Mark Carney speaks at the NATO Summit in The Hague, Netherlands, June 25, 2025. Photo courtesy Mark Carney/X.

The priorities of our political leaders can be very hard to understand. Western countries are suffering years of economic stagnation, deteriorating public services, increasing popular distrust in political institutions, and a host of other problems. Yet our governments have decided that what we really need to do is spend more money on defence—and not just more money, but a lot, lot more money than what we are spending at present.

For NATO countries have agreed that they should spend not just the two percent of GDP they had previously pledged on defence—a target which many of them, including Canada, had notably failed to meet—but five percent. But why the world’s most powerful military organization needs to more than double its expenditure, and why it has picked on this suspiciously round number, remains completely unexplained, perhaps because it is in fact unexplainable.

Defence spending makes no sense in the absence of a threat, and it would seem that the underlying logic of NATO’s new policy is that it faces a serious threat from the Russian Federation. Certainly, no other potential enemy nowadays occupies quite so much attention. But Russia hardly justifies NATO’s proposed spending increases, as can be seen by a simple comparison of modern Russia with the Soviet Union of 40-50 years ago.

In the early 1980s, the Soviet army was positioned in the middle of Germany, about 1,500 kilometres to the west of where the Russian army is today. Backed by its allies in the Warsaw Pact, it enjoyed a significant advantage over NATO. Nowadays, by contrast, not only has the border between Russia and NATO moved far to the east, but the Russian army is a faint shadow of the size and power of its Soviet predecessor. Meanwhile, NATO has gotten a lot large, absorbing most of the former members of the Warsaw Pact. But, according to NATO’s own official figures, from 1975 to 1984 NATO members spent on average only 4.7 percent of GDP on defence, in other words less than they are now promising to spend over the next........

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