Distressed Dubai does not mean Advantage Singapore

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The Hong Kong of 2019-2022 would have a lot of empathy for what Dubai is going through right now.

The Chinese city did not endure war in those trough years. But as it reeled from the aftershocks of violent protests, political upheaval and pandemic chaos, it also had to put up with a barrage of hot takes from afar predicting that its time as a global city was up.

Dubai, long sold as the safest haven in the Middle East and the region’s glitzy “capital of capital”, is now facing a similar wave of demise narratives after thousands of Iranian missiles and drones passed over its skies over the last two weeks.

On the surface, one could say the chatter has some basis. Financial news outlets have quoted asset managers saying their super-rich Dubai-based clients are mulling over moving their money – and themselves – out of the desert, fast. Confidence, we are told, is “irrevocably shaken”.

Even without these airings, some of the anxieties are plain enough. People in Dubai now have to think about safety in a way they never really did before. Travel in and out of not just the city, but the wider Gulf has acquired an uncertainty that was once almost unthinkable. Questions over water and food security no longer feel abstract either.

While some of the gloom undoubtedly stems from schadenfreude – glee that the stereotypical Dubai denizens of crypto bros, influencers and tax dodgers now need to find a new bolthole – there is perhaps some merit to the narrative.

But from a Singaporean vantage point, what is most perplexing – and what prompts this corrective – is the second-order thinking that follows some of these “wither Dubai” musings: that this island state could be an obvious big winner of its Middle East peer’s travails.

It is a reflexive narrative we have heard before, including during Hong Kong’s troubles. Oh, Singapore, with its sui generis “halo of safety”, the last bastion of stable, secure and resilient global cities – the proverbial safe harbour spared both the political dysfunction of Western cities and the vagaries of Chinese rule.

In this case, presumably, the argument extends further: that Singapore’s geographical position and adroit diplomatic stance make it an almost incontrovertible refuge from any form of conflict.

It is alluring thinking, and one can see how Singapore fans overseas – and even Singaporeans themselves – might be lulled into a kind of hubris by such fallacious reasoning.

False comfort

The fact of the matter, though, is that this is a cartoonish way of thinking about global hubs. None of the world’s major nodes – not Singapore, not Hong Kong, not Dubai – is an overnight creation. It follows that they are not automatically in precipitous decline after a first stumble. Even if one does falter, it does not mean another will automatically gain.

Perhaps one reason people imagine Dubai residents can simply “upgrade” to Singapore – the supposedly higher-order safe haven – is a flawed reading of the resilience and vulnerabilities of both cities.

On Dubai, the assumption seems to be that the social fabric is brittle, perhaps because it is so migrant-heavy. But the reality on the ground, by many accounts, suggests otherwise. Journalist Yaroslav Trofimov, The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent and a decade-long Dubai resident, wrote last week that even as the city seemed to enjoy little sympathy from the outside world – becoming fodder for memes about the high and mighty having to cower – what stood out on the ground was resilience.

By the fifth day of the strikes, the city had regained much of its composure. Traffic jams returned to the main roads, offices, malls and restaurants were full again, and vital infrastructure such as power stations remained intact.

The other side of this fallacious thinking is the belief that Singapore possesses some innate resilience, some built-in invulnerability. But what exactly is the basis for that?

Yes, it has a sure-footed, competent government with a reputation for long-term planning and for thinking hard about contingencies. But why should that mean Singapore is somehow exempt from the vulnerabilities of water and food security?

For instance, we too, like many Gulf states, depend increasingly heavily on desalination plants for water. In this latest conflict, Bahrain said on March 9 that an Iranian drone had damaged a desalination plant in what it called an “indiscriminate” strike. Could it not happen here?

Perhaps the argument in Singapore’s favour is that, geographically and geopolitically, we are safe – that the odds of residents at The Sail in Marina Bay or Sentosa Cove watching missiles light up the night sky, as those at the ultra-luxurious Palm Jumeirah have, are infinitesimally small. True, technically. But built into that confidence is perhaps also a sanguineness about the security situation in this part of the world that may not be advisable.

Each hub is unique

There are other reasons why the Dubai-for-Singapore narrative is, to be generous, facile.

As many of those who once touted Singapore as the ready-made beneficiary of Hong Kong’s troubles have since had to concede, global hubs are very rarely interchangeable.

That point should be self-apparent four years on from the worst of Hong Kong’s crises. What did Hong Kong’s IPO boom in 2025 – the world’s biggest – show, if not that Singapore was never simply going to usurp its status as the place, especially for Chinese companies, to raise capital?

As those pushing back against the Hong Kong decline narrative argued even then, it was never really a matter of one city usurping the other in the first place. As Bloomberg columnist Shuli Ren wrote in 2024, comparing the two was like comparing apples to oranges. Hong Kong, by virtue of its proximity to China, is geared towards capital markets and the wider ecosystem of China-linked deals. Singapore has long been better suited to private wealth management, even as it tries to deepen its own public capital markets.

The same applies to Dubai. It offers proximity to Gulf deal flows, and exposure to Middle Eastern, African and South Asian capital, in ways Singapore – or for that matter, Hong Kong – cannot easily replicate.

Whether in the kind of capital, companies or talent they attract, each hub city has its own DNA, its own attitude and its own draw. In contrasting Singapore with Dubai, where does one even begin? One can start with the make-up of the two societies, and their very different relationships with overseas talent and capital.

The Middle Eastern hub of four million people is made up of only an estimated 10 per cent citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Singapore, by contrast, is not merely a city but a nation state, with about two-thirds of its population made up of citizens and permanent residents.

One assumes the officialdom of both places would have little reason to be coy about saying outright that they take quite different views on immigration and capital inflows.

Dubai today is among the most liberal of global cities in welcoming high-skilled foreign talent – engineers, artists, chefs, medical workers, educators and entrepreneurs, not just the stereotypical crypto set drawn by its permissive ways.

It has seen a particularly large influx since the pandemic, as nomadic working lifestyles took off, and another since the Russia-Ukraine war, as moneyed classes from both countries arrived. Newcomers are free to “flash their wealth” and under no pressure to assimilate with the locals. Assimilate into what, exactly, when most people around them are foreigners too? That is not the case with Singapore.

And while the Emirati authorities have done much over the last decade to clean up the city’s perennial image as a laundry for dirty money and a hub for sanctions busting, there is little point being too circuitous about it: of all major hub cities east of the Suez, Dubai remains among the most welcoming to people and wealth of every shade of grey.

With that image in mind, Singapore is a diametrically different type of global hub. It is by no means uninterested in hosting more wealth, or more family offices, if they create jobs for Singaporeans. But there is nothing unfettered about the Republic’s relationship with overseas money.

Take it from Prime Minister Lawrence Wong himself. Asked about precisely these tensions at the November 2025 Bloomberg New Economy Forum, he put it this way: “We have just to remind them, just you know, Singapore is a different society. We are egalitarian, our norms are different, please understand. And for the most part, they do.”

And while Dubai may be more permissive by instinct, Singapore – especially after the 2023 multibillion-dollar money laundering scandal – has become even firmer about keeping grey-zone characters out.

There is simply no tolerance here for dodgy money. In Singapore, leaders talk, as Mr Wong did at the same forum, about wielding “quite a big fly swatter” against unsavoury illicit-money types – rhetoric one can safely say is not top of mind for the UAE’s leaders.

Fool’s gold

It is not just about dirty money. More broadly, in an age of growing sensitivity to wealth inequality, Singapore is in no place to be relaxed about unfettered inflows of foreign wealth, even as it remains open to talent and keen to add immigrants as permanent residents and citizens. That egalitarian instinct, and the discomfort with overt wealth-flashing, is a much bigger part of Singapore’s social compact than it is of Dubai’s.

The sum point, then, is that even if the assumptions behind the Dubai-for-Singapore narrative were right, the idea would still run into a practical obstacle: Singapore is simply not set up, politically or socially, to offer a like-for-like transplant.

So perhaps the smarter response to this current conflict, for the global commentariat and indeed the stratospheric, always-mobile class, is not more “if not Dubai, then who” musing in search of an ever better, ever safer haven.

It is to accept, now, a more uncomfortable truth. If wars can be unleashed on a whim by the powerful in a might-is-right world, and if we are indeed entering an era of more conflict – with global conflicts already at their highest level since 1946 – then the idea of anywhere being a sanctuary starts to look like fool’s gold.