Global Military Spending Surges As Arms Control Mechanisms Collapse

Forbes

5 days ago

At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit last year in Washington D.C., the corresponding press release noted that arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation remained critical to achieving the organization's security objectives. With the war in Ukraine still going strong, global trends in military spending are not reflecting these objectives. A range of escalating security challenges has triggered destabilizing arms races worldwide.
Global military spending reached $2.7 trillion in 2024, representing a 9.4% jump in real terms from 2023. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine and Russia have dramatically boosted their military budgets. Ukraine's military spending surged 640% between 2021 and 2022, according to Macrotrends.net, while Russia's rose by 31%. In 2024, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released a report showing that Ukraine allocates $64.7 billion — roughly 24% of its gross domestic product — to defense, whereas Russia spends about $149 billion, or 7% of its GDP.
But the arms build-up is not limited to Russia and Ukraine. Over the past decade, more than 100 countries have expanded their defense budgets. Including Russia, European military spending climbed 17% to $693 billion in 2024, the same SIPRI report found. With the exception of Malta, all European countries increased their military spending in 2024.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a military budget of almost a trillion dollars for 2026, including at least $175 billion for a Golden Dome Defense System— a layered missile shield designed to protect the U.S. from long-range and hypersonic missiles, which travel at over five times the speed of sound.
In response to the news, Beijing called the Golden Dome 'deeply destabilising in nature.' Yet for the last two decades China has been investing in hypersonic weapons— which follow unpredictable paths and can be maneuvered mid-flight, making them difficult to intercept. China's military modernization, marked by three decades of consecutive growth, saw spending rise 7% to $314 billion in 2024.
This surge sharply contrasts with global trends in military spending several decades ago. From 1983 to 1993, world military expenditures dropped over 40% in proportion to GDP, from 5.7% to 3.3% of world GDP. The 1990s remain the decade with the fewest state-based conflict deaths since the 1950s, raising questions about the causal relationship between military spending and conflict.
Today's arms race unfolds after the repeated failure of critical arms control agreements. The last remaining treaty between the U.S. and Russia on nuclear weapons is New START, which was signed by then leaders Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in April of 2010. Though an agreement was made in March of 2021 to extend the treaty, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 and Russia's subsequent refusal to submit to on-site inspections several months later, Moscow officially stopped participating in the treaty the following February.
Russia also withdrew from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in May of 2023 (which bans nuclear test explosions) and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty in November 2023. Even as U.S. President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin continue to engage in talks about the war in Ukraine, the status of New START (which expires in 2026) and its future replacement remain unknown. Russia has rejected any nuclear arms control talks with the U.S. arguing that the West would first have to change its 'anti-Russian attitudes.'
This wasn't the first time that Russia reneged on an arms' control agreement. One of the notable cases was Russia's development of the Novator 9M729 (first test fired in 2014), a cruise missile which has a range of 2,500 km, which violated the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The INF prohibited the US and Russia (then the Soviet Union) from developing and deploying ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500km, eliminating an entire category of nuclear weapons. As concerns about Russia's pursuit of ground-based missiles persisted, the U.S. withdrew from the INF in 2019.
Russia's INF breaches likely spurred NATO and its allies to enhance their own long range strike capabilities. The U.S. and Germany announced in 2024 that Germany would host ground based medium range missiles (including SM-6, Tomahawk missiles, and hypersonic weapons) which can target Russia directly by 2026. Though these missiles are designed to only carry conventional warheads, they sparked a reaction from Moscow that additional nuclear tipped medium range missiles could be deployed. Russia further alarmed the West by unveiling an intermediate range ballistic missile called the Oreshnik in Dnipro, Ukraine – capable of carrying six nuclear tipped warheads and striking European capitals within 12 to 16 minutes.
Meanwhile France, Germany and Poland signed a letter of intent committing to agree to jointly produce their own medium-range missiles, with a range over 500 km. As for the U.S., in addition to its investment in the Golden Dome, Washington. is accumulating an arsenal of ground-launched strike systems with ranges exceeding 500 kilometres, and working to become a hypersonic missile superpower over concerns of China's rising power.
This arms race between the U.S. in China is especially concerning given that there is no bilateral arms control agreement, and alongside Russia, neither country has ratified the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. While China signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons in 1992 (the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed in 1968), it does not adhere to the spirit of the treaty, having increased its nuclear arsenal considerably. By 2030, the PRC will potentially possess over 1,000 operational warheads, while Russia and the U.S. each possess over 5,000.
With arms' control talks increasingly sidelined, the arms race of the 21st century is not only more expensive than during the Cold War, but potentially more dangerous.