Following the first day of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser delivered a speech to the Arab world that accused Amreeka (“America”) of colluding with Israel to the detriment of the national welfare of Arab societies. Many Lebanese embraced this false rumor and concluded that Amreeka—the perceived apotheosis of the nation-state form, defender of self-determination, and global umpire of decolonization—stood in the way of Lebanon’s national development. In the wake of the Arab Naksa (or setback), Lebanese peoples believed that U.S. diplomacy facilitated Israeli settler colonialism and thus endangered Lebanon’s national sovereignty. By facilitating Israeli expansionism and belying Arab rights, Washington clearly chose empire over decolonization and thus betrayed its invented tradition of anti-colonialism. Lebanese perceptions of U.S. global power, at this moment, finalized a profound shift, which had begun during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 and Arab Nakba in Palestine. A cultural process, in others words, consolidated itself in which the United States became an “imperial” power in Lebanese imaginations. Lebanese peoples equated the U.S. way of seeing them and its subsequent conduct and foreign policies to those of fading imperial powers and Cold War allies, Britain and France, and their perceived Middle Eastern surrogate, Israel. Henceforth, Lebanese society viewed the United States as being far from exceptional. By investigating Lebanese newspapers, speeches, and public protests alongside U.S. diplomatic records, this paper explores the ways in which the Lebanese public sphere processed and projected Amreeka during the 1967 war. It argues that the United States’ imperial turn in Lebanese imaginations profoundly shaped Lebanese identity by challenging official and popular thoughts of the nation-state form and solidifying postcolonial ideas regarding the changing nature of the supposed post-imperial international system. In the process, by zoning in on a vibrant Lebanese public sphere, it demonstrates how the Lebanese Cold War fortified imperial structures and interrupted the imagined linear trajectories of the nation-state, decolonization, and modernity.