You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2020.
Total global military expenditure rose to $1917 billion in 2019, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The total for 2019 represents an increase of 3.6 per cent from 2018 and the largest annual growth in spending since 2010.
The five largest spenders in 2019, which accounted for 62 per cent of expenditure, were the United States, China, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia. This is the first time that two Asian states have featured among the top three military spenders.
The comprehensive annual update of the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database is accessible from today at www.sipri.org.
Global military spending in 2019 represented 2.2 per cent of the global gross domestic product (GDP), which equates to approximately $249 per person. ‘Global military expenditure was 7.2 per cent higher in 2019 than it was in 2010, showing a trend that military spending growth has accelerated in recent years,’ says Dr Nan Tian, SIPRI Researcher. ‘This is the highest level of spending since the 2008 global financial crisis and probably represents a peak in expenditure.’
United States drives global growth in military spending
Military spending by the United States grew by 5.3 per cent to a total of $732 billion in 2019 and accounted for 38 per cent of global military spending. The increase in US spending in 2019 alone was equivalent to the entirety of Germany’s military expenditure for that year. ‘The recent growth in US military spending is largely based on a perceived return to competition between the great powers,’ says Pieter D. Wezeman, Senior Researcher at SIPRI.
China and India top Asian military spending
In 2019 China and India were, respectively, the second- and third-largest military spenders in the world. China’s military expenditure reached $261 billion in 2019, a 5.1 per cent increase compared with 2018, while India’s grew by 6.8 per cent to $71.1 billion. ‘India’s tensions and rivalry with both Pakistan and China are among the major drivers for its increased military spending,’ says Siemon T. Wezeman, SIPRI Senior Researcher.
In addition to China and India, Japan ($47.6 billion) and South Korea ($43.9 billion) were the largest military spenders in Asia and Oceania. Military expenditure in the region has risen every year since at least 1989.
Germany leads military expenditure increases in Europe
Germany’s military spending rose by 10 per cent in 2019, to $49.3 billion. This was the largest increase in spending among the top 15 military spenders in 2019. ‘The growth in German military spending can partly be explained by the perception of an increased threat from Russia, shared by many North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states,’ says Diego Lopes da Silva, Researcher at SIPRI. ‘At the same time, however, military spending by France and the United Kingdom remained relatively stable.’
There were sharp increases in military expenditure among NATO member states in Central Europe: for example, Bulgaria’s increased by 127 per cent—mainly due to payments for new combat aircraft—and Romania’s rose by 17 per cent. Total military spending by all 29 NATO member states was $1035 billion in 2019.
In 2019 Russia was the fourth-largest spender in the world and increased its military expenditure by 4.5 per cent to $65.1 billion. ‘At 3.9 per cent of its GDP, Russia’s military spending burden was among the highest in Europe in 2019,’ says Alexandra Kuimova, Researcher at SIPRI.
Volatile military spending in African states in conflict
Armed conflict is one of the main drivers for the volatile nature of military spending in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, in the Sahel and Lake Chad region, where there are several ongoing armed conflicts, military spending in 2019 increased in Burkina Faso (22 per cent), Cameroon (1.4 per cent) and Mali(3.6 per cent) but fell in Chad (–5.1 per cent), Niger (–20 per cent) and Nigeria (–8.2 per cent). Among Central African countries that were involved in armed conflict, military spending in 2019 rose overall. The Central African Republic (8.7 per cent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (16 per cent) and Uganda (52 per cent) all increased military spending in 2019.
Other notable regional developments
- South America: Military expenditure in South America was relatively unchanged in 2019, at $52.8 billion. Brazil accounted for 51 per cent of total military expenditure in the subregion.
- Africa: The combined military expenditure of states in Africa grew by 1.5 per cent to an estimated $41.2 billion in 2019—the region’s first spending increase for five years.
- South East Asia: Military spending in South East Asia increased by 4.2 per cent in 2019 to reach $40.5 billion.
- The average military spending burden was 1.4 per cent of GDP for countries in the Americas, 1.6 per cent for Africa, 1.7 per cent for Asia and Oceania and for Europe and 4.5 per cent for the Middle East (in countries for which data is available).
SIPRI monitors developments in military expenditure worldwide and maintains the most comprehensive, consistent and extensive publicly available data source on military expenditure. The data is accessible on the Military Expenditure Database page of SIPRI’s website.
Data from previous global economic downturns suggests that the economic crisis resulting from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will probably disrupt future military spending. SIPRI is monitoring current developments to assess the extent of this crisis on military spending.
All percentage changes are expressed in real terms (constant 2018 prices). Military expenditure refers to all government spending on current military forces and activities, including salaries and benefits, operational expenses, arms and equipment purchases, military construction, research and development, and central administration, command and support. SIPRI therefore discourages the use of terms such as ‘arms spending’ when referring to military expenditure, as spending on armaments is usually only a minority of the total.
*SOURCE: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Go to ORIGINAL.
Doug Gwyn has been a frequent contributor to Quaker Theology. Our readers have known him as a theological historian, who has written in depth about early Friends, as well as recent American Quakers. I’d pick as his masterwork, Personality and Place (our review is here), which he calls a theological history of Pendle hill, the…
via Doug Gwyn: Theologian and — Quaker Theological Folksinger? Yes! — A Friendly Letter
The 2005 regulations pushed on the World Health Organization by the United States and the Europeans hampered the WHO’s ability to declare an emergency and a pandemic.
By Vijay Prashad
When U.S. President Donald Trump cut off his government’s funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), one of his grievances was that the WHO—under Chinese tutelage—failed to declare the global coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic soon enough. Not long after the virus brought patients to Hubei Provincial Hospital, the Chinese medical and public health authorities brought it to the notice of the WHO. The WHO investigated the virus over the course of early January, sending a team into Wuhan and making public whatever credible information it could report.
The WHO’s International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee met twice in January, first on January 22-23 and then again on January 30; in the first meeting, the committee felt it had insufficient evidence to declare an emergency, but at the second meeting it took the decision to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). This is the penultimate step for the WHO; on March 11, after it became clear that the virus was spreading across borders, but not before the WHO made many warnings to governments, the WHO declared a global pandemic.
Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden, as well as a host of other U.S. politicians, made the argument that the WHO did not act fast enough with its declaration. Whatever problems posed to the United States by the virus were not the responsibility of the U.S. government, they suggested; the fault lay with the Chinese government and with the WHO.
Our investigation finds that this argument has little foundation. The WHO’s reporting mechanisms are sound, but the WHO’s own ability to make these formal declarations—a public health emergency and a global pandemic, which come with serious financial consequences for member states—has been circumscribed; those who have constrained the World Health Organization—the United States and European nations—are the very same countries whose leaders are now complaining about Chinese influence over the WHO.
Revisions
By the 1990s, it had become clear that the WHO’s old International Health Regulations—originally issued in 1969, with only a few minor updates and new editions over the two decades after that—were inadequate. For one, these regulations were produced before the emergence of very infectious, lethal, and recurrent infections such as Ebola and the avian influenzas. Secondly, these old regulations were made before air travel began to move about 4.3 billion passengers per year, the scale of air traffic now making the movement of viruses so much easier.
In May 2005, the 58th World Health Assembly revised the 1969 regulations, pointing out that the new regulations would “prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.”
The North American and European states, in particular, insisted that the declaration of a PHEIC or global pandemic only be made after it was clear that air travel and trade would not be unduly interrupted. This restriction, essentially the core foundations of globalization, has constrained the WHO since 2005.
The 2009 Test
The new WHO regulations were tested when a new influenza emerged out of Mexico and the United States in mid-April 2009. This H1N1 was a combination of influenza virus genes that had links to swine-lineage H1N1 from both North America and Eurasia (thus the 2009 outbreak was commonly known as “swine flu”). It was first detected on April 15. On April 24, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded a gene sequence onto a publicly accessible influenzas database. On April 25, ten days after the first detection of the virus, the WHO declared the 2009 H1N1 outbreak a PHEIC. On June 11, the WHO said that a global pandemic was underway.
In 2020, the WHO took a month to declare a PHEIC for the coronavirus and took an additional two months after that to pronounce a global pandemic. It was slower to announce the emergency, but it took the same time to declare a global pandemic.
By July 2009, the dangerous H1N1 virus had a less lethal impact than the WHO had feared. However, for the full year from its first detection, 60.8 million people were infected and 12,469 died.
Almost immediately, the WHO was attacked for the June 11 description of the outbreak as a pandemic. When the WHO declares a pandemic, governments are expected to do a variety of things including mass purchase of drugs and vaccines. These are costly.
That December, members of parliament in the Council of Europe opened an inquiry into the WHO declaration. Fourteen members of the Council charged the WHO with what was essentially fraud. They said that “pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the rise of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.” “The definition of an alarming pandemic,” they wrote, “must not be under the influence of drug-sellers.”
The criticism of the WHO stung. It had declared a pandemic, but the virus had stabilized very soon after the declaration. The WHO responded to such criticism with humility. “Adjusting public perceptions to suit a far less lethal virus has been problematic,” the WHO responded. “Given the discrepancy between what was expected and what has happened, a search for ulterior motives on the part of the WHO and its scientific advisers is understandable, though without justification.”
Trump’s Attacks
A WHO official told one of us that the agency had been shaken by the assault in 2009. Over the past ten years, the agency has struggled to regain its confidence, working through the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and then Zika in 2016. In neither of those cases was there a need to make any global declaration.
This year, the WHO declared a global pandemic within three months of the first cases. But there is no doubt that the attack on the WHO a decade ago has made an impact. Former WHO employees tell us that fear of being attacked like this by the main donors seriously hampers the independence of the WHO and its scientific advisers. Trump’s current attack is going to weaken further the ability of the WHO to operate at its own pace and with credibility.
The World Health Organization is not the first UN agency to face the wrath of the U.S. administration. The Trump administration sent its budget to Congress with zero dollars for a line item called International Organizations and Programs. Under this line item comes United States funds for UN Development Program, UNICEF, UNESCO, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Women, and UN Population Fund. In 2018, the United States stopped funding the UN’s Palestine agency (UNRWA). When the UN is useful, the United States uses it; when the UN goes against United States interests, it will lose its funding.
When Trump said that the WHO is “China centric,” he offered no evidence; he did not have to.
No doubt that the United States is currently facing the wrath of the global pandemic. If the U.S. government had begun to plan effectively after the WHO declared a public emergency on January 30 or even when it declared a global pandemic on March 11, the problems would not be so grave. But there was no planning at all, which is distressing. As George Packer put it in the Atlantic, the United States in the months after January was “like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” From Trump, the U.S. citizenry got “willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies.” This sums it up. Part of the scapegoating was directed at China; it is far easier to blame China—already part of a dangerous trade war and a simmering regional struggle in Asia—than to accept responsibility oneself.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.
