Then came 9/11.

From his airy office tower, Blair describes the “twin waves” that explain Dubai’s remarkable growth since that incendiary moment. The first was “the post-9/11 repatriation,” when Arab investors, who lost opportunities and feared their accounts abroad could be frozen, repatriated funds from the US and Europe and began seeking investments closer to home. At the same time, educated young Arab professionals, feeling unwelcome in New York and London, migrated en masse to Dubai, which offered the opportunities, salaries, and lifestyle choices they were accustomed to. Then came the second wave, “the oil boom.” Instability resulting from the Iraq War and escalating post-9/11 regional tensions conspired with roaring demand from China and India to send oil prices into the stratosphere, leaving Gulf states awash in un-anticipated petrodollars. Between 2002 and 2006, the price of oil tripled, surging from $20 (US) to more than $60 a barrel. Export earnings for the Gulf Co-operation Council, a loose coalition of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the uae, more than doubled. By 2006, the gcc’s foreign asset holdings had hit nearly $1.6 trillion — equal to China’s.

These massive oil revenues are being reinvested not only in real estate and corporate acquisitions at home and abroad, but also in the federal debt, a figure now approaching $9 trillion, more than one-quarter of it foreign-held. Although oil-exporting countries are the fourth-largest holders of US Treasury securities (after Japan, China, and the UK), such measurements don’t tell the whole story. With Gulf countries buying heavily from Asian countries that recycle petrodollars into US Treasury certificates, analysts estimate that up to 45 percent of the US deficit is financed by oil money. The result, however indirectly, is that Gulf oil is helping to finance wars over Gulf oil.

The greater the instability, the higher the price of oil — and the greater the incentive to invest in the sanctuaries that remain. Which brings us to Dubai. “You know how a dog’s year is like seven? It’s like that here,” says Blair, underscoring the stunning growth rates that rival those of China and India. Of the trillion dollars in projects planned or underway in the Gulf, more than $300 billion is concentrated in Dubai alone. The emirate, not in spite of calamity but because of it, has become the largest single beneficiary of a swirling confluence of events — an ironic development, given that according to The 9/11 Commission Report, “The vast majority of the money funding the September 11 attacks flowed through the uae.” The Emirates has cracked down on money laundering, but there remains an undeniable link between the towers going up in Dubai and the ones that went down in New York.

Blair leans forward in his leather chair. “In the West, on the globe, America is the centre. If you shift the globe 180 degrees and look at Dubai, you talk about a part of the world most people don’t know, much less can spell. Yet we’re at the nexus.” (Dubai links Europe, Asia, and Africa — one-third of the world’s population within a six-hour plane trip.) “The political leadership has led a very satisfied populace,” Blair continues. Indeed, despite being unelected, Sheikh Mohammed elicits praise from both his well-taken-care-of local constituents and expat professionals who are simply following the good times while they last.”

“Dubai is peaceful because no one stays here very long,” a British management professional who lives in a four-bedroom villa with his wife, two children, two suvs, and two Ethiopian nannies, told me. “They don’t give a damn about the political situation because they’re going back. And the locals are rich because they own all the companies.” (Outside of designated free trade zones, all foreign companies require a local “partner” who generally receives a lump sum in return for a signature on the paperwork.) Still, while crime rates are low, labour strife (not to mention human trafficking) is the fly in the scented ointment. In contrast to the jet-setting professionals, foreign labourers make between $100 and $250 a month and have no bargaining rights. Local newspapers are riddled with stories of worker suicides, abused domestic servants, withheld pay and passports, and riots and work stoppages, which have marred the construction boom of late. The official response has been to legalize the deportation of strike leaders and promise improvements that rarely materialize. Sheikh Mohammed has chastised locals for relying so heavily on foreign labour, declaring that some have more domestic servants than family members (as do many expats).

I tell Blair it’s too bad that the sheikh doesn’t grant interviews. I’ve been hoping to meet him. It strikes me that the ruler is engaged in a delicate dance between twin devils: the Western interests making Dubai their regional base for oil ventures, arms sales, and all manner of goods and services designed to siphon off surplus oil money and the growing regional underclass increasingly vulnerable to calls to arms. Dubai is a symbol of the West in the Middle East, as Sheikh Mohammed well knows, and his recent $10-billion (US) endowment to improve education and stimulate job creation in the Arab world exemplifies his sly genius. Through his new foundation, he aims to bridge the knowledge gap — as well, perhaps, as the cultural and socioeconomic divides between East and West that are the trapeze wire on which he stands.

But Blair has other concerns. He is living the property consultant’s dream, returning to Canada for summer vacations. (His kids, he says, know only summer.) Historically, he tells me, real estate projects have always gone looking for capital, but here capital comes looking for projects. “In Dubai,” Blair says with the conviction of a motivational speaker, “we dare to dream.”

“You want to see what a million dollars looks like? ” asks the bull-necked young Brit seated next to me at the Noodle House in Emirates Towers, where I am reading the Gulf News over a plate of pad Thai. Clad in khakis and a button-down shirt, he lifts a plain cardboard box from the floor and tosses it to me. I shake it gently, wondering at the lack of heft. A million dollars? All in large bills?

Jasper, the Brit, says it’s software designed to measure how much oil remains in the ground beneath Dubai. The emirate is set to run dry around 2020, though this hardly matters since its own oil accounts for only 5 percent of total revenues. Never rich in oil, Dubai has shrewdly diversified into tourism, leisure, real estate, financial services, and manufacturing, and its world-class port has made it a re-export depot for the world. Anyway, Dubai has more oil than it publicly states, says Jasper.