With the end of the Cold War in the nineties and with the speeches in favor of multilateralism in the first years of the millennium, many in the world believed that the peaceful resolution of conflicts would gain ground on the planet and, consequently, that the arms race would lose much of the strength it had gained throughout the 20th century.. But those optimistic forecasts failed horribly.
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The consolidation of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and the expansionist policy of China from the Pacific to Africa, confronted with the reaction of the United States and the European Union, and added all this to the aggressiveness of autocratic regimes such as Iran and North Korea, have given the world arms industry a new impetus.
All projections agree that the military sector will end 2022 with numbers that almost double those of the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. The 100 largest arms-producing companies will close to 600,000 million dollars in sales this year, against 315,000 million dollars in 2006. It could be much more, since it is not yet possible to consolidate the figures for the arms rush for the war in Ukraine.
For years, The United States accounts for more than a third of global military spending. And, for 2023, Congress in Washington has just approved a defense and security budget (which does not only include weapons) of 858,000 million dollars. It is 4 percent more than what was approved for 2022 and 10 percent more than what was executed in 2021. To get an idea of what this increase implies, suffice it to say that between 2015 and 2020, that same budget barely grew by an average of 2 percent per year.
goodbye to pacifism
After the defeat in the WWII, With its cities devastated by three years of conventional bombing and the explosion of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s new leaders made a strong commitment to pacifism. According to the 1946 Constitution, its armed forces would be limited to what today are 250,000 active troops and 60,000 in reserve, dedicated exclusively to “self-defense of the country” and its territory.
But last Friday, the Government revealed the new National Security Strategy, the first in more than a decade, which marks a radical turn. The plan foresees a military expenditure of more than 312,000 million dollars in the next 5 years, which will increase this item of the budget from 1 to 2 percent of the GDP. The new strategy seeks increase “counter-attack capacity” and it does not exclude that the new means allow “reaching enemy territory”.
Japan is in a dispute with China over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands – which China calls the Diaoyu Islands – rocky, deserted islets northeast of Taiwan, not far from Okinawa. Beijing’s threat to recapture Taiwan and incorporate it into the People’s Republic of China, manifested in continued naval operations and areas in the area, gives strategic value to these islands. But basically, it is about the return to an age-old dispute between the Chinese and Japanese over the western Pacific.
Germany is the other country defeated in World War II that had made a pacifist bet. All that changed a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, at the end of February, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat at the head of a coalition that includes environmentalists – a pacifist by tradition – announced before the parliament in Berlin the biggest military spending program in nearly 80 years.
The German plan, backed by all the country’s political parties, plans to add $107 billion by 2026 to spending already planned for defense and security. As in Japan, this will bring such spending to 2 percent of GDP. Annual military spending will rise from averages of $50 billion to more than $75 billion, putting Germany in contention for third place among military powers, behind the United States and China.
To justify the decision, Scholz assured that his armed forces had been “structurally underfunded since 2010.” “It is clear – he explained to the parliamentarians, while cannons resounded in Ukraine a few thousand kilometers away – that we need to invest significantly more in the security of our country to protect our freedom and our democracy.”
Germany was divided during decades of the Cold War, with the eastern half – the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – under Soviet bloc rule. And that ghost reappeared after the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disappeared, the reunified country opted for a rapprochement with Moscow, which involved diplomacy and a lot of business, with large German investments in Russia and German dependence on Russian gas.
But as the Social Democratic leader Nils Schmid rightly said, “dialogue and cooperation in Russia have not worked and we have entered a new era of European security.” “For 30 years we emphasized dialogue and cooperation with Russia – he lamented – and it is bitter to admit that it did not work”.
For 30 years we emphasized dialogue and cooperation with Russia and it is bitter to admit that it did not work
France and the United Kingdom do not want to be left behind. Emmanuel Macron’s government approved a defense budget of more than $45 billion, almost 90 percent dedicated to purchases of military equipment ranging from tanks, guns and armored vehicles to naval and ground satellite stations. It is 7.4 percent more than in 2022 and 36 percent more than in 2017.
In turn, the British Government outlined a program from 2023 to 2030, which seeks to move defense spending from 58,000 million dollars this year to more than 120,000 million annually at the end of the decade, which would mean between 2.5 and 3 percent of GDP. If it succeeds, it would be competing with Germany for being the third largest military power on the planet.
Other increases are evident in Spain, Italy, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and several other countries in the European Union. “The war in Ukraine has served Europe – says a document from the German firm Main First, which advises and manages investments and funds – to rediscover its security needs, underestimated for a long time”.
China, Russia and others
Although Western experts maintain that China’s military spending figures, based on official reports, are not entirely reliable, a constant increase in this budget has been evident for several years in the Asian giant. By 2022, and with the objective of reintegrating Taiwan into its territory, Beijing acknowledged having increased this item by more than 7 percent, up to 230,000 million dollars.
Analysts from Sipri (International Institute for Peace Studies), based in Stockholm (Sweden), think that by 2022 Chinese spending on defense and security will exceed 300,000 million dollars. Between 2010 and 2020, that budget had doubled, going from $130 billion to almost $260 billion.
Obsessed with taking over Crimea and large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, Putin boosted military and security spending in Russia. Since the end of the Soviet Union and before 2004, it has never exceeded $20 billion annually. But by the end of the first decade of the century it was already around 50,000 million dollars per year. In 2013 it had a peak of 88,000 million dollars and then stabilized not far from 70,000 million annually.
It is not clear what will happen in 2023, after the loss of a third of the military equipment committed in the failed invasion of Ukraine and in the midst of the economic crisis that Russia is experiencing. But it’s hard to imagine Putin curbing military spending now that he needs to stand by the bet he made when his troops crossed the border in late February.
Other countries appear strongly in the list of competitors in this arms race. India, with 80,000 million dollars a year in military spending; South Korea, with 45,000 million; and Australia, at $28 billion, all mark significant year-over-year increases.
New forms and expenses
Analysts at Sipri in Stockholm are particularly concerned about what could happen in the field of nuclear weapons. The number of nuclear warheads peaked in 1987, during the last shocks of the Cold War: there were 70,000 warheads, almost all in the hands of the US and the Soviet Union.
The disarmament agreements at the end of the 80s and that continued throughout the 90s and at the beginning of this century, led to an impressive and hopeful reduction, up to 12,705 nuclear warheads in 2022. But, according to Sipri, this trend has been changing, on behalf of China, because of the war in Ukraine and because of the nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran.
“We will soon reach a point where, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear weapons in the world could increase, a truly dangerous phenomenon,” worries Sipri’s Matt Korda. Russia and the United States have about 6,000 nuclear warheads each, while China has about 400: but Beijing’s plan is to quadruple that number in a few years, with weapons that combine space warfare and hypersonic missiles.
And it is that beyond the renewed nuclear threat, this new version of the arms race includes enormous expenses in fields that did not exist until a few years ago, such as the aforementioned space warfare and hypersonic missiles, and artificial intelligence (AI) applied to the military field. and defense.
China bet a long time ago on what its military commanders defined as “intelligent warfare.” And as for Putin, already in 2017 he assured in a speech: “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere (of military AI), he will become the ruler of the whole world.”
MAURICIO VARGAS LINARES
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