US EditionItaly Disavows Plan to Count Massive Sicily Bridge as NATO Spending
8 Articles
8 Articles
One of the world's longest suspension bridges is to be built in Italy - and is considered a military investment. But now the US is putting its foot down on the plan. - It was not about bridges but about military strategic value, says US NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker about the purpose of the NATO goal of spending 5 percent of GDP.
Italy will not use defence funds to finance the €13.5 billion project on building a bridge over the Messina Stream, which connects Sicily and mainland Italy, said Wednesday...
Italy disavows plan to count massive Sicily bridge as NATO spending
ROME — Italy has promised it will not use its spending on a new bridge to Sicily to reach NATO defense budget targets following a stern warning from a U.S. official.Rome gave the guarantee after U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said that alliance member defense spending should not be padded with cash for “bridges that have no strategic military value.”The unlikely story of Italy placing a bridge in its defense budget got underway in June…
The Italian government would like to use this device to bypass and lighten the commitment with NATO to increase defence expenditure
US representative Matthew Whitaker in Bloomberg: "No to creative solutions. I have spoken with some countries that are adopting a very broad view of defence spending"
Bloomberg · Flavia Krause-Jackson and Andrea Palasciano The United States has warned its European NATO partners that it will not tolerate the “accounting tricks” that some governments on the continent have been speculating on in recent months to meet the alliance’s 5% of GDP military spending target. The warning leaves countries like Italy in a delicate situation, where the government has been weighing for months whether to count the constructio…
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