ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the challenge of defining power and explains power as it pertains to small states, suggesting it is better understood from a relative power perspective because it attributes influence and power in terms of capabilities and relationships. It provides a series of examples that demonstrate that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) possesses dimensions of power from a relational point of view and suggests this explains its foreign policy activism, or defensive foreign policy, which is aimed at diversifying its security risks. Realists posit that the goal of any state is to maximize power relative to another or produce a ‘balance of power’. UAE foreign policy from 2004 to 2016 illustrates what the UAE considers to be risks and its strategies to mitigate them. The UAE, as a small state, employs more proactive than defensive risk-diversification strategies at times as a result of capability it has accumulated in some power domains.
