The Middle East has always been a hotspot of human activity, where prophets walked the deserts, empires rose and fell and trade routes distributed spices, knowledge and culture across three continents. It’s also the birthplace of traditions that underpin the modern spa.
While visiting Saudi Arabia recently, I explored the vast construction sites of Neom, just one of a collection of futuristic giga-projects designed to transform Saudi Arabia into a hub for global tourism with total projected investment over US$8 trillion (€6.8 trillion, £5.9 trillion).
Yet, while engineers and architects are constructing the cities of tomorrow, renewed conflict in the region raises a profound question: Will the future be shaped by war or by wellness?
Tourism or terrorism?
The currency of wellness is connection. Wellness thrives on openness, freedom of movement, cultural exchange and trust between people. Wellness, therefore, requires tourism and people crossing borders and experiencing new landscapes, cultures and healing traditions in the pursuit of human flourishing.
Wellness tourism creates incentives for cooperation, stability and long-term destination value
War and terrorism operate in the opposite direction. Tourism requires open borders and investment in local infrastructure. War closes borders and creates technology that destroys infrastructure. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
This tension is particularly evident in the Middle East, a region that’s been a centre of medicine, scholarship and wellness for millennia.
During the Islamic Golden Age, the Persian polymath Avicenna described a holistic approach to health based on simple, repeatable lifestyle practices: contrast bathing, immersion in nature, and oxymels (tonics made from vinegar, honey, and herbs). These practices embody what modern biohackers and wellness practitioners are rediscovering today: that simple practices, when done consistently, create positive feedback loops with asymmetrical benefits.
The asymmetry of war and wellness
The current Middle East conflict demonstrates that asymmetry is a defining feature of modern warfare. Low-cost technologies like drones are capable of causing damage worth billions.
Wellness has the opposite logic. Many wellness practices are asymmetric to the upside. This suggests the spa industry could become a powerful cultural force.
Simple practices often deliver civilisation’s greatest returns / Peninsula Hot Springs
Wellness as geopolitics
The wellness sector rarely sees itself as part of geopolitics. Yet it should.
Unlike extractive industries that concentrate wealth around finite resources, wellness tourism is a service industry that depends on healthy ecosystems, cultural diversity and peaceful environments. A hot spring, mountain trail, or hammam becomes more valuable when shared. Thus, wellness tourism does more than generate revenue; it cultivates the social conditions that make peace a rational economic choice.
Can wellness overcome war?
The global wellness economy is now valued at approximately US$6.8 trillion (€5.81 trillion, £5.04 trillion); more than twice the global military economy of US$2.7 trillion (€2.3 trillion, £2 trillion). But scale alone is not sufficient.
It’s important to examine where investment flows. Wellness developments concentrated on luxury urban destinations accessible only to the affluent don’t build the trust that makes peace durable. Yet, a wellness economy anchored in practices such as thermal bathing, immersion in nature and traditional healing practices available at almost every price point, fosters the conditions for peace and prosperity.
The currency of wellness tourism is connection, trust and human restoration
The goal then is not simply a bigger wellness industry. It’s a more distributed, culturally rooted and accessible one, in which the spa and thermal bathing sector plays a leading role.
What this means for spas
The spa industry doesn’t have to be a passive spectator of world events. It can be an active participant in the choice between war and wellness. By creating beautiful, well-managed places where people feel truly alive, spas contribute more than revenue. They contribute to the social conditions that make peace a rational choice.
Every spa that invests in its natural surroundings, waters, botanicals and cultural heritage, creates an economic argument for protecting that environment. Every operator that trains staff in service and traditional healing practices helps keep living culture alive. Every wellness retreat that welcomes guests from different nations, faiths and backgrounds is engaged in practical diplomacy.
A spa is not a luxury. It’s infrastructure for human flourishing. And the world needs that infrastructure now more than ever.
A choice for civilisation
Humanity now faces an extraordinary choice. War or wellness? Will we continue to invest in weapon systems designed to degrade human life and infrastructure? Or will we invest in places where people can genuinely flourish?
In the end, the most powerful infrastructure we can build may not be a mirrored megacity or a missile defence system, but a global wellness culture where we’re all so interconnected and invested in the pursuit of wellness that war becomes unthinkable.
Immersion in nature shapes stronger, healthier societies, says Cohen / Dr Marc Cohen
