To add to that, Chinese military spending is (if you consider accounting differences) rapidly approaching US spending - and they don't have lots of legacy equipment to keep going. They also leach off of Western R&D by simply stealing it through hacking.

I agree on the Europe comment. Very few countries meet 2%, with an average of 1.3% of GDP in the EU. Britain, France, and Germany (in that order) have the largest defense budgets but Germany's budget goes nowhere due to ludicrous procurement and general incompetence. And of course, Germany is currently doing as little as possible on Ukraine because it recklessly (intentionally?) got itself dependent on Russia. Also worth noting that while they have the largest by gross spending, percentage wise Germany is just 1.3%.

It's just a joke. The problem isn't the EU, to be clear. Europeans don't want war: WW2 is still in living memory and the Cold War split the continent in two. But we've helped finance our social services through neglecting defense, and when you're under the nuclear umbrella of the US, Britain, and France... Why bother? What are they going to do, stop protecting you? The Ukraine war seems to be demonstrating that conventional capabilities still have a place, even if you don't plan on leaving your own borders and are protected from invasion by someone else's conventional military and nuclear weapons.

This comment is becoming an incoherent stream of my thoughts, but it really annoys me when Europeans mock the US for its spending when they could be enlightened like us Europeans and have generous social services, not considering that the US is subsidising Europe's welfare states. And I'm not even American, I'm British. I have nothing against the rest of Europe, but the discourse is in many ways as ignorant and condescending about the US as the US discourse is ignorant and condescending about Europe.

Since when is the amount spend a could indicator for the defensibility of a country.

You could spend 5% of your GDP in scrap and consultancy contracts and would be worse than a country spending 1% in good weapons.

By your logic Russia should have won already.

Hence, the Euro is now worth less than the Dollar because there is no Euro without the Dollar.

> the responsibilities the US has as the world's only superpower

Nitpick: the world's only good superpower. China is a superpower too, but an evil one.

Sounds like your comment was written by a literal child.

>Nitpick: the world's only good superpower.

The Middle East begs to differ.

If the Western European neighbours were a bit more politically neutral and as compassionate as their eastern neighbour, there wouldn’t be politically induced tension in the region. Every sane person would rather spend 2% of GDP on health, infrastructure, research etc, but when you observe year after year western abuse and provocations, you kind of start divesting into defense budgets. Where was the outcry for the last 8 years of bombings, civil rights abuse, threats etc?