In recent years, a growing number of experts claiming personal and familial ties to the Middle East have joined elite foreign policy think tanks in Washington DC in an effort to shape US policy debates on this complex region, particularly after the 2011 uprisings across the Arab world. Through more than two years of ethnographic research within DC, this study contends that such diasporic experts have come to play a specialized role for US empire. Specifically, I argue that they serve as “multiplicitous diplomats,” who use their connections to the region to navigate and translate the interests of competing political elites, governments, and corporations that seek to influence US policies in Washington through the strategic circulation of ideas, people, and funding to and from the Middle East. Such observations firstly reveal the extent to which the US empire operates in practice as a transnationally-contested site of power. Secondly, this study demonstrates how the “Middle East” operates within and enacts influence over the US, as these diasporic experts bring the voices, anxieties, and power of entities in the region and its many diasporas into elite US policy debates.