Sachs calls NATO's existence absurd, urges putting stop to alliance’s expansion

MOSCOW, May 14. /TASS/. NATO expansion should be stopped, as the very existence of the alliance after 1990 seems absurd, a renowned US economist and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University (New York), Professor Jeffrey Sachs said. "NATO must stop expanding. The whole idea [of its existence] was preposterous after 1990," he noted, speaking via video link at a meeting of the Board of Governors of the BRICS New Development Bank, taking place in Moscow. Sachs added that as a multilateral model of the world develops, it is necessary to stop the "residual wars of hegemony," and accepting the fact of the development of multipolarity in the modern world should become a "peaceful root forward." In January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also noted that any "sense in preserving NATO has completely disappeared: The Alliance is an atavism, a relic of a past era," since it was created "to contain the USSR and its geopolitical allies."