Does the world need more bombs and guns?

Ever since Donald Trump became the president of the USA for the second time, he has been demanding that NATO allies increase their defence expenditure to 5% of GDP.

- Janardan Pati

The NATO summit was held recently in The Hague, a city in the Netherlands, on 24th and 25th June 2025—the first time it took place there. Accepting Trump’s dictum, the summit decided that each member country should raise its defence budget to this new benchmark.

NATO, the military alliance, is no doubt the most militarily powerful bloc in the world. NATO represents about one billion people. The only resolution passed at the summit was to increase spending on arms production and procurement.

Global military expenditure in 2023 grew for the ninth consecutive year and reached 2.44 trillion dollars. The US and its NATO allies account for more than half of the world’s military spending, even though the alliance’s members comprise only one billion of the planet’s 8.3 billion people. The USA is refusing to resign the expired nuclear-deterrence treaties. Today, per-capita military spending worldwide stands at 26,300, according to the SIPRI report.