DUBAI — Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor, a 77-year-old billionaire, says his staff think he talks too much.
Sitting outside a cafe in Al Habtoor City, the luxury waterfront complex in Dubai that is home to three of his five-star hotels, he laughed a little and looked at his personal assistant sitting next to him. She nodded, offering something between a smile and a grimace.
Al Habtoor, an eccentric, outspoken businessman whose net worth Forbes puts at $2.3 billion, went viral the week before with a public letter that lambasted President Donald Trump for his “dangerous decision” to “drag our region into a war.”
“Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with #Iran? And on what basis did you make this dangerous decision?” Al Habtoor wrote in a lengthy post on X. “Did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? And did you consider that the first to suffer from this escalation will be the countries of the region itself!”
The post ricocheted around the internet, racking up millions of views and thousands of shares, was featured on CNN and earned Al Habtoor praise across the world. “Literally, everyone in the Gulf is asking this question, quietly,” wrote Middle East expert Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies.
Al Habtoor’s post captured the frustrations of an awkward and frightening inflection point for Persian Gulf nations that have built reputations of wealth and stability. Dragged into a conflict they sought to avoid, they are now trying to fend off drones and missile attacks by Iran but are uncomfortable being too closely aligned with Israel or the United States. Publicly, officials in the largely repressive Gulf monarchies blame Iran. Privately, many rail against Washington for unleashing chaos but see no other power able to provide the same security benefits.
In the weeks since the war on Iran started, retaliatory airstrikes by Tehran have rained fire on these normally tranquil, sun-soaked nations. The United Arab Emirates has experienced the biggest barrage, with luxury hotels, the Dubai International Airport and oil infrastructure all coming under attack in the days before Al Habtoor’s team hit send on the letter to Trump.
Within days, however, the post, which went live on March 5, disappeared.
Asked about his criticism of Trump, Al Habtoor repeatedly pivoted the conversation elsewhere. Dubai, he said, is the “jewel of the world” and will survive this war just as it did the financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic. UAE leaders are working around-the-clock to keep residents safe.
“It is a very safe country,” he said, “safer than anywhere in the world.”
But what about his letter? After years of careful hedging by UAE officials — who normalized relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords, built ties with the U.S. but also kept friendly relations with Iran— did the UAE blame Trump for forcing them into this war?
“I blame Trump, but I blame the Iranians more,” Al Habtoor said. “America is to be blamed because Israel pushed them to do this. But not as much as the Iranians.”
This war, he wrote in his post, feels like a betrayal not just of Gulf nations but of the American people. “You have even broken your promise not to get involved in wars and to focus only on America and put it at the top of your priorities,” he wrote to Trump.
He questioned whether Trump had made the decision alone, or if it had “come as a result of pressure from #Netanyahu and his government,” referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who The Washington Post has reportedpushed Trump to strike.
Al Habtoor said that many of the calls that he received after the post — which he said he drafted but his team edited and posted — were positive. Others were more critical, he said, with friends, some of them well-connected, telling him that it was not the right time to take aim at Trump.
Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a retired political science professor at United Arab Emirates University and friend of Al Habtoor’s, said he reminded him, in private and on X, that the UAE’s main air defense systems were bought from the United States.
“If we didn’t have the Patriots, where would we be?” Abdulla asked, referring to the Patriot missile defense system the UAE bought from the U.S., which it uses in addition to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), which is also American-owned.
Trump and Gulf leaders, including UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, known as MBZ, have had largely warm relationships.
Since the war began, they have spoken twice, according to the UAE’s government, which has carefully — and sometimes brutally — curated its wartime image. (Residents have been barred from taking photos of impact sites after Iranian attacks, for example, with a 60-year-old British tourist reportedly among those charged.)
Al Habtoor is a sprightly, expressive man whose engineering company transformed into an empire as Dubai boomed. Today, it’s a conglomerate that includes an automotive distributor and luxury hotel and real estate developments worldwide.
As the business expanded, Al Habtoor built a reputation as a sort of unofficial — and unconventional — ambassador to the UAE, welcoming foreign officials, traveling widely and writing prolifically. He wakes up at 4 a.m. every day to start work and plays at least an hour of tennis a day — even when fasting for Ramadan as he is doing now. He said he wins every match and joked that he fires anyone who manages to beat him.
In his personal clubhouse at Al Habtoor Grand Resort, another of his five-star hotels, CNN played on a giant TV. Sitting in his massage chair after a midday tennis match, Al Habtoor offered opinions of each correspondent.
When news anchor Kaitlan Collins, who has long had a contentious relationship with the president, appeared on screen, Al Habtoor grinned. “I love this girl,” he said, “because she argues with Trump.”
But it wasn’t always like this.
In 2015, Al Habtoor publicly backed Trump in his bid for the presidency, slamming President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East and declaring Trump“a true patriot” and “a strategist with a shrewd business mind.”
“With Mr. Trump, what you see is what you get,” he wrote in the National, a state-owned newspaper.
But when Trump suggested a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States a few months after that endorsement, Al Habtoor changed his mind. In media interviews, Al Habtoor declared that Trump had insulted the world’s nearly 2 billion practicing Muslims.
“He is creating a hatred between Muslims and the United States of America,” he said on CNBC at the time. “When he was talking about Muslims, attacking them … I had to admit I made a mistake.”
Sitting outside of the cafe in Al Habtoor City, where some passersby stopped to greet him and ask for selfies, Al Habtoor startled at the sound of a bang.
The war was entering its third week, with frequent government missile alerts. Most of the projectiles were being intercepted, but those that broke through were hitting targets from Dubai’s financial district to the airport.
An assistant reassured him — it was just his own company’s construction.
During the Gulf War in the 1990s, Al Habtoor said he housed American soldiers at his hotels and worked closely with American military officials, whose names he still remembers. He recalls spending nights worrying about the soldiers, who he said were “innocent people, and very young.”
He loves the United States and said he has had many American friends — including former president Jimmy Carter, whom he hosted in Dubai and visited at his farm in Georgia as they worked on various charity and peace initiatives together. Carter, he said, was “a leader who cannot be replaced.”
Al Habtoor said he had hoped his post would break through to Trump, from one billionaire real-estate developer to another. Sitting outside the cafe, he looked around at a diverse group of young people and said they represent Dubai’s strength — people from around the world come here to do business, believing they will be safe.
“We had no interest in this war. … This is a business country,” he said. “We don’t want anyone to kill our economy.”
He said he had not wanted to cause problems with his post, seeing it as an “explanation” — not an attack.
Still, he said, he decided to delete the post at the request of “friends” from the UAE and the U.S. It was not the right moment “to upset the Americans,” they said.
“On my principles, I do not like to offend anyone in my life,” Al Habtoor said. He shrugged, adding that he wasn’t sure that deleting the post mattered much. “Already,” he said of officials in the U.S., “they had seen it.”
Al Habtoor tagged Trump in the post, but the president did not respond.
Going forward, Al Habtoor said, the UAE must depend on itself and itself alone. “There are no friends,” he said, “there is only interest.”
Sitting in his Dubai mansion, as he prepared for iftar, the meal to break the Ramadan fast at sunset, one of his sons told him that Trump had posted on Truth Social.
Al Habtoor pulled out his phone and read the post aloud: “We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability.”
Al Habtoor raised an eyebrow and turned to the journalists he’d invited, practicing the skepticism he’d preached.
“What is it that Americans say,” he asked with a wry smile. “Talk is cheap.”
The post This Emirati billionaire put a voice to Gulf anger over Trump’s war in Iran appeared first on Washington Post.
