NATO’s $1 Billion Monument to Irrelevance | Cato @ Liberty - Ted Galen Carpenter:
November 15, 2013 - "A November 13 article in Reuters discusses the growing controversy over NATO’s new headquarters being built outside of Brussels. The price tag — some $1 billion — has raised more than a few eyebrows. 'When defense budgets are being cut and in general when governments are under so much pressure from taxpayers to save money, it looks terribly extravagant,' opines Daniel Keohane, head of a leading think tank in Belgium. Several members of the British parliament also have questioned the cost.
"NATO officials, though, defend the project, asserting that the existing headquarters, built in 1967, has outlived its usefulness. Of course, the same point could be made with far greater validity about the NATO alliance itself. After all, it was created during the depths of the Cold War in 1949 to, as Lord Harold Ismay, NATO’s secretary general at the time, pithily observed, 'keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.' Given the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s manifold demographic, economic, and military limitations as a successor state, that mission now seems to be more than a little obsolete. The past two decades, the alliance has been conducting a frantic search for relevant new missions, resulting in a dubious decision to add members in Eastern Europe and wage even more dubious wars in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan."
Read more: http://www.cato.org/blog/natos-1-billion-monument-irrelevance
'via Blog this'
November 15, 2013 - "A November 13 article in Reuters discusses the growing controversy over NATO’s new headquarters being built outside of Brussels. The price tag — some $1 billion — has raised more than a few eyebrows. 'When defense budgets are being cut and in general when governments are under so much pressure from taxpayers to save money, it looks terribly extravagant,' opines Daniel Keohane, head of a leading think tank in Belgium. Several members of the British parliament also have questioned the cost.
"NATO officials, though, defend the project, asserting that the existing headquarters, built in 1967, has outlived its usefulness. Of course, the same point could be made with far greater validity about the NATO alliance itself. After all, it was created during the depths of the Cold War in 1949 to, as Lord Harold Ismay, NATO’s secretary general at the time, pithily observed, 'keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.' Given the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s manifold demographic, economic, and military limitations as a successor state, that mission now seems to be more than a little obsolete. The past two decades, the alliance has been conducting a frantic search for relevant new missions, resulting in a dubious decision to add members in Eastern Europe and wage even more dubious wars in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan."
Read more: http://www.cato.org/blog/natos-1-billion-monument-irrelevance
'via Blog this'
No comments:
Post a Comment