THE SYRIAN MARSHALL PLAN: The World Bank has estimated that the cost of rebuilding what has already been destroyed in Syria will be upward of $200 billion. But the motivations of Syria’s foreign investors -- consisting mostly of governments and companies from countries that are allied with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- are primarily political. They seem to have calculated that investments in Syria now will give them significant leverage in how the country is governed later, even if the investments don’t pay off in a strictly financial sense in the short term. In that, their plans bear a distorted resemblance to the Marshall Plan loans offered by the United States to Europe after World War II. Syria has become a dividing line among rival powers -- a twenty-first-century iron curtain of sorts -- and, so far, those on Assad’s side of the aisle have assertively used economic power to shape the future of the country. foreignaffairs/articles/141940/adam-heffez-and-noam-raydan/the-syrian-marshall-plan
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 17:51:15 +0000
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