From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Mon Jan 27 2003 - 17:56:41 MST
On Saturday, January 25, 2003 3:03 PM Lee Corbin lcorbin@tsoft.com
wrote:
>> why should the US taxpayer foot the bill for [maintaining
>> troops in Europe]? What would those negative consequences
>> [of withdrawing] be? Perhaps also it would be nice for the
>> Europeans to fend for themselves.
>
> Writers to the thread "Why does the USA still have
> troops in rich Europe" came up with quite a few
> reasons---perhaps you missed that discussion. See
I miss a lot here because of the sheer amount of stuff and participation
in a few other lists as well.
>> I don't think one has to divine motives or just one
>> motive to US troops being in Europe. I think mostly
>> they're there now, when the original reason for them
>> being there (the Soviet threat) is long gone just
>> because of institutional inertia.
>
> So I nominate "institutional inertia" as reason number 9
> on our list.
I second the nomination.:)
In general, I wonder how much institutional inertia effects what we see
in the social and political arena. These effects can take the form of
simple intertia -- "we've always done things that way" -- or more
sophisticated redefinitions -- NATO used to be about defending Western
Europe from a Soviet invasion, now it's about whatever the leaders of
NATO want; the IMF similarly was supposed to operate to uphold a certain
international monetary order, now it's a tool of trade policy and
shoring up investors.
> And this can replace our old "reason number 2",
> which had been "Europeans save money on
> defense that way", which properly belongs on
> the list of why the Europeans don't kick the
> Americans out.
I would qualify that with "some" for the European side. Obviously, some
Europeans do want American forces out of Europe.
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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