How would a small liberal arts college view a PhD from Germany or the UK? Factors other than teaching ops? Main concern: I am looking at PhD programs in Germany and the UK (vs US programs). Ideally, I would like to end up at a small liberal arts college (I got my BA from one). So I know I want a program with teaching requirements. I think this rules out France and Switzerland, but I believe many German PhD programs have teaching requirements. I also think the UK has teaching opportunities as well. 

Are there other factors I should be thinking about? 

Specific Concerns I've thought of

First, am I wrong in my assumption that there are only small liberal arts colleges in the US? Or are there places in Europe, where you can get the same research, teaching, and mentorship balance? 

I know that liberal arts departments are smaller. Should I be worried that a foreign school that is good in my field might not be known in the department that I am applying to?

Also, I had a friend at Oxford, who said that she would need to do a postdoc (in a field that doesn't normally require them), because US universities will not see her 2 year masters + 3 year PhD, as equivalent to a master + 5 year PhD in the US. I'm in the sciences and my field doesn't normally require a masters. Should I also be concerned? 

Reasons
I am currently a Master student in a European program that allows us to do research in multiple countries (theoretically anywhere that will take us, but we have specific connections to France, Germany, and Switzerland). So far I really like the science culture here. I like how easy it is to collaborate with and even work in different labs. In my experience, PhD students in the US just don't have the mobility that EU students. I have an interdisciplinary focus, so this is very attractive to me. I also am interested in a very specific topic and there is better funding for it in Germany and (I think) in the UK. 

In the US, it is hard to find a school with more than one lab working on the topic, I'm most interested in, so I like the idea of applying to the lab rather than the school. I am willing to consider working on related areas, but I'm not sure if I can spend 5 to 7 years working on something that is only tangential to my main interests. On the other hand, my Master program has a general focus and I would be interested in taking more classes that are specific to my main interests.
It's hard to get a job teaching in America unless you do the degree in America. This is because so much of getting an academic job, especially at a small teaching college is going to depend upon personal connections. 

Think about it from their point of view. The hiring committee wants somebody who is a good scholar, a good teacher, and a good citizen of the department (in some order, which factors are more important differ from school to school). It's really hard to evaluate somebody in depth along all three of those axes. It's even harder when you have a pile of three or four hundred applications for one job. So you use shortcuts.

One quick shortcut is no Ph.D. in hand, or a Ph.D. from a place that has a bad reputation. That cuts your pile to 200 or so applications. Then you look and see who doesn't have any good publications or presentations. Now you're down to 100 or so candidates, all of whom are very strong, but you're only going to be able to interview about 20 or so. So the next thing you look at is letters of recommendation. The way you get from that pile of 100 to the pile of 20 is by having letters of recommendation from people that members of the search committee have heard of. There's a chance that they've heard of your famous german mentor, but there's an even better chance that they haven't. Take two scholars X and Y of equal ability, but where X is an American and Y is a German. Let X and Y have equally good publication records and so on, it's still far more likely that the search committee has heard of X than that they've heard of Y, because they've got to conferences with X and heard X's papers and been impressed by him over drinks, etc. This matters hugely in terms of getting hired in the ultra competitive world of academic hiring, and so doing a degree abroad is always going to handicap you.

The only exception I can think of are Oxford and Cambridge. American scholars tend to know the names of those folks, and those two universities have such a strong reputation that you might not get penalized in this way having the degree from them. Everywhere else is a danger zone.