The Emir of Dubai may be the greatest entrepreneur in history.

A man of vision, he realised that, if the Arab states are to remain wealthy, they must use the oil money while it lasts to develop a self-sustaining economy that will endure when the oil begins to dry up. Spending – and borrowing – lavishly, he has built a huge modern city in the desert, and developed it as a major tourist destination and a centre of the global service sector.

It was an enormous risk, but it looked to be paying off – or at least it did until the recession shook confidence in highly leveraged projects all around the world.

Yet the Emir seems to have kept his nerve. Borrowing from his wealthy neighbour, Abu Dhabi, he has just opened the centrepiece of his city, the tallest building in the world, the 2,700 foot Burj Khalifa – named, diplomatically, after the Emir of Abu Dhabi, his biggest creditor.

If Dubai can weather the next few years, it may still have a glittering future. Global economic power is shifting to the Far East, creating a gap in the market for a half-way point – and Dubai has already established itself as the obvious candidate to fill that gap. Its low tax and low regulation policies will only make it more attractive to Western high achievers in the near future.

Against that, the Middle East remains unstable – politically, environmentally, and geologically.

Many would worry about the hubris of a three-thousand foot tower, especially in this part of the world. Some may remember that it was not far from here that the original Tower of Babel was built – and fell. Others may think of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, in which all that remains of a gigantic statue is a pair of huge feet in the desert.

None of this seems to faze the Emir – which is perhaps what lesser entrepreneurs can learn from him. Sometimes all one has to do in a crisis is keep cool and stick to the plan, and, if one has a real vision for the future, it will triumph in the end.

But if, on the other hand, the vision is defective, we get the Shelley scenario: “Round the decay, Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.”