The images from Dubai on the night of Feb. 28, the first night of the war in the Gulf, were almost surreal in their juxtaposition: missiles streaking across the sky above Palm Jumeirah, intercepted in flashes of light, while in the beach clubs below, some residents stood frozen by their windows, cocktails in hand, watching the pyrotechnics. By morning, smoke was rising from the Burj Al Arab, the billowing, sail-shaped hotel that is to Dubai what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, and from Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest.

The war Dubai had spent four decades doing everything in its power to avoid had arrived, and had struck its most iconic addresses. Iran’s assault on the Gulf Arab states—more than 500 missiles and more than 2,000 drones—fired at civilian infrastructure and military installations in the United Arab Emirates alone since that first night was an act of retaliation, a military strategy, and a message to the United States.

The attack on Dubai, specifically, can also be seen as a direct assault on an idea. The glitziest of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, Dubai had for years sold the world a proposition: that in one of the most volatile regions on earth, it was a place apart, built on the soft power of attraction. Iran had struck at that proposition with a demonstration of raw, hard power.

Is the Dubai dream broken? I would argue that it is not. To understand whether Dubai will survive this war and thrive again requires understanding what was built, and what was damaged. Dubai is the most deliberately constructed soft power city in modern history: a place that converted economic abundance into cultural and reputational attraction at a pace no previous city has matched. Iran’s missiles certainly damaged that construction, but they did not destroy it. What distinguishes Dubai from every city that has faced this test before is that it possesses both kinds of power—the soft power of attraction and the hard power of money—in extraordinary quantity. The combination, deployed by rulers who have spent four decades proving they know how to use it, changes the recovery calculus entirely.

The political scientist Joseph Nye, who introduced the concept of soft power, defined “the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment.” He argued that the most resilient states are those that combine both forms of power—what he called “smart power.” Dubai is that kind of city. Its soft power is real and layered: the cultural infrastructure of Art Dubai and the Museum of the Future, the Michelin-starred restaurants, the opera house, the galleries of Alserkal Avenue, the world-class sporting events and literary festivals. Dubai has the ecosystem of a cosmopolitan........

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