The American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002, also known as the "Hague Invasion Act", gives the President of the U.S. legal authority to invade the Netherlands to free detained U.S. service members imprisoned by the International Criminal Court.
When you think about it, it's really quite a remarkable state of affairs for a nation to trust another nation so implicitly they give it physical control of (a non-trivial portion of) their treasury, in a sense. And now that is coming unravelled. Another marker of human civilization's slow deteroriation. I remember a time when I thought things would only keep getting better and better with advances in technology and information sharing.... how naive I was.
The American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002, also known as the "Hague Invasion Act", gives the President of the U.S. legal authority to invade the Netherlands to free detained U.S. service members imprisoned by the International Criminal Court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
When you think about it, it's really quite a remarkable state of affairs for a nation to trust another nation so implicitly they give it physical control of (a non-trivial portion of) their treasury, in a sense. And now that is coming unravelled. Another marker of human civilization's slow deteroriation. I remember a time when I thought things would only keep getting better and better with advances in technology and information sharing.... how naive I was.
They’re not moving it to the Netherlands. There’s still plenty of countries that the Dutch trust, but the US no longer seems to be on that list.
It's honestly quite impressive that it took them this long to do this.
Italy is the third country with the largest gold reserves since the 50s or so, and most of their gold is in the US.
The idea of repatriating it comes up from time to time, but the truth is that it's s logistical and diplomatic trouble with little positive outcomes.
I don't think the US is a serious position to argue diplomatic issues atm.
I'd vote for it if I was Italian.
> The operation took place between March and August of this year, it said.
You can also ask why they move it to London and not mainland Europe.
These systems AIUI have huge amounts of inertia, by design.