Enhancing international performance is a critical issue for internationalizing SMEs. Researchers have suggested that firms need to enhance their international market orientation (IMO) in order to increase performance; but the way this association works is rather unexplored. This is important for both theory and practice since its exploration would lead to a better understanding on how SMEs can effectively enhance their international performance. In this paper, we examine whether alliances through which firms access knowledge and resources play a mediating role in the IMO and performance relationship. We investigate our hypothesis on a sample of 94 companies based in the United Arab Emirates. We discovered that alliances mediate the IMO-performance relationship and we extend the knowledge- and resource-based views of the firm.