You would think that John Bolton would be happier. The former US ambassador to the United Nations and former US national security adviser has been advocating for American military action against the Islamic Republic of Iran for decades. In 2015, Bolton wrote an op-ed for The New York Times entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”. Even then, he wrote, “Time is terribly short but a strike can still succeed.”

In the two weeks since US president Donald Trump gave the go order for Operation Epic Fury, Bolton has been noticeably critical of the means, if not the ends. Those with memories reaching back to the early 21st century, when Bolton was regularly caricatured as the sharpest-beaked of hawks, might be bemused to hear him sounding like a voice of relative moderation. 

It is no secret that Bolton and Trump do not get on. The president sacked Bolton as national security adviser in 2019, partly because he was weary of Bolton’s uncompromising views on Iran. Last year, Bolton was charged by the Department of Justice with unlawful retention and transmission of national defence information; this might be related to the unflattering depictions of the president in Bolton’s 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened. Trump said the book was made up of “lies and fake stories”, and called its author “a disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war”, among other imprecations.

It is Trump who has gone to war, however. Two weeks in and it would be easier to say if Operation Epic Fury was going according to plan if it had ever been made clear what the plan was. With due acknowledgement that nobody knows how this will end, Bolton joined Andrew Mueller on The Foreign Desk to discuss the Iran war, intervention compared with negotiations and the US administration’s aversion to clear planning.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

War with Iran is what you’ve long been calling for, at least since that piece in ‘The New York Times’ in 2015. Is this what you wanted or expected it to look like?
What I was advocating then was destroying [Iran’s] nuclear capability, which I think was appropriate at the time and is still a good thing to do today. The real need today is regime change in Iran and that is very possible, given how unpopular and weak the regime is. That doesn’t mean that the way Trump is going about it is going to produce that result. He has made a lot of unforced errors and I’m worried that he hasn’t laid the proper basis for making the case to the American people, Congress or [US] allies. 

Is it important that it be done now?
I would have liked to have seen it done 20 years ago. I don’t agree that the threat of a nuclear Iran was imminent but I don’t think we’re obligated to wait until the threat is imminent. Because if we did, we might miscalculate and be too late. Iran’s support for terrorism and the fact that it has, since 1979, been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans through its terrorist activity, makes it a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

If a threat isn’t imminent, doesn’t that imply that measures short of war are still available?
It would depend on the regime. This one has never shown any evidence of abandoning a strategic decision to acquire nuclear weapons or to discontinue terrorism in the Middle East and around the world. So negotiation with the regime is futile. The idea that you just have to keep [negotiating]… that’s how North Korea got nuclear weapons. Twenty five years of endless talks while it continued to make progress.

Doesn’t an intervention such as this create an incentive to build nuclear weapons – and not just for Iran but other regimes trying to protect themselves?
That risk is out there today. The fact is that we have stopped nuclear proliferation in the past and we could have stopped it a long time ago. Our unwillingness to do so, and to wait so long in the case of both Iran and North Korea, is really just proof of what Winston Churchill once said about the confirmed unteachability of mankind. How many times do we have to go through this to recognise that some regimes are not going to negotiate in the spirit that we do? They have objectives and they use negotiation not to achieve a resolution of the problem but to give them time to get to the answer they want.

Are your reservations about the current action not so much about the what but the how? Do you ever fear sounding like one of those die-hard ideologues who complain that ‘proper communism’ has never been tried?
No. The end result of regime change is shared by 80 or 90 per cent of the population of Iran. The question is, how do we help them to do it? Of all the mistakes that Trump has made, it’s the lack of co-operation with the opposition, lack of assistance to the opposition, that might be the worst. He seems almost indifferent to the Iranian opposition, as he seems indifferent to the opposition in Venezuela, which he has kicked to the curb in favour of Delcy Rodríguez to replace Nicolás Maduro as president.

Does it not give you any pause that you couldn’t convince several more orthodox US administrations to do this, while the one that has gone ahead is this one?
Well I don’t know why Trump changed his mind. I certainly tried to persuade the same man in his first term to do it and I didn’t succeed. It’s clear that, for whatever reason, he changed his mind. But that doesn’t mean that he also changed his modus operandi. It’s still the same confused, uncertain, disconnected approach that he had in the first term. And that’s a risk.

Is there not a danger that if this operation is being steered by people who are poorly advised, that you end up with a situation even worse than the one we have?
It’s inconceivable to me that you could have a government in Iran worse than the one that we have now.

Are you not concerned about long-term reputational damage to the US? That much of the world sees this as reckless? We’ve heard Pete Hegseth disdaining what he calls ‘stupid rules of engagement’, which are presumably what stops you putting a Tomahawk missile through a school.
Well, you’re talking about defects of personalities, of which there are many in this Trump administration. The policy, the objective, it seems to me, is entirely defensible, unless you’re sanguine about a nuclear weapon going off over your head someday.

How optimistic are you about how this thing, which you have long advocated, is going to turn out?
Well I didn’t advocate for this [war]. I would have done it substantially differently. My criticism is because I think that Trump’s mistakes will quite likely result in this failing and make it harder to instigate regime change in other situations.

So in the admittedly unlikely event that your phone rings and it’s the president saying, ‘Alright, this isn’t working out, what should I do?’, what would you tell him?
Work with the opposition inside Iran. Work with the ethnic groups. Work with people who have been affected adversely by the economy. Get with the young people who despise the regime, who know they could have a different form of life. Get with the female part of the population that has been protesting ever since the murder of Mahsa Amini three years ago for refusing to wear the hijab. The discontent inside the country is enormous. It’s not well organised but there are ways to get to an interim government after the Ayatollah and the Revolutionary Guard are removed – for Iranians to consider what they want their next form of government to look like.

But is that not a recipe for chaos itself? You could end up recreating Yugoslavia with 92 million people.
You could do a lot of things. You could also leave this regime in place and have them murder 30,000 citizens every other month.

To listen to the full interview on ‘The Foreign Desk’, click here.

Behind every auteur is a company of artists, technicians and specialists bringing his or her vision to the big screen. Guillermo del Toro is one such director who, over the course of a 30-year career, has become synonymous with a hyper-stylised neo-gothic aesthetic, bridging both the historical and futuristic in most of his works. One of the artists helping to usher in his vision is Kate Hawley, the costume designer behind the blood-red corsets and bedraggled fur capes of Del Toro’s Frankenstein. 

After winning a slew of awards for her work on the film, including at the BAFTAs and Critics Choice Awards, she is a front-runner to take home an Oscar from Sunday night’s ceremony. Hawley joined Monocle Radio’s Lily Austin on Monocle on Fashion to reflect on the process of bringing the monster to life. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you come to work on this project? 
I was very familiar with the novel and revisited it when Guillermo told me that we were making his version of it. The start of everything always comes from the script and your director’s vision, including themes of nature and theology. Creating the designs was a matter of working with all the other departments and then building on that language, finding and discovering ways to interpret it. With nature and religion there are certain shapes and imagery that were echoed in the set, and Guillermo asked me to reflect the set. He always talks about how the costume is the architecture, the architecture is the lighting. We all work very closely as departments. It all came from trying to find a mood and a tone on this operatic scale that Guillermo was building. He talks about his banquet table, and it’s a bloody big one. We were all invited, as different departments, to sit at this table and collaborate.

Del Toro’s films are always cohesive. But everything really works together in this one in particular. So I wasn’t surprised when I read that you’re also a set designer. Does that help you to create a co-ordinated look and feel for a film?
Yeah, I think so. Because you’re always dealing with character within a landscape, whether that landscape is artificial or real; it’s the world you’re building in the tones. I did a bit of scenic painting at the English National Opera and I learned about colour. And so all of those things have informed how I work with Guillermo and the rest of the team. We’re always echoing each other’s work and painting across our different departments. 

I was really struck by the use of colour in the film. This is a period piece but it felt quite modern. Were you consciously trying to achieve that blend? 
When Guillermo and I were talking about Frankenstein he was very insistent that we didn’t get locked in an old world. He wanted a contemporary, modern feel. That was a directive in terms of the wardrobe: that it doesn’t sit in a Dickensian world. The red veil is a classic way for Guillermo to open a story. You establish the operatic language right from the beginning, and then that becomes the throughline. That red veil becomes the stained, bloodied hand on young Victor Frankenstein, it becomes the glove. So you have a throughline that Guillermo is establishing with the colour red, and we go in a circle with that.

You collaborated with Tiffany & Co for the film. Will you tell us a bit about that?
When we told the crew they were so thrilled, and it meant that there’s a certain shared love of craftsmanship and appreciation for what the other was bringing. It never felt as if things were being imposed on us. It was the language of what they had in the archives. The biggest moment for me was looking at the archives and seeing all the things that I was not familiar with: the art glass and the jewellery. It fitted Guillermo’s language so perfectly and supported the story and the character of Elizabeth. Sometimes things just open the door and they keep presenting more and more wonderful possibilities.

Want to hear from another award-winning costume designer?
– Interview: Catherine Martin on the riviera glamour and ‘barefoot luxury’ of her Miu Miu collection

“How are you finding the mood this year?” People would ask as they came to the Monocle Radio booth at Mipim, the world’s largest real-estate fair, which concluded yesterday in Cannes. The question was prompted by events in the Gulf, which some guests feared were about to deter interest-rate cuts, trigger a surge in material costs and dampen any enthusiasm for investment risk – all just as things had been looking up. It was clear that, these days, our interviewees are reading reports from defence correspondents as much as the financial pages.

The Iran conflict was not the only issue causing furrowed brows. Architects and civic leaders also wanted to talk about the affordable-housing crisis hitting numerous cities across Europe. Ian Mulcahey, the global director of cities and urban design at architecture firm Gensler, also noted that it had become the biggest and knottiest issue for many of the places that he visits. “Every city we work in seems to have a housing crisis and I still can’t quite work out why. We, as a civilisation, haven’t figured out how to build enough homes for the people that live in our communities,” he says.

The starkness of the issue was underlined by London’s deputy mayor for housing and residential development, who revealed that while London is estimated to need an additional 88,000 housing units every year, last year the figure of new starts was closer to 4,000. Mipim, as part of its Housing Matters event that kicks off the week, sought to put leaders from Barcelona to The Hague on stage who could offer solutions – but there is clearly much work to be done.

Others who visited Monocle were feeling far more optimistic, even sensing some positive changes for the industry. Giorgos Karampelas, creative director at Athens-anchored K-Studio, told us that his company’s take on luxury – free of fuss, using materials well, focusing on a sense of place – was finding new audiences far beyond Greece’s borders.

Snøhetta’s co-founder Kjetil Thorsen said that his prestigious architectural practice was only working with clients keen to raise the bar on genuine sustainability, such as Mehmet Kalyoncu, the developer behind the Ion Riva project on the Black Sea. “I don’t think we’ve ever [conducted] this amount of studies on a particular piece of land,” said Thorsen. “We now know everything – even how the smallest drop of water is moving down the hill. We want to enhance these qualities, let nature tell us where to build and where not to build.” 

It was also interesting to see how national confidence was robust in some places, especially in southern Europe. Numerous Italian mayors, for example, were present at the event and throughout the week, we hosted the leaders of Rome and Genoa. Each talked about how they were witnessing a moment of generational change as their cities became centres of technology and innovation, sought to attract talent and deliver on sustainability ambitions. Raffaele Laudani, the deputy mayor for urban planning of Bologna, explained how his city is positioning itself.

“Bologna has become a key strategic European hub for big data and artificial intelligence. We are hosting the second strongest supercomputer in the world for AI, the so-called Leonardo, and around it a new ecosystem of knowledge and technology is emerging,” says Laudani. “We have 80 per cent of the computing capacity of the country and almost 30 per cent of the European one. And now there is a [network] of research centres and the operating university. We are redefining the overall policies around this flagship project that we call the City of Knowledge.”

Though the mood this week was a little strained in places, this is an industry that plans for the long-term and is accustomed to riding out geopolitical squalls. Plus, many opportunities – from data centres (the sessions on this sector were standing room only) to the needs of ageing societies – are not going away. Perhaps that’s why most people left the Palais de Festivals in Cannes looking resolute, even if they were keen to secure a soothing glass of rosé on the Croisette before heading home to everywhere from Berlin to Baku.

Andrew Tuck is Monocle’s editor in chief. To hear more from Monocle Radio’s guests this week at Mipim, listen to the latest episode of ‘The Urbanist’. There will also be a second show from Cannes next week.

This week Monocle has been at Mipim, the world’s largest real-estate fair and urban festival, which takes place in Cannes. Inside the Palais des Festivals, the main exhibition space, we built a Monocle Radio studio, hosted a party and drank a lot of coffee. The interviews that we gathered are destined for our podcasts and the magazine. But here are a few other takes on a week in the south of France.

Don’t get too smug
Monocle will be 20 years old next year. We’ve come a long way over that time and at Mipim numerous readers and partners sought us out at the Monocle Radio pavilion to share their appreciation. But sometimes, even after all this time and even when you are standing under a large “Monocle” sign, there can still be some explaining to do. “How long have you worked at Monaco Magazine,” one nice man asks. “It’s not Monaco Magazine, it’s Monocle,” I say, carefully emphasising every syllable to avoid any more confusion. I point at our lovely signage to stress the difference. He computes the new information. “But do you live in Monte Carlo?” he asks, refusing to believe that he’s got this totally wrong. I give him a copy of the magazine. At least he didn’t ask if I worked at Manacle Magazine, the trade title for those employed in the incarceration industry.

Some people have it figured out
In 1987, Kjetil Thorsen co-founded Snøhetta in Oslo. Today this multi-disciplinary design and architecture practice has more than 300 staff, allowing it to take on big projects around the world but still hold on to a studio ethos. Thorsen came in for an interview to talk about his work on a project in Turkey where, as always, he is being sensitive about sustainability. He’s a mountain of a man, gives a fantastic handshake and talks in a considered tone that would make him ordering toast sound enthralling and important. I could have spoken to him all day because he’s also figured out what he enjoys about his work, where the red lines are and what society needs from architecture. He’s a walking wisdom machine. I have added a note to my to-do list: “Find inner sage, practice handshake”.

Guest guessing
Honestly, I do listen to what they are saying with intent but when you are stood at the mics, your guest just a couple of feet in front of you, you do find yourself scanning their outfits, noting their body language (you can tell in seconds who will immediately engage with you, who is nervous or fears saying a single word that might play out badly with their electorate). It usually works out. The man who undoubtedly rocked the sharpest look was Manfredi Catella, CEO and chairman of real-estate company Coima. It was a wide-shouldered affair that had an air of a 1980s Armani number. The tie, the shirt, the slick grey hair – all so right. You’d buy anything from him. So that’s another one for the to-do list: “Buy an adventurous suit.”

Guest booking is an art form
And that’s why, at Mipim, I leave running the interview schedule to Carlota Rebelo, Monocle Radio’s executive producer. Everyone knows that she’s the gatekeeper and is not to be messed with. And anyway, the only person to corner me about getting someone on the schedule was a gentleman who wanted to know whether we’d like an interview with Miss Poland, who was in town to promote her nation’s real-estate offering. Fearing muddling Carlota’s planning, I declined. In the end, Carlota managed to secure 42 interviews with city leaders, famous architects and powerful developers. But she did come up short on the beauty queens.

That’s a wrap
By the time it came to pack up our stand (to be honest, that’s also not me but our wonderful engineer David Stevens), we had met players in the industry from Saudi Arabia and Florida, and been briefed on projects, politics and the players to watch. And I had also set one man right about my lack of Monaco media connections. 

To read more columns by Andrew Tuck, click here. And to hear from just some of the people that we met at Mipim, listen to this week’s episode of ‘The Urbanist’ – the first of a two-part special from Cannes.

Lisbon has seen a remarkable urban transformation over the past decade. The city has become a hub for entrepreneurship and home for expats seeking the sun while record levels of tourism reflect the global interest. Mayor Carlos Moedas has been at the forefront of dealing with the challenges this cosmopolitan capital is facing, as he told Monocle at Mipim in Cannes.

Lisbon has become one of Europe’s most attractive cities. How do you deal with the welcome challenge of managing its growing appeal?
This is probably the biggest challenge you can have as a city. Attracting young talent is fantastic but you have to invest in social welfare to counterbalance the idea that if people come to your city, the real-estate prices increase. Since my first term I’ve maintained that for every euro the city invests in culture, innovation or technology, we need to invest tenfold in social welfare. For example, in Lisbon, people over 65 have a city health plan where they can call a doctor to their home for free. And we now own more than 22,000 apartments, which means that nearly 12 per cent of our population lives in housing owned by the municipality. That’s not just social housing but also affordable housing, so that professionals can afford their rent and are able to live in the city. Nowadays social welfare is much more dependent on cities than it is on the national government. That’s the most important ingredient for innovation, for technology and for creativity.

Urban regeneration is happening at a rapid pace. How do you balance keeping tradition while promoting a vision for a more modern Lisbon?
Lisbon is unique. When I compare it to other cities there’s something that you can’t describe, almost like the soul of the city. As its mayor it’s crucial [that I] maintain that identity. So we’ve created different programmes; there’s one to protect historic shops and another for owners of small libraries. One of the most successful initiatives is a programme in which we loan spaces for free to locals who might want to start a business in their neighbourhood. Some have become cafés, others tailors or small independent shops. These shopfronts would otherwise be empty and by helping people to create their own businesses, we are adding to the identity of the city. 

Lisbon has invested significantly in waterfront redevelopment in the past 15 years, embracing the Tejo river with museums and reimagining old industrial buildings. Is there more to come?
Yes. There’s still a lot to be done. The first thing, and this is probably the biggest one, is a bit of my own dream for Lisbon – to properly connect the city to the waterfront. We have a train that comes from Estoril into Lisbon and essentially puts a cut between the city centre and the river – I want to add infrastructure to move this below ground so that people can walk from one side to the other. But that’s a 10-year project that can’t be done in a day. Then I want to turn to transportation. We are building the first new tramline since the 1960s to connect the centre of Baixa with a new park to truly make the east of the city alive and kicking. Lisbon is at the top of its game so we have to be careful with the next steps. It’s more difficult to stay on top than it is to get there.

As you return to the waterfront, how are you adding resiliency to these projects so that Lisbon is able to endure the risks posed by the climate crisis?
We have [implemented] one of the biggest adaptation climate change works in Europe today. Since 2022 we have invested more than €150m to build two large tunnels that run under the city to help manage the flow of water – one of them is five kilometers long and has just been completed. This means that when it rains, the water is redirected to the tunnels and we don’t have floods. I’m very proud of it because very few cities are doing this kind of adaptation and the work is invisible to the eye. All that people know is that we don’t have floods but they don’t know why. That takes a bit of courage.

A flash point for many cities is tourism management. How do you mitigate against overtourism as a city leader?
Lisbon has roughly 575,000 residents but there are a million people that come into the city every day, with tourists being about 40,000 of them. We’ve redesigned the tourism tax: not only have we increased it to €4 per night but, for the first time ever, cruise ships are now also paying the tourist tax for each passenger. 

One of the strategies that we used was looking at the fact that not everyone is going to be in the same place at the same time. So we’ve created what we describe as a journey into contemporary and modern art next to the river, with the creation of two new museums: one [dedicated to] the works of Julião Sarmento, the other of Almada Negreiros. And this is all about getting tourists to different parts of town. That’s the only way you can manage the flow and have rules. We also cut 6,000 licences for short-term lettings and implemented strict regulations so that there will be a maximum of 10 Airbnbs for every 100 regular [housing options]. At the moment [the ratio is] 65 short-term rentals per 100 flats. That’s totally excessive and needs to be reduced.

What’s your favourite neighbourhood for a Sunday walk?
Alvalade, which is a 15-minute neighbourhood where you have everything within walking distance. It’s a bit removed from the city centre but you get all the best that Lisbon has to offer.

What’s the best way to commute in Lisbon?
I take a lot of public transport and I make a point of travelling by bus every Friday. It’s the best time of my entire day and I learn a lot. I love the 711 bus.

Where do you go for a coffee?
I usually start my mornings with a nice cappuccino at a place right next to city hall called Fábrica, which has a very international crowd. And then at midday, I go to the typical small establishment for my daily pastel de nata and café [espresso].

What’s your favourite thing about being mayor of Lisbon?
The people of Lisbon. I’ve had amazing moments as mayor but I’ve also had difficult moments, and the people of the city were always by my side – even those that didn’t vote for me. We have amazing people and when you’re a foreigner and you come to Lisbon, you always feel like you belong because lisboetas make you feel welcome. There are very few places like that.

To explore Lisbon properly, consult Monocle’s City Guide. 

1.
Get an architect to design your stand
Among the numerous stands for nations, cities and projects at Mipim, only a few stood out for being beautifully conceived. One of these was Soundscapes of Albania, which was designed to resemble a record shop. The concept was the work of architecture firms Studio Precht and W10, with creative agency Kube Studios supplying graphics and branding. The pavilion was rendered in terracotta red, and some 80 projects by a roster of global architects were promoted. Each scheme was presented as a record sleeve with the promotional material tucked inside. There was also a custom-made vinyl record, featuring Albanian music from the 1920s to the modern day. Oh, and they flew in a DJ. Despite all the property players fighting for attention at Mipim, it took Albania to show why you should hire an architect to design your space.

2.
No, really – get an architect
Another standout was the Ion pavilion. The Ion Riva development on Turkey’s Black Sea coast is the work of architect and developer Mehmet Kalyoncu and will feature residences designed by practices including MVRDV, Bjarke Ingels Group and Snøhetta. It was the latter that stepped forward to design Ion’s beautiful stand. At the centre of the space was a vast circular table, which hosted talks twice a day on topics such as what makes a house a home. The table also doubled as a stage for musical and dance performances. From food to materials, everything was on point.

3. 
And there was Monocle too
Monocle has been attending Mipim for more than a decade and, for the second year in a row, it has held a pop-up Monocle Radio studio and lounge. Our space was cosy and welcoming thanks to the Spanish lighting and product company Santa & Cole, our partners for this outing to Cannes. Radio had never looked so good.

4.
Pack a map, a topographical map
Our heart went out to the shipping companies tasked with delivering numerous vast topographical maps to Cannes. The London Pavilion displayed an epic effort, built by Piper Model Makers at 1:2000 scale, which allowed attendees from the UK capital to precisely locate their homes. Paris had a nice interactive map (pictured) that encouraged lots of button-pushing to reveal what was being erected. But perhaps the biggest example was for a section of the Diriyah project, a new neighbourhood on the outskirts of Riyadh. Measuring some 14 metres in length, it displayed ambitious plans for a new grand avenue. The owners of all these maps were happy to reveal that, more than any render or digital tool, it was seeing a model that most easily sold the vision to attendees.

5.
Dubai is a role model for aspiring nations
Sea Breeze is the name of a huge project on the Caspian Sea coast in Azerbaijan that, in addition to numerous residences and hotels, will also become home to the country’s F1 track and a casino. Set to eventually house 500,000 people, the first phase is already open and includes 45 restaurants. The developer is Emin Agalarov, an Azerbaijani pop singer who managed to pull in large numbers of attendees for his promotional sessions. 

He was very open about the fact that he’s borrowing ideas from Dubai. While the emirate has the Palm man-made island, he’s building the Half Moon Island. Dubai built the skyline-defining Burj Al Arab with a silhouette that looks like a dhow; Agalarov has commissioned an apartment building in the shape of a luxury yacht and named it The Caspian Dreamliner. “There’s no need to try and invent the bicycle,” he says. “My job as the master developer of this project is to find the best-case scenarios and adapt them to my market.”

6.
Make space for your robots
Hubert Rhomberg is the managing director of Rhomberg Holding, headquartered in Bregenz, Austria. He’s the fourth generation of his family to run the business, which is now involved in everything from building data centres to creating a new cultural hub in Vienna. He’s also a believer in AI and robotics. Rhomberg says that, as robots start working in our homes and offices, we will need to consider their needs when designing spaces. Just as servants once used hidden staircases in castles and manor houses to deliver food and linen, these new helpers will also need architects to consider how they might manoeuvre themselves around a building without getting in the way of humans.

7.
Could there be a Baghdad renaissance?
Ian Mulcahey is global director of cities at Gensler, the world’s biggest architectural firm. He is involved in a project that he hopes could provide a model for repairing and aiding post-conflict cities: the Baghdad Sustainable Forests masterplan will transform 10 million sq m of a bombed military facility into a new green lung for the Iraqi capital. “Baghdad desperately wants to try and say to the world, ‘We’re open for business’,” says Mulcahey. “And the day that I saw their brief was the day that I said we want to do this project because rarely do people say that the centrepiece of their urban redevelopment is to build an urban forest.” While the project is still in its early days, it is good to see that architects have the skills to repair not just buildings but identity and hope too. Let’s hope that regional events don’t deter the ambition.

8.
Developers be aware: we don’t like to wait
The key manufacturers of lifts and escalators were all present at Mipim. These businesses see themselves as mobility players and, in a competitive market, many were promoting new products. One of which responded to the needs of an ageing society with a new generation of lifts for domestic settings. 

We wanted to understand the psychology of the lift: how long will people wait before getting grumpy? Bora Gülan, CEO of TK Elevator Europe and Africa, revealed that depending on the setting, you have 20 to 60 seconds before the huffing starts. In an office? “The good waiting time is 20 to 30 seconds – and you need to be able to handle 12.5 per cent of the building’s population in five minutes,” says Gülan. Get your stopwatches out and see how well your building’s lifts perform.

9.
You can engineer a city to stop the brain drain
The mayor of Genoa was in attendance to explain how she is re-engineering her Mediterranean city to make it appealing to young residents. Part of her solution is delivering 40,000 units of student housing, getting active with the new Granarolo-Begato Sports Park and the redevelopment of the Luigi Ferraris football stadium. Why is sport at the forefront of the dynamic mayor’s plans? She’s a retired Olympic hammer thrower.

10.
Don’t forget China
Stephan Schütz is an executive partner at Germany’s biggest architectural firm, Von Gerkan, Marg and Partners. The practice works on everything from concert halls to airports but Schütz is also focused on when not to build but adapt and reuse instead. He suggested that we look to China as an ambitious and active proponent of this approach. “I don’t agree with the thesis that new buildings happen in China and renovation transformation happens in Europe,” he says. “China adapts to new situations and new needs very quickly. For example, we have completed a net-zero high-rise building in Guangzhou for Chinese clients. They used a completely prefabricated building method with robots assembling the pieces on site. So there were nearly no people on site for a 200-metre-high property.” It’s a brave new future for the industry.

The richness of Paris’s reputation as a centre of literary creation veers close to being a trope. It was here, in 1791, that one of the first-ever copyright laws, designed to protect authors, was enacted. From Notre Dame de Paris to Les Misérables, the capital is also the setting of many of French literature’s best-known exports.

With its 400 bookshops, Paris has succeeded not only in ensuring their survival but enabling them to thrive as the economy of bookselling has undergone a transformation around the world. Ultra-competitive pricing from online marketplaces and skyrocketing commercial real-estate leases have combined to put bookshops in major cities in a difficult spot. But booksellers in Paris have two key advantages.

The first is France’s “Loi Lang”, named after president Francois Mitterrand’s culture minister, Jack Lang. This 1981 legislation, originally intended to protect independent bookshops from aggressive wholesaler pricing, outlawed discounts of more than five per cent on new releases, ensuring equal book prices nationwide. So even in the age of online retail, France is the country with the most bookshops per capita and is home to 3,500 independent bookshops. The second policy is one for which Parisian booksellers have former mayor Bertrand Delanoë to thank. The city of Paris started buying up Latin Quarter real estate with the objective of leasing it to bookshops at below market rate. The city is now landlord to 25 per cent of all bookshops across Paris.

Here, we visit 10 bookshops that exemplify Paris’s literary prowess. From preserving 15th-century manuscripts to feeding the appetite for bandes dessinées, these are the stores turning over new pages in the city’s literary history.

7L

Karl Lagerfeld’s voracious appetite for books was legendary. One story involves his chauffeur loading up a car full of books after the fashion designer visited a single bookshop. It seemed only natural, then, for Lagerfeld to start his own bookstore, 7L, at number seven Rue de Lille in 1999.

While the studio housing his personal book collection is sadly not open to the public, the bookshop at the front of the building offers one of Paris’s sleekest collections of coffee-table books on the visual arts, from architecture to street photography. Booksellers at 7L also offer a service that builds collections for clients seeking to fill shelves with works in tune with their personal literary and aesthetic interests.

After Lagerfeld’s death in 2019, Chanel acquired 7L and has big plans for its book club, the Salon 7L. It meets on the first Wednesday of every month for readings and cultural events as diverse as its founder’s artistic pursuits. “I wanted 7L to continue being a place of living creation, celebrating Karl Lagerfeld’s love of books and photography,” Laurence Delamare, 7L’s director, tells Monocle.
librairie7l.com

La Procure

Of the handful of Parisian bookshops that have been open for more than 100 years, La Procure on Place Saint-Sulpice might be the most successful today. Originally a supplier of goods to the Catholic church – from pews to pipe organs – La Procure has become the European leader on religious books, with a thriving network of 26 shops and franchises across France.

When Monocle visits, Elie Khonde (pictured below), a priest from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is stocking up on volumes to take home after completing a summer seminary near Paris. But, over time, La Procure has expanded beyond prayer books, religious art and sculpture. More than half of the shop’s space is dedicated to a general audience, from political memoirs to bandes dessinées.

“We might advise others against it but we will order any book a customer requests,” says La Procure’s CEO, Thomas Jobbé-Duval. “It’s in bookshops, including ours, that the diversity of points of view is best fostered. We are almost the opposite of social media. Rather than narrowing down viewpoints, we facilitate openness and exchange.”
laprocure.com

Librairie Paul Jammes

Librairie Paul Jammes is not the place for you to pick up an ephemeral beach read. Instead, every rare book inside is a piece of our collective history. The shop, which specialises in rare tomes and typography, proves that these objects aren’t a thing of the past – the digital world has made them more important.

Esther Jammes (pictured below) is the fourth generation of Jammes booksellers to take over the family business. When Monocle visits, she picks up a 1485 vellum astronomy book detailing lunar and solar eclipses in colour – its glaring red and yellow charts as bright as they must have been 500 years ago. Nearby, a statue of Gutenberg gazes approvingly at a printing press from the era of the French Revolution.

“People who come in out of curiosity sometimes ask whether this is a museum,” says Jammes. “I tell them that the difference is, for a price, you can leave with the exhibits you like.”

To be surrounded by these books, from typography catalogues to a first edition of Madame Bovary, is to be reminded that human progress – even in the age of smartphones and AI – owes a lot to books. That fact permeates France’s bookshop culture and its proud custodians, Jammes included.
librairiejammes.com

Artazart

In July 2000 journalists across Paris received a bright orange, Artazart-branded hard hat. Balled up inside was an invitation to attend the construction- site-themed opening party of a new bookshop and cultural space on the Canal Saint Martin: “Artazart, the bookstore of creation.” Next year,the shop will celebrate 25 years of housing graphic design publications and events.

“When we started, we would host up to two events a week,” says Jérôme Fournel, co-founder of Artazart. Sitting beside fellow founder Carl Huguenin, he recalls a time when running Artazart involved a lot of white paint and elbow grease to allow one graffiti artist after another to use the bookshop walls as a celebration of creativity. “We were never strictly a bookshop,” says Huguenin. “There isn’t really another structure like ours that intrinsically mixes illustration and books.”

Artazart’s offering, which ranges from magazines to limited-run artist books, is selected by Laetitia de la Laurencie, Artazart’s book curator. Her meticulous attention to paper quality, layouts and typographic choices when picking books earned her a place running Artazart alongside Huguenin and Fournel. “People come from around the world,” she says. “They are delighted to discover in France places with this kind of richness.”
artazart.com

Palais de Tokyo

Alongside its dynamic contemporary art space – complete with a nightclub and gourmet café – Palais de Tokyo also boasts one of the coolest bookshops in Paris. Created in partnership with German art-books publisher Walther König and French literary magazine Cahiers d’Art, the store blends König’s expert eye and the magazine’s 1920s style to create a unique space that carries the biggest selection of art books in Paris.

“We have a big and luminous space where the public is not only attracted to the books on the tables and yellow shelves but also our colourful design objects and our magazines section,” says bookshop manager Arnaud Fremaux (pictured below). Among the trinkets that visitors can purchase, along with their favourite artists’ catalogues or the latest issue of Les Inrockuptibles magazine, are solar-powered lamps by Olafur Eliasson and tongue-in-cheek pills, by artist Dana Wyse, that promise profound improvements to your life or personality upon swallowing.

Beyond the curated selection and prime location in the heart of the Trocadéro, Fremaux considers the museum’s clientele the key ingredient that makes the bookshop such a vibrant space. “The Palais de Tokyo’s programme always attracts an interesting crowd, and the store is the place to spend a moment of relaxation after seeing an exhibition,” he says.
palaisdetokyo.com

Yvon Lambert

Whether or not you live up to your family’s legacy is a classic French plot found in stories by writers from Roger Martin du Gard to Balzac. Perhaps that is why Ève Lambert, daughter of legendary Parisian gallerist Yvon Lambert, felt compelled to create a different legacy all together.

The sleek and cosy result is the Librairie Yvon Lambert, which offers publications on fine arts and photography, a well-stocked magazine wall and an art gallery. “We wanted to continue having a space to organise exhibitions, both with new artists and artists that Yvon has a history with,” Ève tells Monocle.

Ève continues to manage the space alongside her father. The pair also run the Yvon Lambert publishing house, which releases limited edition books featuring original works by artists who the Lamberts are close to. “Matisse and Picasso made such books, where there was a relationship between the artist and the author,” says Yvon. “That is the tradition I am carrying on.”

This combination of activities has been a hit with serious art aficionados as well as digital natives. “We have a very young audience that has always known smartphones – and they buy books,” says Ève. “It shows that there is continued affection for the book as an object.”
yvon-lambert.com

Galignani

Italian publisher Giovanni Antonio Galignani of Lombardy established the Librairie Française et Étrangère bookshop in Paris in 1801. Today a stone plaque outside the door reads: “The first English bookshop established on the continent.” An astute businessman, Galignani also started an English newspaper widely read by the anglophone movers and shakers of the time, including Lord Byron and the Marquis de Lafayette. More than 200 years since its founding, the bookshop – now known simply as Galignani – is back in the hands of its founder’s descendants, with Anne Jeancourt-Galignani at the helm. “Our family had moved away from the profession of bookselling for a few generations,” says Jeancourt-Galignani. “I took over the leadership of the bookshop a few months ago, which has allowed me to reconnect with this family tradition.”

Inside the bookshop’s main room, browsing can require some athleticism. Accessing the titles on the upper shelves involves climbing tall ladders, while nearby stands are stacked with heavy volumes on art and photography. The selection is a testament to the bookshop’s history of adaptation: during the German occupation of Paris, a Nazi command post set up shop next door. With English books banned and unyielding enforcers close by, the shop pivoted to fine-arts books to survive.
galignani.fr

Le Bon Marché

The most visited section of Le Bon Marché in the 7th arrondissement features neither handbags nor night creams. The historic department store’s foot-traffic crown instead goes to its vast bookshop, on the top floor, under the original glass roof designed by architects Louis-Charles Boileau and Gustave Eiffel. “Even more than the rest of the store, we have a clientèle that comes very often,” head buyer Noëlle Chini tells Monocle. “We have also had a more international clientele drawn by our books on art, decoration, architecture and fashion.”

The selection of literature, cookbooks and bandes dessinées covers all bases but under Chini, who got her start at Le Bon Marché selling postcards nearly 30 years ago, the bookshop has emphasised what she calls “beautiful books”. “Fashion and culture have always carried the store, so we wanted to translate that to the bookshop,” she says.

As well as a well-chosen selection of reading materials, you’ll also find a luxury stationery shop, where patrons can customise notebooks and pens from brands such as Caran d’Ache and Leuchtturm1917. “This is a neighbourhood of publishers,” says Chini. “For us, it makes sense to talk about both reading and writing at the same time.”
lebonmarche.com

Librairie Vignettes

Comic books are too often considered the province of children or anoraks. In France and Belgium, however, bande dessinée (BD) is rightly recognised as a bone fide art form, on the same level as music, architecture or poetry. It’s also a thriving business: in 2023, 75 million BDs were sold in France, the third-best year ever for the industry. “France has a very unique BD culture,” Charlotte Foucault, one of the three partners of Librairie Vignettes, tells Monocle. “We are open to all bande dessinées genres, which isn’t the case for Americans or the Japanese.”

Foucault, Ariane Roland and Roxane Pingal had been booksellers together at a larger BD specialist when they decided to strike out on their own in 2020 and open Librairie Vignettes. They offer edgier, more on-the-pulse works and less merchandise now that they are in charge. “Back then, we used to sell a lot of action figures,” says Foucault. “Our idea of bande dessinée is to showcase every genre, including stuff that we don’t like.”

At Vignettes, classics featuring characters such as Tintin and Asterix have their place beside thornier contemporary explorations of topics including feminism or the Israel-Gaza war. This selection reflects the medium’s place in France – as cultural canon with an appeal that continues to bridge the generations.
canalbd.net/vignettes

Chantelivre

Great readers are not born but places like Chantelivre help to make them. “The original idea was to create a space where you would learn reading through fun, discovery and emotions, and where everyone felt welcome, no matter their previous approach to books,” Alexandra Flacsu, co-director of Chantelivre, tells Monocle. Founded in 1974 as the first specialised children’s bookshop in France, Chantelivre revolutionised the literary landscape with its playful approach to reading. “There were comfortable spaces with pillows for children to read in and things were built to fit their height, something that hadn’t really been done before,” says Flacsu.

The 6th arrondissement store was renovated in 2023, and now boasts a complete reading lounge for kids and “la maison des histoires” (the stories house), a dedicated place where children can play and reading sessions with authors and actors are held. Through these activities, books are used not only as mediums for learning but for discovery and moments of sharing. “It’s our way to make reading come alive,” says Flacsu. Today a quarter of Chantelivre’s books are for adults, a choice that she considers to be more inclusive. “We wanted to create a family bookshop. People can come with their toddlers or teens and enjoy a moment together.”
chantelivre-paris.com

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Protecting books in a digital age
Librairie Michel Bouvier

Every visit to my uncle Michel Bouvier’s rare-books shop in Saint Germain des Prés yields a captivating new tale about a recent acquisition (writes Simon Bouvier). Prints of Soviet-era propaganda photos taken by Ukrainian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei. A handwritten letter by a young Claude Monet breathlessly recounting a recent visit to an exhibition. A tiny medieval prayer book with a golden clasp. Every object carries meaning beyond its message. Whether glossy paper or pristine vellum, its form holds a snapshot of human interactions.

Practical, economic and strategic considerations have shifted the attention of consumers and policymakers to the digital realm. But bookshops have something that the efficiency-driven economy of algorithms and convenience can’t replicate.

“On the internet, you find what you seek,” says my uncle (pictured). “But in a bookshop, you find what you weren’t looking for.” This sense of discovery doesn’t just result in a potential sale. It also fosters the community and awareness that are the lifeblood of civic life.

Thanks to my uncle, I know that bookshops matter. Whether you are a powerful mayor or humble reader, support for them shouldn’t merely be a political afterthought or a hip badge of honour. They require serious investment that pays priceless dividends.

Simon Bouvier is Monocle’s Paris bureau chief.

Further reading:
– Monocle’s full city guide to Paris
– Leaf through London with 10 bookshops that are bound to please
– New York’s 10 best lesser-known bookshops

After standing on the scales, feeling the chilly steel of the stethoscope on its chest and going, “Ahhhhh,” the global art market’s annual health check is complete. It arrives in the form of the yearly Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, authored by Clare McAndrew, published yesterday and examined further at last night’s live event at The Royal Academy of Arts in London.
 
The evaluation, taken from sales data offered by global dealers and auction houses, is much anticipated in an art world ever keen to know if its sun tan and gleaming teeth are a sign of rude health or are obscuring underlying health concerns. So how’s the patient faring?

Overall, global sales increased by 4 per cent in 2025 to an estimated $59.6bn (€51.6bn), marking a return to growth after two years of contraction. Auctions did the best with a notable 9 per cent rise, driven by strong sales for works sold under the hammer for more than $10m (€8.7m). Dealer sales rose by 2 per cent. These are modest figures overall, though, considering the market was valued at $67.8bn (€59bn) in 2022. So the patient’s celebratory drink after receiving its results might be more a glass of sauvignon blanc than a magnum of Krug.
 
While “ultra-contemporary” work drove the market out of the pandemic slump, the report shows that sales by contemporary dealers were stagnant in 2025. The numbers also indicate “a structural rebalancing toward established artists and older sectors”, according to the survey. Despite Frida Kahlo’s “El sueño (La cama)” becoming the most expensive work by a female artist when it sold at Sotheby’s last November, the rest of the top-10 auction sales were all paintings by men – the list headed by three Gustav Klimt works – and all sold at Sotheby’s in that same, rather lavish, week.

Does this mean the market looks generally dependable but increasingly conservative? “The big action was the older, established artists that seem to be selling the best,” says McAndrew. “As it happens, because of historical biases, that means there are a lot of male artists in those older sectors.” She notes that auctions and dealers leaned similarly trad, a trend that, she adds, “probably suits the times, in that people are a little bit risk averse. There’s so much rubbish going on around the world that if you want something more certain, you’ll go for those established names.” It seems then that the world’s bellwether collectors are currently in a battening-down-the-hatches mood.

For dealers the highest and lowest price points did the most business, while the middling – “works priced in the five or six figures” – proved “more difficult”, according to McAndrew. Big names at big galleries and the tiddlers with attitude and curatorial cleverness seem to have won through. 

Other than the big-money Klimts and Kahlos going under the hammer, many of the art world’s headlines in 2025 concerned the closure of some big-name galleries including Blum, Sperone Westwater and, last month, the Stephen Friedman Gallery. “In no way do I want to diminish these often irreplaceable galleries going but generally this is a world of real resilience compared with the lifespan of other businesses,” says McAndrew.

An encouraging note on which to end is the fact that in-person sales continued to increase because, as McAndrew concludes, “you’re not just buying an item, you’re buying a whole world around it. The art world is, in fact, much more of a service industry than a goods industry.” The diagnosis? Maybe stick to sorbet for pudding – and do keep up the exercise.

Robert Bound is a contributing editor at Monocle. For more from Bound, read: 

– Team of rivals: Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable exhibition shows us two ways of seeing the world
 
– After seven decades of creativity, David Gentleman shares advice for aspiring artists

– Topless cars are still the most fun you can have with your clothes on

Joachim Trier’s Norwegian drama Sentimental Value is a poignant exploration of family, fame and the complexities that often come with both. Featuring an ensemble cast including Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning, the film follows two sisters who reunite with their estranged father as he attempts to restart an ailing directorial career. The title has been nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

The director has become well-known on the international cinema circuit, drawing acclaim for the Scandinavian film scene. His 2021 feature, The Worst Person in the World, was nominated for several major awards including the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. For Sentimental Value, Trier worked with his longtime writing partner, Eskil Vogt, to create a story that meditates on the intricacies of family and the passing of time.

Trier joined Monocle senior correspondent Fernando Augusto Pacheco to discuss how his personal life informed the film’s narrative, getting the casting right and how cinema can bring people together in trying times.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

As a father of two girls and coming from a film-industry family, is it fair to say that Sentimental Value feels personal to you?
I’m the kind of director who sits down and tries to create a story about where I am in life. Every time I make a film, I start from scratch with Eskil Vogt, my cowriter. This time we realised that we were at a moment in our lives in which we both have children – Eskil and I have two children each – our parents are still around [and] we’re sensing how fast time flies. As you mentioned, my grandfather was a filmmaker. My parents worked with films. I grew up on film sets. That’s my life and I’m very grateful for being allowed to make them. But we didn’t start out thinking that we would make a film about film people. 

The scene where the sisters [Nora and Agnes] embrace towards the end of the film – it’s so pure and beautiful. 
Thank you. Another thing that motivated this [project] was that I had a great collaboration with [the actor] Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World and I really wanted to work with her again. She has an amazing capacity for levity and humor but also deep dramatic work. As I had gotten to know her even better, I felt that there was something to explore in the character of Nora – a workaholic actor who is very successful but somehow finds it hard to create a sense of home or connectedness. Then we had to find a sister to match her and also match [Renate] as a performer. We found a wonderful actor in Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.

In the film we see the National Theater where Nora, the older sister, works, which is the place of imagination. It’s like the left part of the brain. [Her sister] Agnes goes to the National Archive [of Norway] where all [our society’s] facts are stored and researches family history. That’s kind of like the right brain. Between these sisters and between these places of societal understanding of who we are in terms of narrative, there’s a space for family in the movie. 

You could have made the father, Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgård, an unlikable character, but there’s some tenderness for him in the film.
He’s not perfect at all but there is tenderness, right? The father – this director, Gustav Borg – hasn’t made a film in 15 years but still thinks that he’s the king of the world. We cast Stellan Skarsgård because he’s such a warm, sympathetic man. We hopefully created a more three-dimensional character with nuance. It’s a story about reconciliation. It’s about understanding that inside every difficult parent there is also perhaps a wounded child, and to grapple with that. What is reconciliation in the family? I didn’t want to make a film with cheap solutions where, [the characters] talk about it and it’s all fine. That’s not how life works.

Tell us more about the Norwegian film scene. It’s experiencing a boom at the moment.
I care more about the cinema world as a whole, and I work with collaborators from around the world. But I will say this: the wonderful thing about the Nordic-film boom is seeing that personal cinema is being allowed to be made financially. This could encourage other governments to really support the arts.

At this moment, we need to take art seriously. We need, in complicated times in society and in the world, to have reflections of stories on a deeper level. [To] try to communicate, create empathy, meet in cinemas, meet in theaters, meet in books and understand on a deeper level that we are more alike than different. Art can be a place for reconciliation.

It seems as though people are craving more personal stories in the cinema. Maybe they are getting tired of all the remakes and rehashed stories.
We’ve been through a big wave of superhero features and certain formulas, and people want development and forward momentum. They want change. They want to see something new.

Listen to the full conversation on ‘The Monocle Weekly’. 

The UAE has long lived with an uneasy proximity to Iran. Just 55km of water separates the two coastlines – a narrow stretch known as the Strait of Hormuz that has always carried strategic weight. But in the current conflict, that geography seems more acute. 

In the first 11 days of hostilities alone, more than 1,700 Iranian missiles and drones were launched toward the UAE: far more than at any other Gulf state and several times the number fired at Qatar. By some estimates, about 58 per cent of Iran’s attacks on Gulf Cooperation Council countries have been directed at the Emirates.

The scale raises an obvious question: why the UAE?

Part of the answer lies in geopolitics. The Emirates sits at the intersection of several alliances that Tehran distrusts, namely its deep security ties with the US and the diplomatic opening with Israel through the Abraham Accords. “From Tehran’s perspective, the UAE is enemy number one in terms of Arab states in the Gulf,” says Brendon J Cannon, a fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Abu Dhabi. “It’s also, frankly, a victim of its own success.”

Success in this case means visibility. Over the past two decades the UAE – and Dubai in particular – has positioned itself as a crossroads for global business, finance and travel. Its airports are among the busiest on earth, its airlines connect continents and its ports move goods throughout the world economy. For Iran, hitting the UAE carries symbolic and practical weight. “Everybody around the world knows about Dubai,” says Cannon. “So there is an effect of attempting to cut the UAE down to size, and to shake that ironclad view for investors and tourists around the world that the UAE is this oasis of calm.”

That calculation helps explain why Iranian strikes have not been limited to military targets. While US bases in the Emirates have been hit, so too have major civilian sites, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai airports and infrastructure around Jebel Ali port. Debris from one intercepted drone even struck a luxury hotel on The Palm. In other words the objective appears to go beyond battlefield retaliation. It is also about creating disruption in one of the world’s most visible economic hubs.

Proximity matters too. The UAE lies well within range of Iran’s large arsenal of less costly short-range missiles and drones. Unlike Israel or more distant Gulf states, the Emirates can be reached quickly and cheaply by weapons that Tehran already has in abundance. That logistical advantage makes it an obvious pressure point.

At the same time, Iran appears intent on demonstrating that its retaliation can ripple beyond the immediate theatre of war. If Tehran sees the conflict as existential – a struggle for the survival of the regime itself – the logic is to widen the impact as much as possible. “This is an all-or-nothing struggle for the Iranian regime right now,” Cannon says. “The strikes by the US and Israel have led the Iranians to take the gloves off.” Yet there might be another reason that the UAE has remained a central target: it refuses to shut down.

Despite repeated alerts and missile interceptions, life in the Emirates has continued with surprising normality. Offices remain open and the country’s commercial machine has largely kept running. The message from Abu Dhabi and Dubai has been one of resilience rather than retreat. For Tehran that normality might be provocative in and of itself. These continued attacks test whether the UAE’s reputation as a safe haven can withstand sustained pressure. “Part of the aim is to shake that perception,” Cannon adds. But the real disruption is not entirely visible. Flight schedules have faced periodic interruptions as airspace warnings trigger temporary diversions, and some hotels have closed entire floors while quietly trimming prices as bookings soften. Oil markets have also reacted to the region’s instability. The UAE’s economic cogs continue to turn but the conflict proves that insulation from geopolitical turbulence is impossible.

So far the country’s defence systems have limited the damage. Officials say that the UAE has intercepted roughly 93 per cent of incoming missiles and drones, with fighter jets and air-defence batteries knocking down projectiles before they reach urban areas. Footage released by authorities shows air-to-air interceptions followed by the blunt confirmation: “Target destroyed.” The display is both a military and a political message – reassurance to residents, investors and visitors that the country can defend itself.

Privately, however, Emirati officials are angry. The UAE had made clear that it would not allow its territory or airspace to be used by the US to launch attacks on Iran. The hope was that this stance might limit retaliation. It did not. “They’re justifiably furious,” Cannon says. “Iran is a problem – it’s an existential threat to the UAE.”

That displeasure is unlikely to alter the Emirates’ strategic direction. If anything, the conflict might reinforce it. Closer defence ties with technologically advanced partners – including Israel – and greater investment in domestic military capability are likely outcomes. At the same time, geography ensures that the UAE and Iran cannot simply disengage. Trade links, shared waterways and economic realities mean that the two neighbours will eventually have to return to some form of pragmatic coexistence. But the trust deficit has widened dramatically.

For Tehran, striking the UAE might serve multiple strategic goals at once: retaliation against the US and Israel, pressure on a key Gulf adversary and disruption of a global economic hub. For the Emirates the lesson is stark: success, visibility and openness make a country influential – but they can also make it a target.