The Praetorian Guard and the Spectacle of Violence

To understand why the United States is experiencing what Jeffrey Sachs calls a “temper tantrum” on the global stage, we must look beyond standard geopolitical theories and examine the structural role the U.S. has played for Western capital. John Stockwell, a former CIA officer turned critic, offered a haunting metaphor that cuts through decades of obfuscation: the Praetorian Guard.

In ancient Rome, the Praetorian Guard served ostensibly to protect the emperor, but their true function was more complex. They became the visible face of imperial violence, the ones whose brutality drew public hatred while the patrician families quietly accumulated vast wealth through grain monopolies, tax farming, and colonial extraction. The Guard absorbed the rage; the families kept the gold.

Stockwell argued that the ruling oligarchy deliberately created this dynamic—they vested the Guard with the power to abuse, intending for the public to become fixated on the spectacle of that violence. While the people hated the Guard for its brutality, they forgot the names of the families who were quietly pillaging the treasury. The brilliance of the system was that when revolution came, it was the Guard who fell on their swords, not the families who simply relocated their capital and found new guards.

Stockwell extended this metaphor to the post-1945 United States. In the post-colonial era, as European empires formally dissolved, the U.S. became the Praetorian Guard for the entire Western oligarchic system. The U.S. intelligence apparatus and military machine performed the spectacular violence—coups in Iran and Guatemala, invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, the overthrow of Allende, Lumumba, Mosaddegh—that drew the world’s ire. This allowed the global structure of economic extraction to continue unabated, with the U.S. absorbing the moral culpability while the broader Western oligarchy retained the profits.

The Quiet Pillaging: Engineering Dependency Through Denial

While the Praetorian Guard created the distraction of noise and violence, the actual mechanism of pillaging was often silent and bureaucratic. This is where F. William Engdahl’s concept of “Full Spectrum Dominance” provides the critical economic context that standard analyses miss.

Consider a stark reality: in 2005, across vast swaths of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, farmers were still pulling plows with oxen. This wasn’t because tractors hadn’t been invented—John Deere had been manufacturing them since 1918. It wasn’t because these regions couldn’t afford them—many had valuable natural resources to trade. It was because access to agricultural machinery was deliberately restricted as a tool of control.

The mythology was carefully constructed: America was the “Breadbasket of the World,” generously feeding hungry nations through food aid and development assistance. The reality was precisely inverted. By restricting access to farming machinery, modern irrigation systems, fertilizer production facilities, and food processing infrastructure, the “liberal international order” ensured that developing nations remained dependent on Western grain exports. When tractors were permitted, they came bound in a web of control: proprietary software that farmers couldn’t modify, parts that couldn’t be locally manufactured or repaired, financing schemes that indebted entire communities, and contracts that dictated what could be grown and where it could be sold.

This was Full Spectrum Dominance in practice—not just military superiority, but control over the basic means of survival. The World Bank and IMF served as the financial architecture of this system, offering “development loans” that paradoxically prevented actual development. Structural adjustment programs required countries to prioritize export crops over food security, dismantle local agricultural support systems, and purchase Western equipment at inflated prices—creating debt spirals that persist for generations.

The Division of Labor: Violence and Extraction

The brilliance of this system was its division of labor:

The Guard (USA): Provided the spectacular violence—military bases, carrier groups, drone strikes, “shock and awe.” They staged coups against leaders who tried to nationalize resources or implement land reform. They maintained the threat that kept smaller nations from stepping out of line. Most importantly, they absorbed global hatred, becoming the face of oppression while believing themselves to be liberators.

The Mechanism (Western Financial/Corporate Complex): Maintained the actual chains of dependency. They controlled the patents on seeds, the manufacturing of tractors, the processing of raw materials, the shipping routes, the commodity exchanges, and the currency systems. They ensured nations couldn’t feed themselves, couldn’t industrialize, couldn’t break free—thus enabling the quiet extraction of resources at pennies on the dollar.

The Narrative (Media/Academic Complex): Produced the cognitive framework that made this system invisible even to its own operators. They created the language of “development,” “modernization,” “comparative advantage,” and “free trade” that obscured the reality of enforced dependency. They taught generations of economists that countries “naturally” specialized in raw material extraction while the West “naturally” controlled manufacturing and finance.

The Cognitive Dissonance of a “Good” Empire

This structure created a profound psychological trap within the American populace and even its policy class. Americans genuinely believed the cover story—that they were the “Good Guys” spreading democracy, feeding the hungry, defending the free world. The violence was always framed as reluctant, defensive, humanitarian. “We had to destroy the village to save it” wasn’t seen as Orwellian madness but as tragic necessity.

This wasn’t simple propaganda; it was a comprehensive worldview that pervaded every institution. American military officers truly believed they were bringing stability. USAID workers genuinely thought they were fostering development. Even CIA operatives often saw themselves as protecting democracy from tyranny. The system’s genius was that it ran on the genuine idealism of people who couldn’t see what they were actually doing.

This dissonance created a peculiar blindness. American strategists literally could not conceive that denying tractors to farmers was a form of warfare. When they looked at global agriculture, they saw American generosity feeding the world, not a deliberately maintained technological apartheid. When developing nations remained poor despite decades of “aid,” it was attributed to corruption, culture, or climate—never to the systematic denial of the basic tools of production.

China’s Invisible Revolution

This blindness proved catastrophic when China began its quiet revolution. Starting in the early 2000s, China didn’t announce a campaign to “destroy American hegemony” or “overthrow the Western order.” Instead, they simply began manufacturing and exporting tractors.

Not tractors bound by intellectual property restrictions. Not tractors requiring proprietary software updates. Not tractors that could only be repaired by certified technicians. Just tractors. Simple, robust, affordable machines that farmers could fix with basic tools and mechanical knowledge. Tractors that turned oxen-plowed fields into productive farms. Tractors that broke the agricultural dependency at the heart of the Western extraction system.

But it wasn’t just tractors. It was water pumps that villages could maintain themselves. Solar panels that bypassed the need for centralized grids. Construction equipment that allowed countries to build their own roads without Western contractors. Telecommunications infrastructure that didn’t route through Western servers. Payment systems that operated outside SWIFT. Development loans without structural adjustment requirements.

China understood something the West had forgotten in its own mythology: real power comes from productive capacity, not military dominance. Every tractor sold, every rail line built, every power plant constructed without Western involvement was a blow to Full Spectrum Dominance more devastating than any military defeat.

The Obsolescence of the Guard

When the Council on Foreign Relations published “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China” in 2015, they were still thinking in terms of military competition and regional influence. They worried about China’s growing navy, its territorial claims, its alliance building. They completely missed that China had already spent a decade systematically dismantling every chokepoint of Western economic control.

The authors wrote about preventing China’s rise to regional hegemony, not realizing that China had no interest in replacing the U.S. as the global policeman. Why would they? The Praetorian Guard role was a trap—expensive, exhausting, and ultimately self-defeating. Instead, China was making the Guard obsolete by destroying the economic architecture it was designed to protect.

The “neurotic breakdown” Sachs observes in current American behavior is the realization of irrelevance. The U.S. spent $8 trillion on Middle Eastern wars while China built the Belt and Road Initiative for a fraction of that cost. The U.S. maintained 800 military bases while China built trading relationships that made those bases strategically meaningless. The U.S. perfected surveillance and assassination technologies while China perfected batteries and high-speed rail.

The violence of the Guard cannot stop the trade of tractors. Sanctions cannot prevent the transfer of engineering knowledge. Aircraft carriers cannot intercept development loans. The entire apparatus of American power, built at astronomical cost over seven decades, has no answer to a country that simply offers farmers affordable equipment and developing nations actual development.

The Tantrum of the Obsolete

What we’re witnessing now—the trade wars, the technology bans, the increasingly hysterical rhetoric about the “China threat”—is not strategic competition between equals. It’s the tantrum of a Praetorian Guard that has discovered its irrelevance. The families they protected are losing their grip on global resources. The extraction mechanisms are failing. The mythology is collapsing.

The American foreign policy establishment cannot articulate what they’re actually trying to defend because doing so would require admitting what they’ve actually been doing. They can’t say “China is breaking our agricultural technology monopoly” because that would mean admitting they’ve been maintaining one. They can’t say “China is undermining our debt-trap development model” because that would mean acknowledging that’s what it was. They can’t say “China is providing the industrial capacity we’ve been withholding” because that would reveal the withholding as intentional.

So instead, they speak in abstractions about “rules-based order” and “authoritarian threats” while the actual foundation of Western power—technological and financial dependency—crumbles beneath them. They impose chip sanctions that accelerate Chinese semiconductor development. They restrict technology transfer that forces China to innovate independently. They threaten allies who buy Chinese equipment, only to find those allies increasingly willing to risk American displeasure rather than remain technologically backward.

The Empire’s Empty Arsenal

The United States built the most expensive military in human history to protect an economic order that could be undone by selling farmers tractors they could repair themselves. The empire’s arsenal is empty not because it lacks weapons, but because its weapons are aimed at the wrong target. You cannot drone strike a development loan. You cannot sanction industrialization into submission. You cannot maintain technological apartheid when knowledge, once discovered, wants to be free.

The tragedy isn’t just the wasted trillions or the unnecessary violence. It’s that an entire generation of American leaders internalized a worldview so completely that they cannot see reality even as it renders them obsolete. They are guards without an empire to guard, protectors of an extraction system that no longer needs protection because it no longer functions, believers in a mythology that the rest of the world has recognized as a lie.

The future belongs not to those who can project force across oceans, but to those who can build things that work, educate their populations, and solve actual problems. The American Century is ending not with a bang but with a whimper—the confused protests of a guard that cannot understand why the farmers no longer fear them, now that they have tractors.

The rest of the world has moved on from the spectacle of violence to the mundane work of development. America is still watching its own outdated show, not realizing the audience left and took their tractors with them.