I'm currently on a short visit to the Arab Gulf, organized by the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It's the sort of study tour that DC think tank analysts, national newspaper columnists, and media pundits of all sorts engage in on a regular basis - they are invaluable for making contacts, facilitating dialogue between countries, and learning about a new aspect of some policy challenges our country is facing. I've already outlined some of my initial perspectives on the first few days here in the United Arab Emirates in this post earlier today.

The UAE - which I'll refer to as the Emirates in shorthand here - is known for many things these days: an indoor ski slope in the desert, man-made islands like the Palm Island shown here (where our delegation just had dinner at the home of a senior government official), and a rapidly expanding skyline of luxurious hotels and office buildings shown in this video here.

But just a few short years ago, the Emirates was best known for being at the center of a mini-firestorm in DC policy circles linked to a proposed policy that would have given a firm in Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, operational control over a handful of U.S. ports. The Emirates got hammered in the public furor that erupted - with Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle engaging in a bit of demagoguery that ended up killing the idea. At one point, fully seven in ten Americans opposed the ports deal.

The Emirates quickly learned how to play the Washington game the right way - first it hired a bevy of lobbyists to help them navigate the choppy waters of a post-9/11 America that by 2006 had just gotten really grumpy about Iraq and pretty much all things about the Middle East. Dubai hired firms to help it fend off a lawsuit about under-age camel jockeys used in the country, and it got some Washington insiders to lobby for a range of defense and aerospace interests here in the Emirates. Less than a year later, the Dubai Group announced a major deal to give Bourse Dubai a 20 percent stake in the NASDAQ stock exchange in the United States - and no complaints or opposition materialized, as outlined in this Businessweek article.

The think tank delegation like the one I'm on are just one tiny piece of a much broader puzzle of trying to help the Emiratis make their case to the American people and policy elites and opinion formers. I have much more to say about the pros and cons of these sorts of trips which I'll share later - but I'll say these two things now.

First, it's a growing trend in the world of policy analysis and it reflects the globalized nature of politics and policy. Countries around the world becoming more attuned to each others' internal politics. Many more countries around the world are finding time in the busy schedules of their senior government and business leaders to host such delegations for a meeting. I do it all the time with visiting dignitaries and thinkers from around the world who come to the Center for American Progress.

Second, there's nothing inherently invidious about such trips so long as people who are on these trips are honest enough to disclose what they are doing and smart enough to discount the spin that they are likely to hear from the people they meet. In my view, however, the growing trend of U.S.-government sponsored trips to war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan for oped columnists and think tankers are more inherently problematic than some of these trips, particularly when the sponsorship of the trip is not fully disclosed by a talking head.

More on the trip in posts later this week.