a credit risk perspective, affirming the UAE’s sovereign rating at AA with a stable outlook and confirming that the economy is positioned to absorb the repercussions of the regional conflict, supported by sovereign reserves, strong non-oil growth, an attractive investment environment, and financial and banking stability.
Consider the context. These rankings were compiled after more than a hundred days of conflict, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the targeting of national infrastructure. A country under fire ranked number one in economic performance across twenty-one competitive indicators, placed in the global top five across sixty-seven, and in the top ten across one hundred and eighteen. The IIF’s chief economist, Garbis Iradian, noted that sovereign assets exceeding two hundred percent of GDP gave Abu Dhabi wide room to sustain investment and liquidity, and suggested the crisis may ultimately strengthen Abu Dhabi’s position as a global energy supplier while accelerating Dubai’s evolution into a broader hub for finance, technology and services.
What all three assessments confirmed, from entirely different methodologies, is that the UAE’s economic architecture was never a collection of parallel initiatives. Trade agreements, pipelines, a nuclear reactor, sovereign wealth funds, industrial diversification, each appeared standalone, sometimes dismissed as excessive. The war revealed them as integrated layers of a single economic design, engineered to hold when crises converge simultaneously.
The IMD rankings expose precisely why. The categories where the UAE placed first globally, absence of bureaucracy, adaptability of government policy, employment rate, availability of global expertise, quality of air transport, reveal qualities cultivated long before the crisis began. They are embedded in the way the country operates, the kind of strengths that only become fully visible when systems are tested under pressure. Adaptability was one of the conditions that allowed the country to absorb the shock.
The IIF reached a parallel conclusion through different data. Non-oil sectors generating seventy-seven percent of GDP, thirty-six economic partnership agreements spanning three billion people, non-oil foreign trade exceeding one trillion dollars for the first time, these were positions secured before the first missile launched. The UAE’s exit from OPEC delivered independent production policy at the moment flexibility separated countries still exporting from those that could not.
The UAE won a war it had sincerely tried to avoid, as Dr Anwar Gargash, the Diplomatic Adviser to the President, noted weeks ago. The victory was measured in what did not stop. Electricity never went out, with Barakah alone generating twenty-five percent of the national supply without interruption, Crude kept moving through Fujairah, water supply held, food stayed on shelves, medication remained available, airports targeted by missiles resumed operations, government services ran at every level, nothing was missing.
Three global institutions, three methodologies, one conclusion. The Strait of Hormuz is reopening. For most countries, that marks the end of a crisis. For the UAE, it is the beginning of a chapter others will spend years trying to understand.
(Naoufer Ramoul is a senior TV presenter and producer at Dubai Media Incorporated, and the host of the award-winning political show Qabel lil Niqash on Dubai TV. She has worked as a presenter at Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and Alhurra.)
