Rather than trying to construct rationalizations for the persistance of patronage into an era when it clearly makes no sense, based on some idea that the clients were of some benefit to the patrons back in the Cold War era, why not just take the present absurdity of patronage as yet another confirmation that it never made any sense?

We did not lack for contemporary observers who felt, even back in the day, that our patronage of, say, South Vietnam, made no sense. Events proved them right, did they not, even back in the Cold War era? Why not just go with the much simpler idea that these people were right all along, that we never had clients for sound and sensible reasons. This removes the need to explain why we still have them, now that even the shadow of a ghost of a prospect of rational need has long since dissipated.

Some phenomena in this world do need to be studied from the outside, as objective reality for which we need to figure out the structure of causal mechanisms. But some things are entirely of our own creation, the rather random results that ensue when an individual or a nation is so prosperous and powerful that is has the luxury of chasing after foreign dragons it has hallucinated, and thereby acquires persistent friends and enemies. Some things in this world are real, some are just shadows on the cave wall thrown by a false light.

To study this “client-patron relationship” as anything other than a specimen of intellectual pathology, is to grant such a subject a solidity and reality that it simply does not deserve and cannot bear. There can be no end, or even sound and useful waypoints, of such analysis of things that don’t exist.