In 1954, NYU signed a contract with the University of Ankara to develop public and business administration in Turkey. NYU-Ankara project entailed curriculum development, research activities, and academic exchange programs. Much has been written on the global circulation of expertise during the Cold War and the expanding influence of American social science in countries such as Turkey. Cold War assistance programs at the time were simultaneously about economic development and US military concerns. American representations of aid at the time were articulated in a language of philanthropy. US assistance programs were following the method of “aided self-help.” Such characterizations included manifestations of earlier Western imperial concerns, including the civilizing mission and colonial paternalism. In this essay, I contend that Cold War American imperialism provides opportunities to dissect governmental categories extrapolated to establish a global administrative standard. Going through Turkish and US documents from the era, I propose to trace the intermingled development of three concepts: administration, security, and care. American and UN projects regarded education and administrative capacity as crucial to economic development in the 1950s. My central argument is that the US-Turkey networks of people and knowledge created at the time not only contributed to the making of modern Turkey but also opened up a field of possibilities for improvising the relationship between the ruler and the ruled in the Global South. For the American observers, economic growth appetite had to be tamed in the case of Turkey because of its unwarranted adverse effects on regime stability and military capabilities. Rationalization ought to be the answer for administrative incompetence, yet for the Turkish observers, skepticism reigned over establishing a new regime of care for the population. Turkey was an undeveloped agrarian country, and securing the “free world” had to go together with securing the Turkish peasant. However, these two motives did not mean the same to every actor. In this regard, categories were always subject to change and interpretation. As Cemal Mıhçıoğlu, a faculty member in political science at Ankara University, would say to his foreign counterpart, he was “an interpreter in every sense of the word.” Therefore, in this essay, I focus on the shifting definitions of securing, caring, and administrating in Cold War Turkey. In this way, I will not only show the historical development of Turkish raison d’état but also shed light on the relationship between economic development and regimes of care in a broader context.