Based on archival research, this paper historicizes the creation of Middle Eastern library collections in the United States. During the mid-twentieth century, a series of paradigm shifts rewrote fundamental assumptions about the nature and purpose of American research libraries. The process began during the Second World War, when the military value of “open-source intelligence” from American research libraries popularized the idea of the library as a weapon of war. As the Cold War intensified, librarians launched unprecedented cooperative ventures to provide information to policymakers and researchers in the burgeoning field of area studies, lavishing attention on long-ignored regions suddenly deemed “critical” to national security. These ill-funded efforts had little effect until they received a boost from American agricultural aid. In 1954, Congress passed Public Law 480, allowing foreign governments to purchase American agricultural commodities in their own currencies in the hope of creating new markets of American goods. In 1958, an amendment allowed the Library of Congress to acquire books with these surplus currencies for a select group of American research libraries. Beginning in 1962, an unprecedented flood of books flowed into the United States. Within ten years, the PL 480 office in Cairo had selected, purchased, and distributed over ninety percent of Arabic-language volumes in American libraries. While these measures have built the most comprehensive Middle East collections in the world, enabling much of the scholarship produced in the United States, preoccupations with actionable scholarship and the national interest privileged the kinds of knowledge valued by the security establishment. Neglecting literature in favor of economics, or medieval philosophy in favor of modern political Islam, national interest challenged scholarly inquiry as the primary motive for selecting library materials. Rather than seeking to reduce inequality or increase access, meanwhile, the program has endowed a few elite American universities with even greater resources. This is particularly apparent on a global scale. Concepts of the library as a national security resource led to the collapse of internationalist visions of librarianship. Today, the largest library collections from the Middle East are concentrated in North America, out of reach of the very people they describe, and reinforcing the dominant position of American scholarship. Thus the flows of grain and books set in motion by Cold War fears reproduced the very inequalities and asymmetrical power systems that such aid and scholarship were supposed to manage.