Political Quotes

“there is no more complex issue than the financial cost of NATO enlargement. Over the past two years there have been several studies by private and by governmental organizations, which have yielded widely differing estimates. The highest figure reached one hundred twenty-five billion dollars over ten years, with over thirty billion of that accruing to the United States. The most recent--and I believe the best--estimate is NATO's own cost study, which estimates only one-and-a-half billion dollars in direct costs over ten years. According to the latest estimate, the expected U.S. contribution to the direct costs of enlargement are estimated to average forty million dollars per year for ten years. There are good reasons for the vast disparities in the estimates--basically there was a lot of ``apples and oranges'' mixing going on. Explaining all this requires a fair amount of effort, which, I regret, some of the critics of enlargement either were unwilling to give, or which they eschewed for the easier route of utilizing unexplained, raw data for partisan purposes.”