The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, had set a target of spending 2% of GDP on defense for each of its members. In this post, I'll take a closer look at which of the countries met the requirements and which ones fell behind and why.

Just How Big NATO is?

If we make some comparisons in terms of military spending alone, NATO is big. Really big. Compared to Russia, for example, NATO is insanely superior. In 2021 Russia spend around $66 billion on its military while NATOs European members alone spent more than four times that and if we add the biggest spender, The United States(spent more than 11 times more than Russia, $801 billion) to that, I think its safe to say that NATO is huge.

Call To Action

History has witnessed so many times that war doesn't usually go the way that the strongest military power should want to. Also, I think NATO's idea is to strengthen the local troops so they could respond faster in case of crisis.

Probably the first time I heard about the military spending requirements was when former US president Donald Trump called out to European countries to raise their contribution or else. I think that's actually a valid argument, why should the US be the only one contributing since we are all in this together?

Research

When I decided to write about this particular topic I searched for statistics and the first title I laid my eyes on was this, Only 7 nato members hit alliances 2-percent gdp defense spending target in 2022. Now, before clicking the link to the article I saw the European map in my head and also which ones those 7 countries were and had a theory about why they've been such good pupils.

I don't want to brag about it but when I learned that the US, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the United Kingdom all reached the goal, I must say that if it was a quiz, I'd probably got 6 out of 7 correct.

As for those fellow European countries that didn't meet the requirements, I totally understand why. I can imagine how tempting it is for countries to make budget cuts and focus them on military spending considering the current economic situation. Especially when the electricity costs are high because the cheap gas has been cut off. While inflation is killing people's purchase power I'm sure the governments are tempted to allocate the income collected from taxes somewhere else.

It's probably even more tempting if the country in question isn't located close to the... well, close to the possible threat.

From the ones that made it 2 % or above, I would have guessed right the hawkish UK and even more hawkish US and also the Baltic countries and Poland - which are all next to NATOs eastern border. Greece was a bit of a surprise but I can see that cos of their ongoing disagreements with a fellow NATO ally, Turkey.

Finland

The reason why this subject interests me is because I'm from Finland which just joined NATO as their newest member. We applied together with the neighboring Sweden which was unfortunately left out for now for various reasons.

So what about our military spending? Do we meet the 2 % GDP target? In short, yes.

For decades Finland has been kinda balancing between the East and West. We were never occupied during wars but we had close ties with the Soviets for a long time. After the second world war, Finland actually benefited quite a lot from the trade deals we were sort of forced into with the Russians. Meanwhile, we were building our military forces while the NATO question was a no-no.

After the Soviet Union, Finland's military spending spree was focused on the West. From what I've learned from the public debates is that the government's function is merely to work as a rubber stamp and the generals usually get what they want. We became regular customers at Lockheed Martin.

Of course, there have been opposing voices mainly from the left side but whatever it is, it has passed and the military has become quite strong throughout the years.

Conclusion

The Finnish Defense Forces have been constructed to stand alone against the possible enemy so we were already "NATO ready". Before even applying to join, Finland bought 64 F-35s from Lockheed Martin, a missile defense system from Israel, and started building 4 new warships.

According to the Ministry Of Foreign Affairs, Finland's military spending in 2023 of its GDP will be 2.38%.

In the end, it all comes down to geography. What we have in common with some other A students of NATO - Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia - is the interesting location of our country.

I would very much like to raise a discussion about the subject, what's your opinion about the military spending of your country and is there a lot of arguments for or against it?

Thank you for reading!

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