{"id":286627,"date":"2025-01-27T12:01:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T12:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=286627"},"modified":"2025-01-26T06:16:38","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T06:16:38","slug":"military-expenditures-as-a-percentage-of-gdp-a-100-indefensible-and-stupid-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/military-expenditures-as-a-percentage-of-gdp-a-100-indefensible-and-stupid-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Military Expenditures as a Percentage of GDP: A 100% Indefensible and Stupid Idea"},"content":{"rendered":"
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War Collage – La Paix Quand?
\u00a9 Jan Oberg 2024<\/p><\/div>\n

– that everybody seems to love.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

With intellectual and moral disarmament, the West has become its own worst enemy. It is dangerous. It\u2019s self-destructive.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

25 Jan 2025 <\/em>– 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

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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?<\/p>\n

Next follows a matching of probability and capacity: Threats that are too big for a country\u2019s capacity to do something about \u2013 like being hit by nuclear weapons \u2013 or threats that are too unlikely are separated and dropped. So are threats\/challenges that are too small to worry about.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the way it was done up until the end of the First Cold War. One could agree or disagree with various governments\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

But what are NATO countries doing today?<\/p>\n

They drop all this \u2013 intellectually demanding \u2013 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mindbogglingly, they tie their military expenditures to their economic performance:<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like setting off a certain percentage of the family income to health expenditures whether or not any family member is ill.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The more the West spends on militarism, the more its civilian performance and power will decrease, and the less there will be for \u2018security.\u2019 But our kakistocratic militarists don\u2019t even think that far!<\/p>\n

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NATO\u2019s original Military Expenditures As Percentage of GDP<\/em> 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 \u2013 or not at all.<\/p>\n

In other words, money has become the measure of problem-solving capacity and quality; changes, reforms or completely new thinking and structural reform don\u2019t even enter the equation. <\/em><\/p>\n

Qualities are expressed in quantitative terms. And it is the end of thinking and common sense.<\/p>\n

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

Threats to a country do not move up and down according to that country\u2019s economy. Such thinking points to the intellectual inside-the-box stagnation of an old organisation.<\/p>\n

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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 <\/em>? 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.<\/p>\n

Be sure that the higher the percentage figure gets, the faster NATO countries\u2019 civilian economy will sink into an even deeper crisis – because the economist\u2019s First Law is that you cannot eat the cake and have it too.<\/p>\n

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

With Trump in the White House, the decline of the West will go even faster. That\u2019s why he wants a Greater American from Panama to the largest possible part of Scandinavia (with 47 US bases) and Arctic.<\/p>\n

There may come a day when Europe sees fit to open up to Russia, China, and all the other \u2018bad\u2019 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?<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

This article is adapted from my much longer <\/em>The TFF Abolish NATO Catalogue. Abolish NATO or Convert It to Serve Peace. 30 Arguments and 100s of Inspirations<\/a> from 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Prof. Jan Oberg, Ph.D. is director of the independent <\/em>Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research-TF<\/a>F<\/a> in Sweden and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. CV: <\/em>https:\/\/transnational.live\/jan-oberg<\/em><\/a>
\n<\/em>https:\/\/transnational.live<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – thetransnational.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

– that everybody seems to love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":166625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[2914,2009,1268,291,2462,91,249,70],"class_list":["post-286627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-anti-nato","tag-anti-war","tag-european-union","tag-military","tag-military-industrial-media-complex","tag-nato","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286632,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286627\/revisions\/286632"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}