During the Cold War, the US constructed an Arabia that needed to be developed and adopted modern architecture’s apolitical expression in its embassy buildings and Trade Fairs to reshape geopolitical borders and export American modernization schemes across the globe. Using archival material, this paper unpacks postwar American representations of the Middle East and American displays of prowess in overseas trade fairs. By coupling these two aspects of representation, this paper illustrates how the US created the need for aid and how it went about to systematically construct the conditions in which the American, rather than Soviet, methods of modernization were adopted. US experts used maps, aerial, and street photographs to constructed an environmental imaginary of the Middle East in which its society, architecture and landscape were undeveloped, backward and primitive. Through these projections, aid programs visually demonstrating that the region met the established criteria of “underdevelopment”, its susceptibility to encroachment of communism, and in need for modernization. This constructed imaginary enabled American experts to draw parallels between the environments they were familiar with and the new ones where aid was to be delivered. In doing so, American experts first, projected what they knew so that they would be able to operate in foreign landscapes, and second, they replaced the existing environmental imaginary. Based on this, US experts relied on the New Deal development arsenal that modernized the American South to modernize the Middle East. Between 1956 and 1964, the US participated in Trade Fairs in Damascus, Casablanca, Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis which used modern architecture to depict the US’s neutrality and distance itself from the colonial enterprise. With a prefabricated concrete shell pavilion outfitted with a full-scale pharmacy and operating room, a modern bedroom and kitchen, and a farm, US pavilions centered around the domestic and rural spheres. These scenes constructed for US pavilions became a place to showcase American prowess and also a place in which ideologies were confronted head on. Besides embassy buildings, Trade Fairs were the only places in which the American modernization project could be compared to the Soviet model as both were on full display. Through actively constructed the region with maps and photographs and by displayed itself as apolitical and neutral, the US reshaped geographies, landscapes, and the urban fabric.