I wouldn't be so sure about that. The whole reason they have to resort to land reclamation to create artificial islands for their military bases is that they were late to the party and all the good spots on existing islands were already taken, mostly by Vietnamese bases: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Spratly_...
Now holding those islands doesn't help Vietnamese fishermen much when they encounter other countries' coast guards out in the open sea, but the bases still provide a convenient place to shelter if they happen to be close by.
Military expenditure is just a good excuse to jumpstart a high tech manufacturing economy.
This "2%" figure is a top contender for "the biggest load of bullshit in politics" award, I (as a German, if it's relevant) hate it with a passion.
The reason is simple - all this target does is incentivize waste and disincentivize control and oversight. After all, if the only thing that's compared is how much money was spent... what's to keep states from blowing the money on bullshit and hoping that the US will save their butt once again?
What would be way better is to define goals on capability targets. Like... France being responsible for having one combat ready aircraft carrier, Germany 200 tanks, UK 7 nuclear submarines. That way governments would be incentivized to keep the vendors accountable to deliver safe and working products at reasonable cost, instead of basically letting them do whatever the f..k they want and milking the taxpayers for shit like marine helicopters that aren't certified for flight over sea (German NH90 scandal).
Against whom? In practice, NATO is an offensive alliance: Afghanistan, Libya and Bosnia were not defensive wars.
NATO military spending already dwarfs that of any potential rival. Every dollar spent on the military is a dollar not spent on social programs, hospitals, schools, and other things that actually improve people's lives. Rather than pressuring everyone to ratchet up military spending, the world would be much better served by disarmament.
The NIH, NOAA, CDC, National Science Foundation, EPA, food stamps, farm subsidies, low income housing, and anything Obama ever cared about are obviously just wasting taxpayer dollars. But we need those extra aircraft carriers.
Yes, Europeans should invest more in Defence, but not in NATO, which should be let to fade into history.
The military is the strong arm of the political power. Giving a military branch to the EU would seal the deal in terms of creating a federal state.
This is why such initiatives are very limited and often more symbolic than anything else (e.g. Franco-German units) because sovereignty and control are very tricky matters to handle.
Then some countries, notably Germany, have issues with military power for historical reasons.
Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, South/North Korea have all seized Chinese fishing vessels before. Some recently. These countries also regularly seize each other's illegal fishing boats, the entire region is an overlapping web maritime disputes. The difference is China is a juggernaut, larger in population and economy than all other claimants combined. 14 Trillion GDP = capabilities to vastly out muscle everyone else. Same story with SCS islands, where China was _responding_ to other claimants reclamation and weaponization efforts. But Chinese reclaiming at Chinese scale will crush everyone else.
The fishing parallel is growing Chinese coast guard and structuring of maritime militia means Chinese fishing vessels get better support and more lenient treatment from other coat guards as Chinese force balance grows. Recent Chinese SCS skirmishes are relatively peaceful compared to others, whose mutual clashes frequently escalate to bloodshed because small peer countries can escalate and be brutal to each other. Obviously such reports rarely gets attention in western reporting, nor that per capita China underfishes, or fishing fleets from other wealthier per capita countries is sustained through foreign slave labour, whereas China's is just... cheap Chinese labour.
China SCS Monroe doctrine is balancing from this perspective. Philippines finally agreed to "cooperate" with China on SCS oil exploration, setting up frameworks for other members. RCEP this week without US or India. Short of war with USN, it's just a matter of time before China tames the SCS. For context, this is newly projected growth of PLA Navy 14th five-year plan for 2025. Only surface combatants.
https://preview.redd.it/yxsbgotn6kz51.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...
In the next 5 years, China will build approximately entire Japanese Navy in tonnage. It will do so with ~2% of GDP in defense spending, basically what Trump wants NATO members to comit. And as Australia, Japan, Korea are setting record high defense budget growth, China will be increasing national defense by 6.6% this year, lowest in decades. This is the fundamental reality of disportionate Chinese scale and industrial capability, even modest spending means the kind of acquisitions that will make neighbours shit bricks and US worry over hegemony. The alternative is... China not spending money a reasonable amount on defense and modernization, not enforcing her claims, which is a ridiculous expectation.