Courtesy of Fortune magazine, a detailed look at Qatar:

As I stepped out of the car on my first full day in Qatar, the 120-degree heat made me feel as if someone had suctioned the oxygen out of my lungs, then pressed down on my chest.

But through the front door of a small building lay another world: a cool, dark screening room in which no ambition for this tiny country seemed too big, improbable, fanciful — or expensive. As I sank into an armchair, an ice-cold soda in my hand, a 3-D surround-sound video sprang to life from 34 projectors on a three-sided screen, showing the Qatar of the near future. Arab nomads in white robes rode camels over the sand dunes before melting into a cityscape of high-rise towers, air-conditioned soccer stadiums, vast airport terminals, and spotless high-speed electric trains. “It will be spectacular … unlike anything seen,” the narrator cooed as two words fluttered across the screen: “Expect Amazing.”

That may sound like magical thinking. But then this is Qatar: a nation that has already spun natural resources into mind-blowing wealth and outsize global clout in just one generation — and that now looks set to transform itself again. The pintsize power, contained on a peninsula that is smaller than Connecticut and juts out from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf, is the world’s leading exporter by far of liquefied natural gas, thanks to immense offshore reserves. As a result, the fewer than 250,000 native Qataris who make up the country’s population — grandchildren of pearl fishermen — are now the world’s richest people, with an average annual income of about $100,000. They are also the world’s most brazen investors — in property, art, television, sports, mining, and banking. They aggressively snapped up many of those assets at fire-sale prices in the wake of the Great Recession, a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity for countries, like Qatar, with cash to burn.

No region of the world has been left untouched by Qatar’s billions, including the U.S. In Washington, D.C., for example, Qatar invested $620 million in developing CityCenterDC, a shopping and housing complex. And as of Aug. 20, millions of Americans can now switch on TV and watch Qatar’s Al Jazeera America, which just launched with 700 employees at its headquarters in downtown Manhattan.

The Qataris have treated Europe’s capital cities like so many shopping malls. Take London. In Britain’s capital city, acquisitions or investments made by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, and its subsidiaries include Harrods department store; Europe’s tallest building, the Shard; 20% of the London Stock Exchange; and even the U.S. embassy building. In Paris, Qatar owns the city’s biggest department store, Printemps, and its only major soccer club, Paris Saint-Germain. The president of the latter, Nasser al-Khelaifi, 39, a former professional tennis player, also runs the Al Jazeera Sports Network, which recently created beIN Sport, a sports TV network with channels in France, Asia, and the U.S. The new network is eyeing the broadcast rights to Major League Soccer in the U.S. when they come up for bidding in 2014.

But that’s just the beginning. Qatar has large stakes in German industrial giant Siemens, Banco Santander in Brazil, and the Agricultural Bank of China. Qatari investors own the Italian fashion house Valentino outright.

Qatar’s global reach and influence has spread so quickly that it is difficult to fully grasp its dimensions, other than an impression that anything is possible. Little wonder, then, that in that same darkened screening room in 2010, six inspectors from FIFA, the soccer world’s International Football Federation, viewed the video pitch and later handed the World Cup, the biggest sporting event on the planet, to Qatar to host in 2022. “Yes, Qatar has money, but so do many other countries,” says Wael Sawan, chairman of Qatar Shell, who is Lebanese. “When the Qataris decide on something, they just go for it, they finance it, and they go big.”

Although Qatar’s World Cup is still nine years away, it is already shaking up the country, with reportedly as much as $200 billion earmarked for a subway system, freeways, hotels, ports — and air-conditioned stadiums, which will be essential during the blistering summer. The heat is a major hurdle. Recently some in the soccer world have called for the World Cup to be moved to the winter, which would be disruptive to professional leagues, or to be taken away from Qatar altogether. Expect the Qataris to spend whatever it takes to prevent losing it.

Why is the World Cup so important to Qatar? In exclusive interviews with Fortune, top officials say they are seizing on the event to push through a much longer-term agenda: creating a post-oil-and-gas Qatar — a streamlined, diverse economy capable of operating on equal footing with the West. “This is about delivering the very best that money can provide,” says Hassan al-Thawadi, the 34-year-old head of the World Cup 2022 Supreme Committee. Expected to attract about 1 million visitors and more than 1 billion TV viewers, the World Cup is a unique platform, he says, for convincing Westerners that not all of the Middle East is repressive and unstable. “No other sport is capable of having such a unifying effect,” says Thawadi, a British-trained lawyer who is also general counsel to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. “It will break down stereotypes.”

As if to underscore the significance of Qatar’s impending changes, the country’s ruler did something in June that is unheard-of in this region: He quit. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani announced on Qatar TV, a government-run channel, that he was immediately handing power to his young son, Sheikh Tamim. Visibly delighted at his retirement at age 61, the older emir said that “the time has come to turn a new leaf” and that Qatar needed to be led by “the new generation … with their dynamic potential and creative thoughts.”

At 33, Qatar’s new ruler is astonishingly young compared with the other Persian Gulf royals, who typically die in office. (Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, for example, is 89.) A tall, athletic soccer buff, an ardent tennis player, and (like Britain’s Prince William) a graduate of the U.K.’s Sandhurst Military Academy, Sheikh Tamim has inherited not only great wealth but also huge political influence. His father spent generously on Sunni causes around the Middle East, lavishing support on Libyan and Syrian rebels, Hamas in Gaza, and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Sheikh Tamim has inherited a country unrecognizable from the backwater his father took over when he became emir in 1995. Then few Americans had ever heard of Qatar, let alone knew how to pronounce it. (For the record, the correct way is “KA-tur.”) The country’s profile has grown in part as a result of Al Jazeera, which the new emir’s father created in 1996 in an effort to give Qatar international branding as its wealth grew. “He has managed to achieve a quiet, gradual, and comprehensive revolution,” the new leader said of his father in a televised address two days after taking power while sitting at his desk in front of an ornate credenza topped with carved gazelles.

With Tamim on the throne, Qatar’s young bucks, a cadre of twenty- and thirtysomethings, are now in charge. That could lead to big shifts in the nation’s approach to business and investments. Theirs is the first generation with no experience with Qatar’s simple nomadic past, or any apprehension that their wealth might someday dwindle. With about 25.4 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and a mammoth 890 trillion cubic feet of natural-gas reserves, Qatar’s energy wealth is hugely disproportionate to its size. And it has growing investments in natural-gas production elsewhere, including a new partnership with Exxon to build a $10 billion LNG export terminal in Texas.

Multilingual, wired, and educated at top Western prep schools and universities, Qatar’s young leaders have already run major enterprises and negotiated multimillion-dollar deals at an age when many young Americans and Europeans are still struggling to launch their careers. Despite the fact that Qatar is a devoutly Wahhabi Muslim country, the capital city of Doha is increasingly Western in feel, with cafés and entertainment (despite the burqa-clad women), a modern-art museum, a spectacular Museum of Islamic Art designed by I.M. Pei, and a $434 million National Museum under construction. Qatar Airways flies to dozens of cities around the globe, from Chengdu to Chicago. A new airport, scheduled to open soon, will ultimately be capable of moving 50 million passengers a year. And Education City, outside Doha, houses satellite campuses of Georgetown University, Texas A&M, and Carnegie Mellon — schools that many of the young Qatari stars attended in the U.S. “We literally all know each other,” says Tamim al-Kawari, 38, CEO of the Doha investment bank QInvest, who has an MBA from American University in Washington and previously ran Goldman Sachs’s Qatar operation. “We are all related.”

The new crowd’s influence extends to almost every facet of Qatar’s business. At 25, the new emir’s younger brother Mohammed is the managing director of the 2022 World Cup Committee. Their sister, Sheikha Mayassa, 30, who has an MBA from Columbia University, heads Qatar’s Museum Authority and is among the world’s most important art buyers. Last year she spent more than $250 million for “The Card Players” by Paul Cézanne, the highest price ever paid for a painting. Ahmad al-Sayed, the new head of the $85 billion Qatar Investment Authority, is 37. So, too, is Fahad bin Mohammed al-Attiya, chairman of Qatar’s National Food Security Program, who aims to create an agricultural industry virtually from scratch.

Yet for all their sophistication, it is unclear whether this generation will pull off what could be Qatar’s most important transition of all — turning their rich country into a democratic one too. Qatar allows women to drive, work, and serve as cabinet ministers. But the government remains overwhelmingly male and is run in a strictly top-down way. Although the former emir promised two years ago that Qatar would hold parliamentary elections by the end of 2013, the idea has scarcely been mentioned since, and the constitution makes the emir’s power “inviolable.” In my conversations with Qataris, none mentioned democratic reforms as being among their many ambitions. Rather, there was a sense of pride that their new emir was installed without a single protest. That, they believe, is resounding proof that Qatar is not a repressive Middle East country.

Many Qataris assured me that Sheikh Tamim’s rule would be no different from his father’s. But some of Doha’s palace watchers detect deep shifts ahead — ones that could ripple through the financial world. They cite Tamim’s debut speech as ruler. After heaping praise on his father’s legacy, he became surprisingly candid, suggesting that some officials have been responsible for “poor planning and mismanagement” and that his government would be “more tough and clear on the results” of investments. Al-Attiya, the food-security head who knows the new emir well, says he expects “a dramatic shift toward increasing performance and helping the private sector achieve their needs.”

That seemed clear three days after the new emir took power, when he replaced Qatar’s best-known political veteran, Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. Al-Thani had simultaneously served as prime minister, foreign minister, and chief executive of the sovereign wealth fund, overseeing the nation’s global buying binge. While few foresee wholesale cutbacks in Qatar’s foreign investments, there could be a more cautious approach as the country channels billions into the World Cup buildup. “The message people take away from the new emir is that Qatar will be more accountable,” says Patrick Forbes, CEO of the Doha public relations firm Forbes Associates, who has been a close palace watcher for years (and has no relation, ahem, to a certain business magazine that shares his name). “Qatar will continue spending and investing, but they want to see results. And you will probably see more investment inside Qatar rather than outside.”

From afar, Qatar’s image is of a sleek powerhouse where money brings an easy solution to every problem. But close up, the cracks in its sparkling façade become evident almost from the moment one lands in Doha. For one thing, Qatar is utterly dependent on foreign workers. The airport terminal teems with people, but most are workers from the Philippines, India, and elsewhere. More than 85% of the country’s 1.9 million or so inhabitants are foreigners, who are contract workers with no path to citizenship. The vast majority are low-paid laborers, such as construction workers, cleaners, and drivers, who earn a few hundred dollars a month toiling under conditions that have been sharply criticized by human-rights organizations. Qatar is drafting new labor laws specifically for the World Cup in order to pass muster internationally.

Despite a government push for companies to hire more Qataris, there are dire shortages of professionals everywhere. Even about 80% of the soldiers and policemen are foreign. This mishmash throws up comic moments. After landing in Doha, I asked an airport security guard for help reading Arabic directions, before realizing he didn’t know the language either. Traveling in from the airport, along the spectacular seafront, its skyscrapers glittering with neon, I asked the Eritrean taxi driver how he likes Qatar. “They’re rich,” he said, “but they don’t share.”

Indeed, with so few Qataris to run things, wealth and management are intensely concentrated. Top officials and CEOs have multiple jobs, run numerous companies, and make endless decisions, especially in the state-run enterprises that dominate the Qatari economy. This means delays, including in payments. “Decisions that would take days or maybe weeks in the U.S. take months or years here,” says a U.S. lawyer based in Doha who did not want to be named. “The attitude is, ‘We won’t lose anyone if we pay slowly,’ since Qatar has everyone in the world knocking on their door, looking for money.”

And yet Qatar’s wealth might not be limitless. Shortly before the new emir was crowned in June, a government report warned that growth could drop from 5.3% this year to 4.5% next year because of slower expansion of the oil and gas industry, and that real GDP per capita had fallen sharply since 2011. Accurate economic forecasting is difficult in Qatar, however, because of a lack of solid data. State-run entities that appear awash in cash get money from state coffers, and the sovereign wealth fund’s accounts are secret. A plan to open a sliver of the fund to outside investors was shelved last year, perhaps because the move would have required it to open its books to scrutiny.

The lack of financial transparency has created intense resentment among some Western executives, who say that Qatar has a blank check to outbid them on contracts, with no accountability to shareholders. In France, for example, the paid-subscription TV network Canal Plus sued beIN Sport in July for unfair competition, saying beIN was grabbing major broadcast rights by offering excessive sums, effectively luring away Canal Plus subscribers, whose fees pay for its other programming. As the West continues to recover from the Great Recession, there may be more pushback.

Qatar’s economic miracle is precarious in other ways too. Having eked out a bare-bones economy from pearl fishing until the 1940s, before its oil and gas discoveries, Qatar skipped over some basics, like building farms and big reservoirs. The desert country has limited food stocks and, shockingly, just 67 hours — less than three days — of stored water. It imports 90% of its food, and three-quarters of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow chokepoint close to Iran. After the 2008 economic crisis sent food prices rocketing, Qatar launched the National Food Security Program, which aims to have Qatar growing 40% of its food by 2025. That target is daunting, considering that Qatar has almost no farmers today. “The most vulnerable countries in the future will be food importers,” says al-Attiya, who heads the program. “We need to go from ancient farming to 21st-century practices.”

Qatari officials, together with Western security experts, recently gamed out a nightmare scenario, which goes something like this: The Strait of Hormuz is severely disrupted — for example, by a nuclear test, a giant oil spill, or a war with Iran (the U.S. military’s regional Centcom base is in Qatar). Oil and gas exports are disrupted. Qatar seeks out alternative food and water supplies and begins rationing. Many foreign workers leave the country, and construction and all social services rapidly slow down. “These are issues that are out of sight,” says Jonathan Smith, al-Attiya’s senior adviser, who is from Oklahoma. “Until we are in the red zone, we don’t think about it.”

Well, in the past that was true. Today, however, as Qatar tries to move beyond its energy riches to stage a global sporting mega-event and define its post-World Cup agenda, the new generation in power is beginning to plot its future very carefully. And it expects amazing.