For nearly 70 years, the US has fed Jordan a heavy diet of security assistance, defined as economic funding, military arms, training programs, intelligence transfers, and technical support. The purpose of such assistance has been to bolster Jordan’s coercive apparatus, comprising its military, civil police, and mukhabarat; and it has been enormous, measuring over $20 billion since 1957 – or several times more than all domestic taxes collected by the Jordanian state. Yet a paradox abounds. At the operational level, US security assistance achieves none of the goals espoused by its own strategists. US military officers and defense planners underscore the need to “professionalize” Jordan’s military and security institutions, “upgrade” their reservoir of techniques, and “build” their strategic capacity. In short, they aim to give the Jordanian state the independent ability to practice violence effectively. But US security assistance has failed. Jordan’s coercive apparatus remains a underwhelming garrison force, able to police dissent within civil society but not much else. It is permeated by corruption, and incapable of waging war or even squashing mass mobilization without emergency American help. The obvious explanation to why security assistance flourishes despite this deficiency speaks to hegemonic interests: clearly, the US cares more about propping up the Hashemite monarchy, a quintessential American client state, than anything else. But the way that failure has been normalized in official policy discourse linking Washington to Amman remains curious. The weakness and corruption of Jordan’s organs of violence are treated as symptoms rather than causes, and they are accepted as a matter-of-factly externality in dealing with an Arab state. Deconstructing this theater of absurdity requires two critical insights. First, security assistance thrives not despite, but because of, failure. In Jordan, violence and the crises that justify its deployment are mutually constituted: the threats that the state sees as imperiling its survival, such as Islamist radicalization and economic decay, are the result of maintaining a bloated coercive apparatus that consumes the lion’s share of national resources. Second, an ideational factor lurks, for elite politics transcend state boundaries and dictate the social construction of security interests. A transnational coalition oversees US security assistance to Jordan, namely American officers and strategists in Washington, and Jordanian generals and royals in Amman. The careers of both require fueling a military-industrial complex designed to amplify or invent threats to stability in order to justify the further profitable delivery of aid, arms, and knowledge.