There’s a familiar pattern whenever a geopolitical crisis erupts.
First come the television images: airport queues, frantic departures, Westerners explaining how frightening it all feels as they try to get home to Surrey, Sydney or San Diego.
Then come the headlines about “chaos”.
Except most of the time it isn’t chaos.
But it is war.
And the people whose lives are actually being torn apart rarely appear on the evening news.
The Vanity Narrative
The escalation around Iran is serious. Airstrikes, missile exchanges, regional retaliation. Oil routes under threat. Markets jittery.
Yet a fair bit of the Western coverage seems obsessed with something else entirely.
Expats trying to get out of tax-free Gulf enclaves.
Influencers lamenting interrupted luxury getaways.
Tourists irritated that flights are delayed for a few days.
It’s hard not to notice the strange theatricality of it.
People who were perfectly happy enjoying low taxes, cheap labour and winter sunshine suddenly discover geopolitics the moment their return flight is cancelled.
Cue the breathless interviews.
Cue the social media posts.
Cue the performative anxiety.
And then there was another detail buried in the news this week.
Some wealthy British nationals leaving the region are reportedly “carefully avoiding the UK itself”, routing their travel elsewhere so they don’t accidentally trigger UK tax residency rules and a bill from the taxman.
War may be raging.
But the tax planning continues.
Will They Go Back?
Some will say they’re leaving for good.
Maybe they will.
Or maybe they’ll simply relocate to the next tax-optimised playground where the economics work in their favour.
Another sun-drenched city.
Another luxury apartment.
Another place where someone else pours the drinks, drives the taxis and cleans the rooms.
And when the dust settles?
Who knows.
Will they return to the same “sinking ship” once the tax advantages and sunshine look attractive again?
Or will they simply head off on another self-centred jaunt to whichever corner of the world best maximises their personal gain next?
Mobility is a wonderful privilege when you have it.
Most people don’t.
Meanwhile, Real Life Continues
My daughter is a teacher in the region.
She doesn’t feel directly threatened. Not in the sense of bombs falling nearby.
But she is — understandably — a little worried.
And she is teaching children from neighbouring countries and beyond.
Kids who are hearing the news, sensing tension in adult conversations, and quietly wondering what the future might look like.
When I asked her what it feels like being there right now she paused for a moment.
Then she said:
“It’s surreal.”
And she gave a wry — if slightly nervous — smile.
Teachers carry on. Classrooms still open. Lessons still happen.
But everyone knows the world outside the school gates has shifted.
The People Who Don’t Get on Planes
There’s another group you won’t see much on television.
The taxi drivers who took those tourists to the airport.
The hotel staff suddenly watching bookings evaporate.
The cleaners, cooks, porters, bar workers and security guards who rely on the global circus of business travel and luxury tourism.
When the planes stop flying, they don’t board evacuation flights.
They stay exactly where they are.
Trying to work out how to pay rent.
Trying to work out how to feed their families.
Trying to keep a fragile local economy functioning while the globally mobile pack their bags and leave.
And here’s something else worth remembering.
Those workers are expats too.
But they’re the expats we rarely talk about.
In the Western imagination, an expat in Dubai usually means a middle-class professional enjoying a tax-efficient lifestyle in the sun.
But most expatriate workers in the Gulf are something very different.
Taxi drivers.
Hotel workers.
Construction workers.
Restaurant staff.
Many come from India or other parts of the Middle East and South Asia. They’ve left families thousands of miles away to work and send money home.
When the headlines focus on wealthy foreigners trying to get flights out, it quietly erases the much larger population of migrant workers whose livelihoods depend on the place continuing to function.
They don’t have the luxury of leaving when things get uncomfortable.
Their families depend on them staying.
A More Complicated Place Than The Headlines Suggest
My daughter also made another point.
Sometimes it feels like people in the West almost “want” Dubai to fail.
There’s a certain delight in poking at the influencer culture and luxury lifestyle narrative.
And yes — that world absolutely exists.
But it isn’t the whole story.
What surprised her most about living there is the sense of community.
The fitness culture is huge. People genuinely build friendships around it.
And the government invests heavily in public wellbeing and participation.
Every November the city runs a month-long fitness challenge.
Temporary sports spaces appear across the city.
Classes are put on everywhere.
Padel, tennis, gym sessions, volleyball and more — all free.
Thousands of people join in.
It’s not about luxury.
It’s about community.
And that side of life — the ordinary, meaningful parts of living somewhere — rarely makes it into the international coverage.
War Isn’t a Travel Disruption
One of the oddities of the modern media environment is how easily war becomes a lifestyle inconvenience story.
Flights cancelled.
Oil prices rising.
Holiday plans disrupted.
All real issues.
But when the conversation centres on those things, perspective gets lost.
Because the real story is not the inconvenience experienced by the globally mobile.
It’s the obliteration of normal life for people who cannot leave.
Perspective
My daughter says the children she teaches are calm.
Kids often are.
But beneath that calm sits uncertainty — the kind of uncertainty that shapes an entire generation.
And that’s the part of conflict we rarely talk about.
Not the airport lounges.
The classrooms.
The Third Half Thought
At The Third Half we talk a lot about People · Planet · Progress.
War has a way of reminding us which of those actually matters most.
Because the difference between being inconvenienced by a crisis and having your life defined by it is enormous.
One group waits for a delayed flight.
The other waits to see what the world will become.
And somewhere in the middle, a teacher stands in front of a classroom full of children from across the region and beyond — doing the most normal thing in the world.
Teaching.
While the world outside shifts around them.
(And I’m a very proud father).