From intervention as exception to intervention as normalcy: Explaining the evolution of UAE national security and foreign policy

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has emerged as one of the Middle East’s most influential regional actors. Yet, existing scholarship largely explains this transformation through leadership change, particularly the rise of Mohammed bin Zayed, or through the country’s growing material capabilities. This article argues that these explanations overlook the evolution of the UAE’s national security strategy. It examines how changing domestic and regional threat perceptions have reshaped Emirati national security since the federation’s establishment in 1971. This research is a single-country longitudinal case study of document analysis using process tracing to examine the country’s increasingly interventionist foreign policy as the external manifestation of successive changes in its national security strategy. The article develops a conceptual framework that defines the UAE’s current foreign policy as selective interventionism, combining discursive and material interventionist practices with objectives of order transformation and order maintenance. The selective interventionism links national security strategy, foreign policy, and intervention before tracing the evolution of Emirati security thinking across three phases: state survival and federation building (1971–late 1970s), coalition security and exceptional intervention (1980–2011), and the normalization of selective intervention following the Arab Uprisings (2011–present). It argues that each phase reflects a distinct national security logic that redefined the objectives and instruments of Emirati foreign policy.