Dubai is shifting from symbol of „safe wealth haven" - to an example of how a whole economy can collapse in a few weeks. After Iranian drone and missile attacks on Emirati infrastructure, the markets in Dubai and Abu Dhabi lost around 120 billion dollars in value. That's not a correction - that's a flight.

Hotel occupancy fell from 70-80 percent to around 20. Air traffic - cut by two thirds. The tourism industry is practically in liquidation. In February alone, around 30,000 German tourists were left stranded with no way home. And while official foreign visitors debate the return of flights, the local wealthy have already decided: the money is moving to Singapore and Switzerland.

„More and more clients are asking what the alternative is," says Ryan Lin, a lawyer at Singapore's Bayfront Law office. The same is confirmed by Till Christian Budelman, a private banker at Switzerland's Bergos: „Capital protection is now defined by geography, not by tax optimisation."

The expert on Gulf states Sebastian Sons of the Carpo institute says the blow is doubly painful for Dubai: economic and reputational. A decade of building the image of „a soft place for wealth" - towers that don't fall, an airport that doesn't stop, banking without questions - is now broken. Not forever, but for several years for sure. And in the reputation industry, a few years is an eternity.

For the Balkans, this is a lesson we've paid for before: no scene is „immune" to geopolitics. You can be Dubai. You can be Beirut. You can be Skopje in the 90s. The question is which great power you sit on the road of, not how many stars the hotel has. Oil and gas prices across the region show another effect - the blocked Strait of Hormuz keeps lifting the cap on petrochemical exports, which means our own pump price feels the distant blow too.