The Great Lions of Power and the Peoples Condemned to Watch the Banquet from the Door
“There are peoples who were not expelled from paradise for sinning, but for being born too far from the table where others had already reserved every place setting.”
John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden as a parable about guilt, inheritance, and the terrible possibility of choosing. Cain and Abel appear not only as biblical brothers, but as two ways of looking at the world: one receives the blessing; the other bears the mark. But the twenty-first century transferred that tragedy to geopolitics. Today, there are also blessed peoples and marked peoples. There are nations seated inside the garden, with central banks, aircraft carriers, satellites, universities, hard currency, and veto power. And there are others, many more, that live east of Eden, where history arrives late, debt arrives on time, and hope travels on foot, carrying a suitcase too light to be called a future.
“Paradise has always been generous with those who arrived first and very instructive with those who were left outside.”
Angels do not live in the modern paradise. Lions do. The United States, China, Russia, and the European Union do not share the same morality, model, or appetite, but they share something more important: power. They can print money, impose sanctions, purchase raw materials, block routes, finance wars, and decide which country is trustworthy and which must wait in the antechamber. They speak of democracy, sovereignty, security, fair trade, and human rights according to the diplomatic season of the year. When they roar, markets listen. When they make mistakes, others pay. When they preach prudence, they already possess enough fuel, food, chips, weapons, and credit to survive their own lessons.
“The lions do not need to explain the jungle: they need only call it the international order.”
The great powers speak of development, cooperation, security, and stability, but all too often they view poor countries not as wounded nations in need of historical justice, but as spheres of influence, reserves of labor, military routes, captive markets, useful borders, or deposits of raw materials. Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Myanmar know what happens when impoverished territories become laboratories for war, sanctions, occupations, weapons, oil, opium, religion, migration, and hypocritical diplomacy. There, aid usually arrives after the missiles, and reconstruction is announced before the destruction has ended.
Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, and poor Pakistan know another version of the same fate: cheap factories, minimum wages, foreign debt, technological dependence, and global chains that sell human exhaustion at a low price so others can buy abundance. Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia, Paraguay, Venezuela, and many Latin American peripheries know the same grammar: conditional loans, extractive companies, international organizations, watchful embassies, obedient elites, and peoples forced to give thanks for crumbs while their resources depart aboard ships, through contracts, or in corporate balance sheets. The old imperialism arrived with flags and soldiers; the new one arrives with treaties, banks, sanctions, investments, risk ratings, digital platforms, and carefully translated moral speeches.
“Poor countries are not outside paradise because they lack merit: many times they were left outside so that the paradise of others could continue functioning.”
They are not countries without intelligence, dignity, or beauty. They are societies trapped between cheap raw materials, fragile institutions, small elites, large debts, and a modernity that demands that they compete with the world before they have built schools, hospitals, roads, potable water, and trust. They are required to provide stability without solid institutions, productivity without technology, democracy without equality, and growth without capital. Then they are blamed for failing to reach a goal whose starting line was placed several centuries farther ahead.
“The poor are expected to reach the future without having yet received the tools of the present.”
That is why poverty, viewed from afar, usually appears to be a technical problem. It is measured in dollars per day, indexes, charts, conferences, and photographs of serious children. But lived from within, it is something else: waking before sunrise only to arrive late anyway; falling ill without insurance; studying without internet access; working without a contract; migrating without papers; voting without believing; going into debt to eat; losing a child at a border that the rich call immigration control and the poor call a cemetery. The world speaks of inclusion while building walls, of cooperation while charging interest, and of resilience while demanding that the vulnerable endure until they become a statistic. It is a refined form of compassion because it does not stain the carpet.
“Poverty is far more moving when it appears in a report than when it knocks on the door…”
Powerful countries could do something more useful than roar about development. The United States could help Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala through infrastructure, hospitals, technical education, preferential market access, and decent jobs that reduce forced migration, instead of limiting itself to reinforcing borders. China could finance processing plants, railroads, energy, and technology transfer in Bolivia, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, and Bangladesh, allowing them to export finished products rather than merely raw materials, debt, or human exhaustion.
Russia could contribute to Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan through energy reconstruction, fertilizers, food, technical training, and security agreements that do not turn every form of assistance into a new military dependency. The European Union could offer Venezuela, Paraguay, Myanmar, and the forgotten peripheries of Latin America and Asia financial relief, less unequal trade, environmental technology, potable water, and institutional cooperation without demanding diplomatic obedience as an invisible tax. This is not about charity, but intelligent geopolitics: helping to build capable, stable, and productive countries is less costly than managing their wars, migrations, coups, sanctions, and despair for decades.
“The lions could open the door; but they often prefer to finance the fence, organize a seminar on exclusion, and then congratulate themselves on the quality of the report…”
Steinbeck left behind a luminous word: timshel, thou mayest choose. Its greatness lies in reminding us that human beings are not completely condemned by their blood or their past. But geopolitics has produced a revised edition of that freedom. Poor countries are also told that they can choose: between going into debt with some or depending on others; between selling cheap lithium or buying expensive batteries; between exporting copper and importing technology; between accepting a military base, a financed highway, a recommendation from the Fund, a foreign sanction, or an electoral promise that will last less than inflation. Choosing under such conditions is a curious, almost decorative freedom, like handing a menu to someone who has no table.
“Freedom looks flawless when it is written by those who never had to choose while hungry.”
The problem is not that strong countries exist. The problem is that the world order turns strength into virtue and weakness into guilt. If a great power protects its industries, it is called strategy. If a poor country tries to do so, it is called distortion. If a lion invades, pressures, or buys loyalties, it is called national interest. If a small country makes a mistake, it is called endemic corruption, institutional immaturity, or cultural incapacity. In this way, power preserves its moral elegance: it never steals, it merely secures supplies; it never dominates, it merely stabilizes regions; it never exploits, it merely invests with a long-term vision. The grammar of power is marvelous, because even plunder can appear dressed as cooperation.
“Power rarely declares itself innocent: it prefers to hire good translators.”
While the global economy produces more than US$110 trillion a year and the planet allocates nearly US$2.9 trillion to military spending, it is projected that by 2030 approximately 622 million people will continue living in extreme poverty and that 3.4 billion will survive on less than US$6.85 a day. The arithmetic is simple: there is money for aircraft carriers, satellites, banks, financial bailouts, and prolonged wars, but there is no moral budget to pull an enormous part of humanity out of the mud.
“The problem is not that the world is poor; the problem is that it learned to distribute abundance with the surgical precision of an alibi.”
That is why East of Eden remains an uncomfortable metaphor. It speaks not only of brothers, but also of inheritances. It speaks not only of good and evil, but of who received fertile land, a library, a family name, an army, a currency, a port, credit, and time. The countries situated outside the garden are not asking for eternal charity. They are asking for less hypocritical rules, less abusive trade, less restricted technology, less religious debt, and less ceremonial respect. They are asking the world to remember that poverty is not an aesthetic flaw in the landscape, but a political architecture.
“The powerful prefer to organize summits on hunger with impeccable banquets…”
“Nothing beautifies an injustice quite like a well-set table, a speech about the common good, and a carefully managed silence before the peoples who continue paying the bill…”
“Power always finds noble words to conceal the obvious: that while some celebrate the world order with a glass in their hand, others continue being born condemned to live east of Eden…”
Short Bibliography
• World Bank. Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024. Projects that 622 million people will live in extreme poverty in 2030 and that 3.4 billion will subsist on less than US$6.85 a day.
• SIPRI. Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2025. Reports that global military spending reached US$2.887 trillion in 2025 and that the United States, China, and Russia accounted for 51% of the total.
• John Steinbeck. East of Eden. Viking Press, 19
