With more talk lately about whether European NATO members are spending enough on their militaries, I took a look around the internet to find a nice chart. What I found were a lot of out-of-date ones, along with a chart for 2023 which has good information but is hard to read. So, here is a new one.
The width of each bar shows the country’s spending as % of GDP, the height of each bar is the country’s GDP, and hence the area of the bar is the country’s total military spending. Because some smaller-population countries have relatively small GDPs, I plotted those with a different GDP scale for visibility, and I also combined some small countries. Finally, I color coded the bars to give an idea of where each country is. I took out the US, which has a population, GDP, and total spending far greater than any other NATO member, but I left in the other North American NATO member – Canada.
Some things I see in the chart:
- Frontline countries (those that share a border with Russia or its vassal state, Belarus) are almost all spending above 2%. Poland is almost up to 4%. Norway has spending levels more typical of countries further west, but its border with Russia is small and remote for both countries.
- Other Eastern European countries are near or above 2%. I’m not sure why Greek military spending (3%) is so high.
- UK and France are near 2%, but Germany is still only at 1.6% according to these numbers. Other countries which are further from Russia are also well below 2%. I’m also a bit surprised that Turkish spending is not very high.
In 2022 Germany announced a special military fund of 100 billion Euros to upgrade its military. I can’t tell if this number is included in the defense statistics I used for the chart. Press reports had put German spending in 2024 above 2% of GDP even before a certain presidential candidate made inflammatory remarks about NATO recently. I’m willing to bet that said candidate will notice the higher German spending at some point and take credit for it even though it was announced before he stirred the pot.
Conclusion: countries that are most at risk of being invaded by Russia are already spending 2% of GDP on defense, in some cases way more. The question is whether other European countries a little further from Russia are doing enough to support the Frontline states. As my earlier post showed, they are already doing much more for Ukraine than many Americans realize.
A comparison to spending back in 2014 shows how military spending has increased in NATO. As percentages of GDP, 2023 spending was 30% higher than 2014 in Germany, double in Poland, and at least 25% higher in other Frontline and Eastern European countries. Spending per GDP went up a similar amount in the rest of Europe as well.
Remember What We Are Talking About
A common misconception promoted by some politicians is that NATO countries owe the United States some kind of dues for NATO membership. That is not how it works. While members due need to spend money for the direct support of NATO, this is under $4 billion total compared to all military spending which is over $200 B for Europe alone.
The 2% of GDP figure is referring to all military spending by each country. US spends a bigger fraction of GDP on the military, but that is not all for Europe. The US has a gigantic navy, globe-spanning military bases, involvement in conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and a self-image as the world’s superpower that has driven our military spending far above European levels.
Here is the 2014 NATO statement about total defense spending for each member nation:
“Allies currently meeting the NATO guideline to spend a minimum of 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defense will aim to continue to do so… Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level will… aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.” [emphasis mine]
So have European nations been “aiming to move towards” 2%? I guess so.
While NATO was conceptualized as a way for the US to help Europe deter a Soviet (now Russian) attack, so far the only time NATO countries invoked the mutual defense clause was to come to US aid in attacking Afghanistan after 9/11. US military facilities in Europe are part of its system of projecting power across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Africa. All the US service members medevacked from Iraq or Afghanistan to a hospital in Germany benefited from our alliance with Europe.
Meanwhile, in another area of the world that has US leaders worried, Taiwan’s 2024 military budget is 2.6% of their GDP, just 3.5% higher than the previous year. Considering that people here wonder if China will launch a massive invasion of Taiwan within a few years, you would think Taiwan would be spending 4%, 5%, or more to deter an existential threat. While Americans tend to see this as some kind of ignorance or Stockholm syndrome on the part of the Taiwanese, it just may be that Taiwanese have a more realistic appraisal of their own military needs than we do.
(Though I have to admit, from the little I know, it really does seem like Taiwan should be fortifying itself to the hilt to raise the cost of an invasion. As I’ve written before though, the US should make sure it does not get into a war with China over this or anything else.)
Some Details
Data comes from NATO itself, Defense Expenditures of NATO Countries.
I made the graph myself. This is the first political chart I’ve made using R instead of Matlab. I still prefer Matlab but I fear that its use will decline in competition with open-source languages like R and Python, so I’m trying to keep up with the times.
The “Balkans” in the chart includes Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bulgaria. Some other countries listed separately in the chart are technically also in the Balkans, but I just wanted a short name for this grouping of small countries.