When war broke out in the Middle East last week, it plunged the travel industry into the kind of chaos not seen since the pandemic. Thousands of flights to or from the Gulf have been canceled; Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s airports sustained damage from Iranian weaponry. Since these countries have all staked their future on cheap and efficient connections that have knitted the U.S. East Coast and Europe to Asia and Australia for years, this is a big deal. The travel industry—and therefore the flow of people and capital—is about to reconfigure.
And Singapore is ready. Last year, its government placed a bet on the future at a time when tiny, wealthy city-states seem more fragile than ever, beginning work on a new terminal—able to handle about 50 million passengers a year—at its legendary Changi Airport, routinely voted the world’s best. At the groundbreaking ceremony in May, Singapore prime minister Lawrence Wong drew a parallel with history that now seems a little uncanny, referring to Changi’s origin story. In the 1970s, unrest in the Middle East and soaring oil prices cast a shadow over the world, he said, and Singapore’s prime minister at the time, Lee Kuan Yew, faced a choice: Make an existing airport a little bigger, or spend far more developing a huge, entirely new, state-of-the-art location at the island’s easternmost tip. Lee chose the bolder course of action, and Singapore became the global travel hub it is now.
