Which means Montenegro has little choice but to seek a “public-private partnership” (PPP) arrangement that will most likely erode its sovereignty further while funneling more money to Chinese interests:Ĭhina Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), the large state-owned Chinese company that is building the first section, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in March to complete the rest of the road on a PPP basis.īut European lenders worry that Montenegro would need to offer costly revenue guarantees to make that work, potentially deepening its financial woes. And frankly they don’t want to,” said Grgic, author of a 2017 study on the highway. Now that it’s been started, the politicians can’t stop it – no matter how harmful it might be. It reminds people of Tito and the days of grand socialist projects in the region,” said academic Mladen Grgic, referring to former Yugoslavia’s long-time communist leader Josip Broz Tito. “This highway is a big deal in Montenegro. The Chinese are very good at exploiting local political and cultural trends to sell Belt and Road: Some Europeans are uneasy to find China’s debt imperialism strategy, so effective in places like Sri Lanka and Djibouti, reaching their doorstep in Montenegro. A European Union official dubbed the Chinese project a “road to nowhere” because it is impossible for Montenegro to borrow enough money to complete construction. Reuters reported on Monday that the first phase of the project “has sent Montenegro’s debt soaring and forced the government to raise taxes, partially freeze public sector wages and end a benefit for mothers to get its finances in order.”Įven those draconian measures scarcely made a dent in Montenegro’s debt, which now approaches 80 percent of GDP. Critics call it another example of Chinese debt imperialism: the slow-motion conquest of smaller countries through the “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative by suckering them into taking loans from Beijing they will never be able to repay. The project is incredibly expensive, leaving Montenegro struggling to pay off titanic debt to Chinese financiers. Top Stops along the Road to Nowhereįor more insight into each stop along the route, our content is arranged by state.Chinese companies are hard at work on building a road through the mountains to connect Montenegro’s port city of Bar with Serbia. Here along the backbone of the nation, conversations over a daybreak breakfast, afternoons spent cooling off by municipal swimming pools, and twilight American Legion baseball games provide the stuff of truly memorable Road Trip diversions, and for that reason alone, US-83 remains a must-do long-distance byway. Perhaps best of all, US-83 manages to transnavigate this broad, odd nation, albeit north-to-south, without once grazing a conventional tourist attraction. For endless miles in every direction, telephone and power poles provide some of the few signs of life between the highway and the distant horizon, though the towns-where average speeds drop suddenly from 70 mph to radar-enforced 25 mph or slower- are spaced just often enough along the highway to serve your food-and-fuel needs. Physiography aside, this route’s cultural landscape centers on small but self-sufficient farm or cattle communities that date back to the last days of the Wild West and that are far enough off the tourist trail to retain an unselfconscious, aw-shucks quaintness. Yet on US-83 you’ll also take in some phenomenal country: verdant farmland dotted with truly small towns, endlessly shifting prairie grassland, winding Missouri River roadways, and plain, isolated, where-the-hell-am-I agricultural expanses.įollowing roughly along the 100th meridian, US-83 marks the historic divide between the “civilized” eastern United States and the arid western deserts. Its grim moniker, “The Road to Nowhere,” is alternately unfair and then not severe enough, for the route navigates some of the widest and most aesthetically challenged landscapes in the country-the yawn-inducing rolling grasslands of the northern Great Plains, the beefy expanses of western Nebraska and Kansas, and the mesmerizing heat of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle-before following the lower Rio Grande south to the Gulf of Mexico. Once the only entirely paved route from Canada to “Old Mexico” (as hard-to-find postcards along the route still say), US-83 is still likely the shortest-from Swan River, Manitoba, dead south to Brownsville, Texas, and beyond to Matamoros, Mexico, seemingly without turning once.
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