It begins, as these things often do, with a disruption to routine. The flight boards at Heathrow flicker with cancellations. Travel insurance small print is scrutinised with newfound urgency. The Kuwait airport attack, a brazen strike on civilian infrastructure, has reshaped the contours of a crisis that now feels inescapably personal. For the millions who move between the Gulf and the West, this is no longer a geopolitical abstraction. It is a cancelled holiday, a stranded relative, a gnawing sense that the world is contracting.
On Tuesday, the US and Iran exchanged fresh strikes, their rhetoric hardening even as diplomats stumbled through back channels. The attack on Kuwait’s airport killed 14, a grim reminder that in this asymmetric conflict, the sanctuaries of ordinary life are no longer sacrosanct. The airport was a symbol of transit and connection. Now it is a crime scene, its glass-strewn halls echoing with the silence of halted journeys.
In the cafes of Knightsbridge and the business lounges of Dubai, the talk is of contingencies. Oil prices spike, stock markets twitch, and the word 'escalation' loses its clinical distance. But the real story is on the ground, in the lives of people who woke up to a world that had subtly shifted. In Kuwait City, families cancel trips to the mall. In Tehran, long queues form at petrol stations. In London, the Iranian diaspora watches with a dual anxiety: fear for relatives back home, and a creeping dread of being implicated in a crisis not of their making.
The cultural shift is palpable. A wariness seeps into everyday interactions. Airport security, already a theatre of suspicion, tightens another notch. Social media feeds fill with sermons and slogans, but also with the quiet, desperate pleas of people caught between powers. The human cost is not just in casualties, but in the erosion of the mundane: the spontaneity of a weekend getaway, the ease of a business trip, the simple act of crossing a border without a flutter of dread.
Class dynamics, too, assert themselves. The wealthy retreat to gated compounds and private aviation. The middle classes check their savings and cancel plans. The working poor, many of them migrant labourers, have no such option. They are the ones who clean the airports and staff the hotels, their lives laid bare to risk without the buffer of privilege. Their stories rarely make the headlines, but they are the ones who will feel this most acutely.
This is not the first Gulf crisis, and it will not be the last. But each iteration chips away at something essential: the belief that the world is stable, that travel is free, that borders are benign. We are not at war. But we are living in its shadow. And the shadow is growing longer.
