01 The airport at 2 AM

If you are trying to understand our emerging world, a good place to start might be Dubai International Airport at 2 AM in the morning. Underneath the steel and glass terminal with the ubiquitous global brands flashing Gucci or Swatch in a massive neon-lit, duty-free hall, you might be blinded by the 21st century consumerism and fail to see what is right in front of you: one of the most diverse collection of people under one roof on earth.

Henna-bearded Pakistani men in sandals and traditional garb huddled around an iPhone. Stylish European couples en route to the Maldives. Young Filipina nurses heading to contracts in Riyadh. Ethiopian families navigating connections. Chinese engineers bound for infrastructure projects in Africa. Indian IT workers returning to Bangalore from client meetings in London, and Nepali laborers catching some sleep in the quiet corners on their way to construction jobs in the region.

Would-be novelists should spend a week in the airport. The storylines would be endless, but there’s a bigger story at play here.

When historians look back on the first quarter of our century, they will mark it as the era in which the emerging world ceased to be a hinterland of the global economy and became one of its central pillars.

The rise of China, India, broader Asia, and swaths of Africa and Latin America will loom large in that account — but so too will the nexus states and cities that served as the connective tissue and circulatory pumps of this transformation, moving capital, talent, and goods across borders and time zones. The United Arab Emirates stands out as one of the most consequential of those pivotal nexus states – and Dubai International Airport often feels like its epicenter.

02 What is a nexus state?

What is a nexus state? It’s a state positioned at the intersection of the key global flows that shape our world: goods, services, people, data, capital, and ideas. Nexus states and cities are not passive nodes. They are active drivers of these flows. Think Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th centuries, indispensable to the rise of European commerce, or London in the 18th and 19th centuries as the nerve center of an expanding global economy. New York inherited that nexus city mantle through the 19th and 20th centuries; more recently Singapore and Hong Kong emerged as the gateway cities of Asia's ascent and Miami as the hub of the Americas.

Critically, the great nexus states and cities of history rose not simply because of convenient geography but at moments of systemic transition, when old centers of gravity were weakening and new ones had not yet consolidated. Amsterdam rose as Mediterranean dominance fragmented. London rose as new technologies ushered in the Industrial Revolution. Singapore and Hong Kong rose as Asia’s major economies woke from their slumber. The UAE has risen as the post-Cold War unipolar moment has fragmented and as the economic weight of the world has begun its long migration southward and eastward.

The crafters of nexus states also seem to have a keen sense of what’s coming next but, in reality, few can forecast the future. What distinguishes the crafters of nexus states is their willingness to make big bets on the infrastructure of connectivity, which, as it turns out, is a good bet on the future.

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