US President Trump (who is, not to put too fine a point on the matter, not a figure I admire) is currently seeking to increase US defence spending by 10%. This amounts to about $54bn, or about £39bn sterling.
This 10% increase is comparable to the UK's entire defence budget of around £45bn ($60bn). This has been the approximate annual spend every year since 2011.
Although US military spending makes every other country's look tiny by comparison, as a proportion of its economy it is not quite such an outlier as it is sometimes made to sound. Considering the US economy (nominal GDP) is about eight times the size of the UK's, a defence budget ten or eleven times is a pretty proportional split.
There are only about a dozen countries (such as the US) that spend more than 3% of GDP on defence, and only about another dozen that spend above 2%. Russia spends 5.5%, but its real spending ($70bn) is comparable to the UK's ($60bn); China, like the UK, spends about 2% (but for a much higher total: around $200bn). The UK is still one of the world's top 5 or 10 biggest military spenders overall, close to France, India and Japan - roughly where we'd expect.
Total spend figures are pretty worthless. They give no indication of what the money is spent on and whether it is good value. Russia spends about the same as Saudi Arabia on defence, not much more than 10% of the US figure, but supposedly maintains 350,000 troops - five times Saudi Arabia, about three quarters the US. China spends a third or a quarter what the US does, but maintains three times as many ground troops. Meanwhile, despite its $60bn spend, serious concerns have been raised about Britain's operational capabilities - our ability to fight wars independently any more at all.
All this makes the NATO 2% target - the proportion of GDP that members of the alliance are expected to spend on defence - look pretty silly. Specific operational capability targets for each ally, allowing each state to play a useful role within the NATO framework, tailored not just to the size of its economy but to the state of its public finances and perhaps demographic considerations, would be much more useful. Such targets would have to be negotiated multilaterally, and adhering to them would have to be entirely voluntary - or they would certainly be seen as meddling.
Given how few NATO countries bother to meet the 2% target anyway, it's all a bit academic.
The USA and a few other players will always pull the weight - and they should be happy to: it is a crucial means of maintaining influence, and keeping partners onside from long-term antagonists (i.e. Russia). It is not really in US interests for the EU, or even EU countries, to do the heavy lifting on defence spending themselves: the more powerful the EU becomes, the less it has to care what America thinks - making Trump's original demands for greater European defence spending perversely short-sighted.
NATO has more than enough brute strength to beat off Russia in any fair fight - which would of course never occur in the first place, just as it hasn't since 1945, due to the imminent threat of mutual assured detruction. Boosting defence spending may be a comforting response to a perceived threat, but it is specious. The threats from Russia are propaganda and the weaponisation of ethnic Russian minorities in the old provinces of the Russian Empire, and defence spending has nothing to do with either.
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