27 April, 12:03
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has just released figures that deserve to be read not as a spending report, but as a diagnosis of civilization itself. Global military expenditure in 2025 reached $2.88 trillion. Growth has been recorded for eleven consecutive years. The share of world GDP stands at 2.5% — the highest since 2009.
Numbers alone tell you nothing unless you understand their deeper economic nature. And that nature is singular: financing the defense industry is not investment. It is the industrial-scale disposal of national capital. The annihilation of what should have gone toward development — redirected instead toward the windfall profits of those who make their fortunes on other people's wars.
What $2.88 Trillion Actually Means
For perspective: the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Western Europe after the Second World War, would cost approximately $160 billion in today's prices. Humanity burns through eighteen Marshall Plans every single year.
But direct spending is only the visible tip of the iceberg. The classic model for assessing the aggregate costs of militarization, developed by Davis and Nordhaus, demonstrates that every dollar spent on weapons during active conflict generates between $4 and $16 in cumulative damage — through disrupted supply chains, destroyed infrastructure, demographic losses, and foregone investment.
$2.88 trillion in direct expenditure translates, by the most conservative estimate, to between $10 and $15 trillion in aggregate economic damage to the global system annually. For reference: total world GDP stands at roughly $110 trillion.
Militarization is consuming at least 10% of humanity's productive potential. Money that should be securing the future development of civilization is not going toward renewal, not toward a technological leap — it is going toward destruction. Which, through the logic of the "economics of damage," creates a new and even larger market: reconstruction. By spending $2.88 trillion on war, the owners of military capital secure guaranteed access to another $15 trillion from state budgets — through contracts to rebuild what has been destroyed.
Structure as Verdict
Three countries — the United States, China, and Russia — account for 51% of the global defense budget. But that figure must be read through the lens of economic weight, not absolute sums.
The United States spends $954 billion — 33% of global expenditure — while the American economy represents roughly 25% of world GDP. This disproportionate overspending is a classic symptom of what Giovanni Arrighi described as the "financialization of decline": maintaining the global system begins to cost more than it returns. Put more simply, the more the United States invests in security, the faster it loses global leadership.
It is telling that in 2025 the US recorded a reduction — due to the absence of a new military aid package for Ukraine. But this is not a change of strategy. Programs funded under the previous administration were closed and replaced by new ones, more profitable still for those who stand behind them.
China spent a record $336 billion — 12% of global expenditure — with an economy approaching 18% of world GDP. Beijing is still underspending relative to its actual weight, but it is expanding steadily and without sharp jolts. This is not the behavior of an aggressor; it is the behavior of a hegemon-in-waiting, accumulating productive capacity before converting it into military power — precisely as the United States did in the first half of the twentieth century.
Russia: $190 billion, 6.6% of global expenditure, with a GDP that barely exceeds 1.7% of the world total. Its war spending outstrips its economic weight by nearly four times. This is not the strategy of a great power — it is self-destruction through militarization. The Soviet model in miniature: the economy gradually becomes an appendage of the war machine, while the machine consumes the very sources of its own reproduction. We know how that model ended: 1991, and Moscow releasing all its colonial republics from the prison camp.
Ukraine: The Price of Survival
2.9% of global expenditure — on par with Saudi Arabia and its oil revenues. For an economy that represents fractions of a percent of the world total, this is a deeply troubling indicator. A 20% increase in 2025, against the backdrop of reduced American assistance, is not a triumph — it is an alarm signal: the country is shifting to self-financing its war at the expense of domestic consumption and the share owed to future generations.
SIPRI researcher Lorenzo Scarazzato has noted that the share of defense spending in state budgets has reached record levels in both Ukraine and Russia simultaneously. Both countries are entering a spiral in which every additional hryvnia and every additional ruble spent on weapons further depletes the economy's reproductive potential. The difference is that Russia does this voluntarily, in pursuit of an imperial project, while Ukraine does it under compulsion — in pursuit of survival.
The Security Trap
The most important thing no one will find in SIPRI's tables is the collective irrationality of individually rational decisions.
Every state that expands its military budget is acting perfectly rationally on its own terms: the threats are real, allies are unreliable, time is running out. But when all players simultaneously increase spending in response to one another, the aggregate level of security does not rise — it falls. This is the classic security dilemma described by Robert Jervis: every step toward self-defense is read by the neighbor as preparation for attack, compelling the neighbor to take a symmetrical step.
Eleven years of consecutive growth is not a reaction to a specific threat. It is a systemic dynamic that reproduces itself regardless of the intentions of its participants. Germany will reach 2.3% of GDP in 2025 and plans 3.5% by 2029. Poland has already exceeded 4%. The rest of NATO is pressing toward 3%. If the trend holds, by the end of the decade the world will be spending $4–4.5 trillion annually.
This is not the "price of peace." It is the price of preparation for the next great war.
Arrighi wrote about systemic cycles of capital accumulation and about how every hegemonic transition is accompanied by a phase of chaos and violence. By every available indicator, we are living through exactly such a phase — and we are dutifully financing it. There is only one question left: at what point does this phase of chaos become irreversible?