Who do you recognize as the authority to make that decision though? If the locals are currently ruled by a terrorist group or Nazis or whatever, do they get to decide? What about the locals that disagree with the government currently in power?
And an answer of 'if we just didn't needlessly meddle' might be the ideal, but it's ignoring the realities that we have meddled and some countries are unlikely to stop doing so. We have to accept the world we have not the one we wished we had.
What's the opinion on certain high risk countries where there's a high likelihood of the artifacts simply being destroyed? If I remember correctly ISIS and other similar organizations have burned or bombed several historical sites before.
Yeah. There was a post the other day about a CEO that got a 1.2B payout and then gave her staff a first class ticket and $10k in cash. The cost amount to less than 1% of the payout for selling the company that those same staff helped make successful.
And everyone was arguing about how the CEO didn't have to give anything at all, so complaining about any of it was just being greedy. Totally ignoring the fact that there's no way the CEO represented 99.5% of the effort to make the company successful.
They don't even see it as a problem and seem happy with whatever minor crumbs the rich are willing to hand out, totally ignoring that what they've been handed is a tiny fraction of what was stolen.
What if some of the locals want it taken away for protection, but the government wants it destroyed?
There's no clear 'owner' in many cases. I think it places where it's uncertain, then we should prioritize saving the artifacts over the ones that seek to destroy them.