Time to pull American Military bases out of Germany

[Boca]

They're Iranian assets, which are simply being released to them. For example, if Iran had gold sitting in a vault in Switzerland for years, that vault is now accessible to them. If they owned stock in some foreign company, they now again have access to those shares. There's real estate as well, all over the world -- for example, Iran legally owns the land on which its embassy was located in the US, but the US impounded that and rented it out to others for many years. Now the Iranians are again able to use it (or to sell it). That's why the exact value of the deal is hard to calculate -- it's not just a bunch of fungible assets sitting in an account somewhere. It's a lot of unique property, including plots of land and even artwork that was sitting abroad and got impounded. For example, the Tehran museum of contemporary art bought some artwork back in 1978, which hadn't been delivered yet as of 1979, and it wound up impounded for decades. No doubt other art pieces have also been impounded (e.g., stuff that was on tour abroad at the time of the revolution, and then never returned). You can try to assess the value of those things, but for assets where the market isn't particularly liquid, like real estate, privately held stock, and art, that's going to be tougher than for cash, gold, and publicly traded stocks.

I understood they were Iranian assets. So, are you saying the only cash out for the US was $1.7 billion?

 

[georgephillip]

YES....we do flush an awful lot of money down the black hole of defense fraud....IMO the Defense Budget and the Fraud part of it are two totally separate issues however.

JO

"Congress wants hearing on Pentagon wasteful spending charges
BY KRISTINA WONG - 12/06/16 06:09 PM EST"

http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/309113-congress-wants-hearing-on-pentagon-wasteful-spending-charges

As long as the public/private partnership in the "Defense" Industry remains as corrupt as it currently is, how do you justify giving gangsters a bigger slice of the pie with each passing budget?

 

[Arkady]

I understood they were Iranian assets. So, are you saying the only cash out for the US was $1.7 billion?

My understanding is that was the only cash delivered by the US government, since that was cash actually owed by the US government. It may be that other cash was in private US hands, like US banks, with Iran having been locked out by law.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Ahem...yes well I know where exaclty where Poland is Ark ( I realize that you assume most conservatives to be totally uneducated so I understand your need to offer the geography lesson )....I ignored it because I see it as a zero point impediment to the Soviet Military...You are right...this is not the cold war era....and Ground war is no longer the big hit parade it used to be. Not that it is not still a danger as the walk over to Crimea demonstrated. Our Military bases are a warning to nations who would attack...if you attack here you are actually attacking the US. That has $$$$ worth IMO. If Merkel feels that she already contributes enough to NATO...then I say let her decide what level of Military readiness is needed for her own nation without our contribution.

Also I agree on the likelihood of Russia declaring war on anyone...PUTIN unlike his immediate predecessors has a mind for business and understands that War is expensive.
Though I disagree with you on the potential outcome...I think you underestimate the ferocity of what Russia has left. As far as spending ratios are concerned I think we have already had this conversation. You make a good point but I also believe you may be comparing apples and oranges. I don't know what Putin get's in currency/hardware ratio for what he spends...I am quite sure the wages in Europe and much higher than those in Russia however.

Finally I think you have outlined quite nicely why the Military Bases there are superfluous. Craig made an interesting comment about the US being hurt more by a pullout than Germany would be. I don't know if that's true but I suppose it's possible.
In an organized phase out over the course of 5-7 years I believe those assets and troops would be much more valuable reassigned to other areas of real need...South east Asia for instance.

JO

Bankrupt the Jihad

Use them for garrison troops when we seize all the Muslim oilfields.

 

[Arkady]

I strongly disagree....the government with which we made that deal is gone forever...with it our obligation IMO.

That is not typically how we treat the matter, though, is it? For example, say we shipped the UK some new F-35 fighters in early 2016, in exchange for a promise to pay us in 2017. Only, in between, they got a new government:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36788782

And, arguably, we did, too.

Would we regard their payment obligation as void because the deal was made with prior governments? Of course not. Even when there's a "new government" in a more radical sense, we regard such obligations as enduring. For example, lots of African and Central American nations have debts run up by various deposed regimes, but they're still expected to pay on them.

If we took the position that a change of regime was all that was needed to throw past contractual obligations into question, we'd end up worse off far more often than we'd end up better off, since all sorts of countries that owe us could use that loophole as a way to void a debt.

There was no pressing need either morally or financially to restore that money to the current regime in power

There was a practical reason to do so. Iran was on the path to becoming a nuclear power, and short of starting a devastating and illegal war of aggression against them, against the protests of most of the world, there wasn't much we could do about it. The negotiated deal opened them up to nuclear inspections and put other leading nations in a position where they had an interest in enforcement.

We saw where the other path leads, during the Reagan/Bush era, with regard to North Korea. They pretty much ignored North Korea's move towards nuclear potency, imagining that tough words and isolation would magically keep North Korea from getting nukes, and that, of course, failed. By 1993 North Korea had at least a couple nuclear warheads, and was poised to start making dozens per year, thanks to the near completion of a couple large reactors at YongByon. Fortunately, Clinton's deal took them off that course, but some of the key damage had already been done by the Reagan/Bush team's criminal incompetence -- North Korea was a member of the nuclear club, and that genie isn't going back in the bottle.

 

[JackDallas]

No. Most have at least some education -- not necessarily enough education to realize Russia doesn't border Germany, judging by what gets posted here, but the mere fact they communicate in something resembling written English suggests some education.



That's interesting, but the Soviet military hasn't existed since the early 1990s. It's the Russian military that's at issue. Poland spends about $8.3 billion on its military. That's certainly not enough to hold back the Russians, but it's enough to make their supply lines an absolute nightmare if the Russians tried to sustain a conventional military operation against Germany, especially with the help of a ferociously anti-Russian Polish population acting as guerrilla partisans. So, Poland is certainly an impediment to any plans for Russian aggression against Germany.



The US has decided that everyone in Europe should be spending 2% of GDP on defense. But that's Cold War thinking -- it imagines the continued existence of a Soviet Union that is on the same military level as the US, as well as a tightly allied Warsaw Pact that Moscow can use to counter NATO. Those are simply no longer the facts on the ground. 2% is excessive in the current situation. That doesn't mean every NATO country should feel free to spend as little on its military as it wants. It just means the expected commitment should be updated to the new realities. Even if the NATO countries each spent only 1% of their GDPs on their militaries (like Canada), combined NATO spending would remain vastly in excess of what Russia and their smattering of allies spend.



Putin is fairly similar to his predecessors, who had limited designs on Eastern Europe as a buffer zone, but not designs on broader expansion. What he did in Crimea (or earlier in Georgia) isn't terribly different from what various predecessors did in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. If I were, say, Poland, I'd be worried about Putin trying to whittle away at contested lands, the way Russia did with the Ukraine's Crimea. But it makes sense Germany isn't terribly alarmed right now.



That matters when it comes to personnel, but personnel are less and less the primary concern -- hardware is. And there's a global market in military hardware.

Most Conservatives have at least sufficient education to be a public defender, like you.