Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan
Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan was president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi from November 2004, when his father Zayed died after thirty-three years, to May 2022, when he died and his half-brother Mohamed, who had run the country since Khalifa's stroke of January 2014, took the title he had held in fact. The eighteen years were the boom that made Dubai and Abu Dhabi the cities the world flies through, the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on earth, named for him on its opening night in January 2010 because Abu Dhabi had just lent Dubai the twenty billion dollars that saved it from default. There was the sovereign wealth fund that grew to a trillion dollars, the Louvre and the Guggenheim bought for Saadiyat island, the Barakah nuclear plant, the first in the Arab world. There was the Emirati air force over Libya in 2011 and Yemen from 2015, the ports from Djibouti to Berbera, and the state that answered the Arab spring by jailing the ninety-four signatories of a petition for an elected parliament in 2013 and making itself the region's counter-revolution. He was born in Al Ain in 1948, Zayed's eldest son, and was educated at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was Zayed's crown prince from 1969, his prime minister in Abu Dhabi, and his deputy commander of the federal armed forces from 1976. He was the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the supreme petroleum council, the offices that made him the manager of the money while his father was the founder and his half-brother, from the 1990s, the soldier and the strategist. He was quiet, disliked the cameras, and hunted with falcons in Morocco and Kazakhstan. He paid for the mosque in Abu Dhabi and the hospital in Al Ain that carry his father's name. After the stroke he appeared rarely, in photographs. The decrees carried his name while Mohamed bin Zayed received the presidents. He died on 13 May 2022 at seventy-three. The country declared forty days of mourning. The federal council elected Mohamed the next day, which had been the arrangement for eight years.
- Lived: 1948 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Emirati
- Roles: president, monarch, emir
