This paper explores multiple spatialities and subjectivities of Gulf "technostate" ideals through the case of American and American-style higher education in the region. American university globalization has increasingly targeted and been courted by authoritarian states. While the reasons for these partnerships are manifold—including the ease of top-down large-scale monetary investment, “knowledge economy” development strategies, social engineering programs, and other corporate and imperial entanglements—an overwhelming discourse has emerged around higher education initiatives in places like the Arabian Peninsula, China, Singapore, and Central Asia, which juxtaposes liberalism (in the form of higher education) with the illiberal, authoritarian contexts it is supposedly encountering within the framework of neoliberal globalization. While critics in the American academy have pegged these projects to increasing corporatization of academia, with some also arguing that they are linked to US imperial interests in a post 9/11 era, we have found in our research within branch campuses in Qatar and the UAE that Western educators are motivated by a complex set of interests that include neoliberal and imperial inclinations but are not reducible to them. More importantly, by focusing on the discursive rather than empirical elements of this research, we highlight how the notion of “liberal education” operates as a global discourse of power through American branch campuses in the Arabian Peninsula and by extension other nondemocratic states around the world. Specifically, we argue that the very concept of authoritarianism is discursively produced in and through these university projects, and simultaneously builds (upon) an idealized narrative about the national self in the United States that erases existing and emerging inequalities—indeed, authoritarianisms—within the home spaces of American academia.