Europe Does More Than US for Ukraine
How much do you think European countries are spending on Ukraine? Short answer is: they are spending a bigger fraction of their GDP to help Ukraine than we are. And more total money too.
The US has pledged an amount equal to three tenths of one percent of our annual gross domestic product. That’s for military and non-military aid over the last two years. We’re behind France – FRANCE – which has pledged over half a percent. The Baltic nations (Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia) have committed 1.7% of GDP – over five times as much as us. OK, the Russians are right next door and breathing down their neck, but little Netherlands is also over 1% of GDP. The UK has pledged a higher fraction of GDP for both military and non-military support. Germany’s military support alone (about 0.4% of GDP) is higher than US military plus nonmilitary.
Sure, the Baltic countries together have about 6 million people and their contribution is a drop in the bucket compared to the 330 million Americans whose government pledged 75 $B (billion dollars). But all the European countries together have pledged over 160 $B.
Here, I made a chart:
The data is from the Ukraine Support Tracker at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. They looked at different categories of funding from individual countries and separate amounts funded by the European Union (EU) as a whole. The chart is one of my rate-intensity plots; each rectangle represents a country or group of countries, the width of the rectangle tells the percentage of GDP pledged, the rectangle height tells the GDP, and hence the rectangle area tells the total spending. I also shaded the rectangles to give a rough idea of the total spending if you don’t feel like multiplying the width by the height. For a more detailed description of the chart and the data, see a page about it at my George Mason University website: International Financial Support for Ukraine.
Did I mention Canada? Same spending for Ukraine (per their GDP) as the US. Even Japan kicked in a few billion dollars, even though they aren’t part of EU or NATO.
Too much of the debate over Ukraine portrays America as carrying all the other countries. According to these numbers, that’s simply not true.
Are the Europeans doing enough? No. And neither are we Americans. Don’t get me wrong, the billions spent already was well worth it. We helped Ukraine stop the Russians from taking the whole country, are helping them keep their society and government afloat while facing an enemy three times their population, and we are raising the price of aggression for Vladimir Putin, who thought his “Special Military Operation” would be over in a few days. But we have not given aid fast enough or big enough to let Ukraine kick the invaders out of their country, and Russia is still raining death down on a thousand-kilometer front line and on Ukrainian cities.
The US has made a promise to help protect other countries formerly in the Russian Empire. I didn’t want NATO to expand into any of these, certainly not the Baltics; but now that we have, its in our interest for Putin to fail in Ukraine. If he does not, he may decide he can pick off a few small NATO countries and suddenly we are sucked into World War III.