This paper argues that the American University of Beirut (AUB), itself representative of a number of affiliated American colleges in the Middle East, served as a node for the redistribution of intellectuals, white collar workers, politicians, and teachers across a region that was devastated by the Great War and in the process of building successor states from the defunct Ottoman Empire. It finds, contrary to conventional narratives about the growth of American power in the region, that influential factions within the US government and socio-economic elites thought of the Middle East as a potential imperial territory and sought to expand American power in the region through the development of education, among other strategies. The administrators and many of the teachers at the college were committed to rebuilding and “rehabilitating” the Middle East by spreading the ideology of liberal internationalism and creating inroads into the economic and political infrastructure there. They sought to use education and the redistribution of graduates to achieve these goals while circumventing the United States’ official foreign policy of isolationism during the interwar period. Graduates from AUB and other American colleges took up positions in nascent state institutions or settled in urban centers as members of the middle and upper middle class. The results of this attempt to make economic and ideological inroads into a region that was officially dominated by the British and French empires were mixed. Many graduates quickly deviated from the orthodoxy of what they were taught at such colleges. Students tended to repurpose liberal internationalism to suit their own specific needs, and a great many actively engaged in anti-imperial and even anti-American politics on campus and in their new positions post-graduation. At the same time, graduates still bought into the logic of internationalism, liberal capitalism, and, ironically, opposition to European imperialism, all of which greatly benefited the growth of American hegemony in the Middle East. I will use official college newspapers and student published magazines produced at AUB, as well as the records of the Near East Colleges Association (the confederation of American colleges in the Middle East) to discuss how ideology was disseminated to and then adapted by graduates. I will also use the college’s exhaustive alumni directory and the various departmental alumni newsletters to examine the effect that the migration and distribution of graduates had on nation-state building across the Middle East.