April 11, 2025:
The Americans are demanding that their European NATO allies assume more responsibility for their own defense. To encourage that, the U.S. is relinquishing its role as leader of NATO and chief contributor. The United States has to deal with increased Chinese aggression in East Asia and that’s where American military resources will be concentrated. Europe is on its own and by any calculation can afford to create military forces adequate to deal with any Russian threat. As happened in the two World Wars, the U.S. will render assistance, which will take weeks or months to arrive.
Since the 1950s most European nations have been content with allowing the United States to carry most of the defense load in terms of specialized equipment and combat ready troops as well as warships and combat aircraft. The Americans spend three percent of their GDP on defense each year and European nations agreed to spend two percent. The United States continues to spend three percent but not all of the European nations met their two percent goal. Poland and Finland, which border Russia, did meet the two percent goal but NATO nations further west, like Germany, are only spending 1.5 percent.
The problem is that NATO nations can afford this expense, without hurting their economies, more than Russia can. In 2021, the year before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russian defense budget was $66 billion. Russia expected a short and victorious war in Ukraine. That did not happen so Russia’ military budget for 2022 rose to $75 billion and then to between $84 billion and $100 billion in 2023. As a result of this Russia is expected to spend over $600 billion on defense between 2022 and 2025.
The Ukraine War has made NATO countries aware that the Cold War-era Russian threat has returned and is not likely to go away. This means NATO countries will have to return to Cold War levels of defense spending, which averaged 3.5 percent a year for all NATO members. In the 1990s that shrank to two percent. Now it is supposed to go back to 3.5 percent. In Russia the situation was worse. At the end of the Cold war, in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart, the Soviet Union was spending over $70 billion a year on defense.
Russia is not only more aggressive but is putting its economy on a permanent war footing. Russia cannot afford that, mainly because it was hit with extensive economic sanctions. This hurt Russia economically and the government tells the Russian people that the current economic depression in Russia is the result of NATO aggression. Russia tells its people that its troops went into Ukraine to prevent NATO from taking control of Ukraine and using it as part of an attack on Russia. The assertion seems absurd to Westerners, but Russians have had over a century of government paranoia about the West and are more inclined to accept it as reality.
Russia is already threatening to inflict some punishment on European nations that support Ukraine and that is inspiring the NATO nations to at least consider trying to up their defense spending and reach the two percent goal. Right now American defense spending exceeds that of Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine. Currently the United States is spending nearly $900 billion a year on defense, which just about exceeds the combined defense spending of every other nation on the planet. Considering this situation, the Americans feel justified in demanding that their European allies meet the two percent of GDP goal they agreed to. The continued fighting in Ukraine proved to be an incentive to meet the two percent demand and, in some cases, exceed it.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is another example of Russia reviving the Cold War that ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then Russia has continued to get involved in wars. For example, Russian operations in Syria caused Russian defense spending to increase to $48 billion in 2015. That was 4.2 percent of its 2015 GDP. Military spending declined to $45 billion, or four percent of GDP in 2016. Russia was forced to cut defense spending sharply in 2017 and 2018 because of continued low oil prices and economic sanctions imposed because of Russian aggression against Ukraine that began in 2014. As a result in 2017 Russian defense spending fell to about 3.2 percent of GDP and in 2018 it was 2.9 percent of GDP. There it remained until the eve of the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022.