NATO's 5% of GDP military expenditures is a 100% indefensible and stupid Idea

Worse now after NATO Hague Summit, June 2025. We are so far out that millions of taxpayers should refuse to pay and overwhelm NATO/EU legal systems as NATO moves towards Zero Security with this.

War Collage - La Paix Quand? © Jan Oberg 2024

Pathological groupthink towards a war economy.

This is a re-posting of my critical analysis from January 2025 below. It has become even more relevant with NATO’s Hague Summit, June 24-25, during which this absurd measure was increased to 5% of GNP to be reached within the next 5-10 years. For a country like Denmark, this will amount to an estimated 10% of the state’s budget!

This comes on top of what IISS let you know here: “European defence spending jumped by 11.7% in real terms to reach USD457 billion, with 2024 marking the tenth consecutive year of growth.”

The same source estimates Russia’s 2024 military expenditures to be US$ 146 billion (or 462 if calculating it by purchasing power parity (PPP).

Currently, none of these NATO/EU leaders have a clue about how to finance it except by taking loans (to be paid back by future generations) and reducing expenditures for a broad range of civilian purposes, such as health, education, and culture.

It will mean a further reduced capability to compete globally in terms of research, innovation, and global problem solving - such as the climate and poverty. It will, in short, give the 88% living outside the West a great boost, and sink the West even faster.

NATO’s leaders will, thereby, bring us everything but security, peace and cooperation. Their “decisions” will, whether knowingly (cynics) or not (ignorants), only bring misery and increase the risk of war in Europe, if not beyond.

This means more than a doubling of already very high military expenditures. The percentage policy relieves NATO members and their governments from doing any serious, intellectually decent threat analysis (see below how it should be done). It is enough in these dark times to just refer to Russia as a threat.

They also know that there is not one journalist around who would ask questions about that all-simplifying, politico-pathological Russia-hating reference. The selected mainstream media are all militarism-promoters.; you never hear a NATO-critical question at the S-G’s press conferences.

The simple facts no one talks about

Regarding NATO and Russia's military capabilities, please see this. NATO is leading big on every indicator. Concerning military expenditures, Russia’s are US$146 billion (or US$ 462 billion if you want the largest possible figure, see above), while NATO’s total expenditures are US$ 1,470 billion. (NATO comprises 32 countries, which account for about 17% of the world’s 190 countries.)

This makes a Russia:NATO ratio of 1:10 as of today !

But that is not enough. The arms-addicted NATO/EU leaders want an increase from 2 to 5% of GNP - or, let’s say, a doubling over the next decade. While neither NATO nor I know how Russia’s military expenditures will develop over that decade - they do serious qualitative threat analysis and not GNP percentages - NATO’s decision about the 5% aims at making NATO’s military expenditures 20 times higher than Russia’s.

If NATO/EU needs 10-20 times more money than Russia to be able to fight Russia, we are witnessing the world’s lousiest economy in action: 10-20 times the Bucks to make the same Bang!

In passing, let me add that, of course, many other factors also determine security, strength, and who would win in a war. However, in light of what I have just communicated to you, I dare to call this 5% measure absurd, irrational, and perverse, even pathological as a policy.

•

NATO’s glamour covering intellectual emptiness

Look at it as theatre. They arrive in limousines with high security for themselves. They dress elegantly and are guests of the royal couple. They are merely flying in, at the cost of billions, to be nicely placed at the photo opportunity.

All decisions have been made before they meet, they all play their roles and state virtually the same banalities.

They are actors on militarism’s stage, big smiles, hugs and jokes - they are such a cosy family, a success story like never told in human history.

Media that know nothing about substance, focus on certain words or details - like how Trump is referred to as ‘Daddy’ by the charming Rutte S-G. Even the press conferences is a performance.

The statement coming out of the Summit is so brief and non-argumentative that it is not worth the bandwidth you read it on.

It’s bread and circuses for the people. All these emperors wear no clothes, and their speech is unbearably predictable and banal.

Their ‘security’ means Zero Security for you and me. But you are not supposed to see it. This is the Theatre of the Absurd and War.

Nonviolent taxpayer disobedience

Imagine that 100s of millions of citizens in NATO and EU countries decided not to pay that percentage of their tax money which goes to the military and to this militarism. As honest and decent people, they would instead pay that percentage into a common national Fund for Conversion to Peace.

The day their government began to take security and peace - and not militarism - seriously, the accumulated funds could be released to further an alternative policy.

Now, this has to be done by millions and not a handful. If only a handful, the legal systems would be able to process this nonviolent tax break and force people to pay. However, if this was done in the millions, the legal systems would stand no chance to process all. Think of that!

After all, we are now forced to pay even more to receive even less security - for the simple reason that weapons have not led to peace - it’s rather a drug for amotionallists - and more weapons will only lead the world towards increased war risks, reduced human security and - increasingly likely - a rapidly increasing risk of war.

Militarism can not thrive without obedient, accepting - and paying - citizens. If we use our soft power, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. always advocated, we can stop this militarist madness.

Time is short! Spread the idea!

•

Now, the original argument from January 2025:

Politicians, scholars and the media unthinkingly promote this nonsense, latest President Trump at Davos. Western rational thinking is out; market thinking, hysteria, and emotionalism are in.

With intellectual and moral disarmament, the West has become its own worst enemy. It is dangerous. It’s self-destructive.

•

Jan Oberg

•

For years, NATO's capacity goal has been for all its members to spend 2% of their GDP on the military. To many, this would be a ceiling, but according to ex-SG Jens Stoltenberg, from the Madrid Summit in 2022 onwards, it was the floor.

This goal is a splendid indicator of the frighteningly low intellectual level on which the alliance and the Western world, in general, operate today - intellectual and moral disarmament coupled with militarist re-armament.

Why?

A defence budget shall be determined by a serious, multi-dimensional and future-oriented analysis based on a series of more or less likely scenarios: What are we challenged by the next x number of years?

Next follows a matching of probability and capacity: Threats that are too big for a country’s capacity to do something about – like being hit by nuclear weapons – or threats that are too unlikely are separated and dropped. So are threats/challenges that are too small to worry about.

Then the threat analysis is left with credible, probable future threats within a resource spectrum that the country in question can do something about. It’s based on such a detailed analysis that a government presents its threat analysis and seeks to allocate, or re-allocate, its resources to achieve optimal security given its resources.

This is the way it was done up until the end of the First Cold War. One could agree or disagree with various governments’ threat analyses and priorities, but they were published in studies of hundreds of pages, were put out for public debate and then - as long as the West practised democracy - decisions were made.

•

But what are NATO countries doing today?

They drop all this – intellectually demanding – analytical work based on numerous types of civilian and military expertise and simply set off X% of their GDP no matter what kinds of threats there are in the real world.

Mindbogglingly, they tie their military expenditures to their economic performance: If GDP increases, then military spending grows proportionately! If the GDP slides down, defence expenditures will do so, too, regardless of the perceived or actual threat environment.

It’s like setting off a certain percentage of the family income to health expenditures whether or not any family member is ill.

And absurdly, it is actually a de-coupling of adversaries: We have more to fight Russia and China with whether or not they de facto behave as adversaries. In the long run it will end in the West sinking deeper and deeper into economic crisis - and with a steadily diminished economic performance, there will - according to this counterproductive idea - be less available to the military and warfare.

The more the West spends on militarism, the more its civilian performance and power will decrease, and the less there will be for ‘security.’ But our kakistocratic militarists don’t even think that far!

NATO’s original Military Expenditures As Percentage of GDP idea is a reflection of the Western delusional idea applied in many other fields that, when there is a problem, we set off funds to solve it and pump those funds into a system, whether or not that system is functioning, functioning optimally – or not at all.

In other words, money has become the measure of problem-solving capacity and quality; changes, reforms or completely new thinking and structural reform don’t even enter the equation.

Qualities are expressed in quantitative terms. And it is the end of thinking and common sense.

The 2% goal was meaningless from Day One- Intellectual dwarfs bought it and used it again and again over the last decade or so.

Threats to a country do not move up and down according to that country’s economy. Such thinking points to the intellectual inside-the-box stagnation of an old organisation.

President Trump has just increased it to 5%. When will it be 10% in this incredibly unproductive and parasitic sector that I call the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC ? It is the cancer that eats up civilian creativity, innovation and socio-economic development and militarises us to death - while the rest of the world is whizzing along and surpassing the West.

Be sure that the higher the percentage figure gets, the faster NATO countries’ civilian economy will sink into an even deeper crisis - because the economist’s First Law is that you cannot eat the cake and have it too.

The fact that no one - except this author - has addressed this Military Expenditures As % of GDP as intellectual BS - is, in and of itself, a threat to world security. Where rational, intelligent thinking goes out, militarism and war seep in.

With Trump in the White House, the decline of the West will go even faster. That’s why he wants a Greater American from Panama to the largest possible part of Scandinavia (with 47 US bases) and Arctic.

There may come a day when Europe sees fit to open up to Russia, China, and all the other ‘bad’ guys - if they want to have anything to do with Europe. I mean, with friends like Trump and his greater America - perhaps out of NATO and 5% of economic wealth wasted completely - who will need to point to old enemies in the future?

• This article is adapted from my much longer “The TFF Abolish NATO Catalogue. Abolish NATO or Convert It to Serve Peace. 30 Arguments and 100s of Inspirations” from 2022.

•