The Fractured World Order
While the size of the Pentagon budget often grabs the attention of the media and segments of our Congress always call for more in the way of military spending, little is said about the meaning of security.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a spike in global military spending. Canada and the United States both released plans for more military spending. So far, 29 European states have announced plans for $209 billion in new defense spending, a figure that will continue to rise.
The European Commission has declared that “investments will be needed to replenish the depleted stocks of military equipment,” and Josep Borrell, the EU’s top foreign policy official, has called for the bloc “to spend together, more, and better” on its armed forces. Naturally, one must look at the war in Ukraine if one wants to understand the motivator of this trend. However, it goes back to 1999 when military budgets started to escalate around the world because the optimistic outlook that defined the end of the Cold War faded. In 2000, Russia started to spend more heavily to recover some of the lost military might of the old Soviet Union. Russia was one of the few European countries that didn’t slash military spending after the 2008 financial crises. The US gradually increased defense expenditures after the terrorist attacks on New York City in 2001. In fact, the US has increased military spending by 40 percent over the last two decades. Europe’s defense spending was stagnant for a while, but it started to grow after the Russian invasion of Crimea. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, global military spending had reached a post-Cold War high of 2.1 trillion, as stated by writers Nan Tian, Diego Lopez da Silva, and Alexandra Marksteiner in their story “The Great Global Rearmament: Ukraine and the Dangerous Rise of Military Spending.”
Over the last 30 years, China has increased military spending more than any other country. After 1995-1996 Taiwan Straight Crises – where China lobbed missiles at the Taiwan Strait but was halted by the presence of the US Navy – Beijing launched an incredible military modernization program. Chinese defense spending increased by 10 percent every year for the next two decades, and the country’s now 27 uninterrupted years of increased military spending make for the longest such stretch for any state in the world. Chinese military expenditures reached $293 billion last year. China’s military buildup has kicked off a balancing act in Asia, as other countries in the region are spending more to counter China’s power. Japan increased its military budget by 7.3 percent last year.
The above scenario is a nightmare for a Grotian like me who believes the world must set ground rules for the behavior of nation states and city states and those states work for a world governed by law. One of the justifications for more military spending here in the US is deterrence, or the need to deter China and Russia – allied in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – from becoming too powerful.
It’s important to remember there’s more to security than just how much any country spends on its military. The greenhouse effect and food insecurity are also security challenges, challenges that lots of military spending won’t cure, as stated by Tian, Lopez da Silva, and Marksteiner. On June 30, the United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced that to finance military aid to Ukraine, it was “surrendering” some climate and foreign aid funds. Funding greenhouse effect and food security initiatives would take a fraction of the military budget.
Tian, Lopez da Silva, and Marksteiner’s story brings up many good points but doesn’t bring up the main problem – the fact that the word’s power centers aren’t cooperating on the establishment of an orderly world. Naturally, this is hard given the belligerent behavior of Russia in Ukraine and worries about China’s behavior when it comes to Taiwan. The biggest challenge of the future will be for each power to police its own sphere of influence but not invade the sovereignty of smaller countries in their sphere and at the same time not war with each other. The powers must meet in the middle somewhere to establish ground rules or laws. Can we see a modern version of the Peace of Westphalia, the masterful work of diplomacy the ended both the Eighty Years War and the Thirty Years War, that used the balance of power in Europe to bring peace to Europe until World War I?
