On September 11, 2001, as Islamic terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center and brought down its towers in fire and smoke, the Emiratis were still basking in the glow of their success as organizers of the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF), rated by travel gurus as the “ greatest   event   on   earth .” Little did they know that the unprecedented nature of the attack in which two of their fellow citizens were involved, would upend their decades-long relationship with the United States and strip them of the American military security cover to which the United Arab Emirates (UAE), like its neighboring Gulf states, owed much of its political stability and economic success. With President Bush abandoning the Gulf to zero-in on Iraq in the U.S. Global War on Terror, less than two years later, the Emiratis had braced themselves for the inevitable. They began to diversify their geostrategic partnerships, recalibrate their economic goals, and embark on an assertive foreign policy marrying the two. Experimenting with this double-edged foreign policy, the Emiratis, under the leadership of Abu Dhabi, looked west beyond the Persian Gulf toward Africa. With East Africa as ground zero, they began building a composite regional security order comprising ports, shipping terminals, special economic zones, and naval bases, which now flank the continent on its west in the Atlantic and stretch out to as far as south and Southeast Asia in the Indian Ocean. This emerging maritime order or “Abu Dhabi’s project of militarized commerce,” which I have earlier referred to as “the Southern Tier in the Middle East,” has more than given Emiratis the edge     in     transport     and     logistics     operations worldwide and secured their grip over global supply chains in energy, oil, and mineral resources. Indeed, the Southern Tier’s blending of the commercial and the strategic has unleashed a new dynamic culminating in the UAE coming into its own in global politics. The UAE’s emergence in the spotlight as a “middle power” with economic and political capabilities has been viewed by many as threatening to the U.S.-dominated liberal international order. Why that remains the case and what lies at the core of the Emiratis’ ability to unsettle Pax Americana are questions that International Relations scholars and foreign policy analysts continue to grapple with. The UAE, with a population of about 10 million (87 percent of which is expatriate), one of the highest GDPs per capita globally, and a territory smaller     than     Portugal , behaves less like a territorial state and more like a trading corporation or merchant diaspora with commercial, financial, and political ties in multiple places. Dubai Ports World (DP World) and Abu Dhabi Ports Group (AD Ports Group), both of which are state-owned corporations, give the UAE ample flexibility to invest in infrastructures and partner with local businesses at various stages in the supply chain. Besides yielding rents and profits, these grassroots level entanglements offer the Emiratis adequate scope to forge   social   relations with   local   tribal   communities   and   ethnic   groups , gaining exclusive access to mines, agricultural land, and commodities. Meanwhile, the UAE’s status as a sovereign state recognized by the international community, allows it to enter into bilateral treaties, trade agreements, and defense partnerships with states where these corporations and allied businesses have substantial stakes, all in the name of securing and protecting the latter’s investments. By alternating between the dual logic of capitalist enterprise and territorial power, the UAE has carved out a niche for itself and occupied a place in the international system that neither great nor small powers can. With small and weak players, particularly conflict-ridden, resource rich states in Africa, it steps into the shoes of great powers like the United States, offering aid, development assistance, and loans and humanitarian engagement, but without the ideological baggage of democracy or insisting on the rule of law. However, unlike the international institutions, NGOs, and aid agencies that the U.S. utilizes to channel funds, the UAE falls back on the social networks and conduits that move goods and commodities from the hinterland to ports and special economic zones owned by DP World and other state-owned enterprises to accomplish its mission. These very same networks and conduits double as the arteries of the illegal gold and weapons trade, exacerbating civil wars on the continent and allegedly overseen by private military contractors working for Abu Dhabi. When the U.S. and its western allies accuse    the    UAE    of interventionism and backing militia groups in these conflicts, it can peel back this layer of traffic, transfer   these   networks   to   the   Russians , and claim plausible deniability, citing trade, rather than military involvement by the state, as its primary objective. A foreign policy hinged on social networks of non-state players that lend themselves to a wide array of applications by multiple states and their commercial and strategic instruments, empowers the UAE to create bilateral connections and entanglements with great powers on either side of the ideological divide, while claiming neutrality in their rivalry against each other. This neutrality has enabled it to secure a place in global institutions like the United Nations that once served as custodians of the liberal international order. As the liberal order crumbles under the weight of meddlers and middle powers like the UAE, and the U.S. remains mired in a myriad other foreign policy priorities, the world stands at an inflection point with multiple powers having room for maneuver without ever becoming a hegemon.