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RichardKennaway comments on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014 - Less Wrong
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At this point in a discussion one would have to dissolve the word "country" and ask what properties of Dubai are important to the discussion. A glance at a few Wikipedia articles indicates that the UAE is a federation of kingdoms, in which all powers not explicitly granted to the federation are retained by the members, each of which has absolute sovereignty within its borders under a hereditary king. Before the UAE was created, the emirates were absolute sovereign entities (i.e. "countries"). After it was created what were they? Well, "are" the members of the EU "countries"? Yes. "Are" the states of the US? No. "Is" Dubai? Doesn't matter, look instead at the question of substance, which was:
Dubai might want to first informally square things with the other members of the UAE (or at least, the one other member that matters, Abu Dhabi), but establishing overseas colonies, er, charter cities, would not necessarily be an activity that would officially concern the UAE federal entity.
I never intended to enter the discussion in the first place; my original comment was parenthetical. I was simply pointing out a verifiable, objective, yet quite possibly tangential matter of fact that some participants (or readers) may have been unaware of.
Whether Dubai is a country or a part of a country is not a question that there's any ambiguity about. It's not a subject of dispute, as in the case of e.g. Taiwan. It's a simple matter of looking the answer up in Wikipedia. If you want to question the answer you find there, fine, but then you have to question the notion of "country" in general, and acknowledge that you're doing so, otherwise you're not being intellectually honest.