The world spent nearly $2.9 trillion on its militaries in 2025 — the eleventh consecutive year that figure has grown, and the clearest statistical portrait yet of a planet that has stopped believing in its own security. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released its annual accounting Monday, and the numbers tell a story that no single headline can contain.
Africa Today News, New York, learned that global military spending rose 2.9 percent compared with 2024. The military burden — the share of worldwide GDP consumed by defence budgets — reached its highest level since 2009. The United States, China and Russia alone accounted for $1.48 trillion, just over half of everything the world spent on weapons, personnel and war preparation in a single year.
“Everything points to a world that feels less secure and is spending on its military to compensate for the global landscape,” SIPRI researcher Lorenzo Scarazzato told AFP.
The United States remains the world’s largest military spender by a distance, but its 2025 figure actually declined — down 7.5 percent to $954 billion, largely because Congress approved no new financial military aid to Ukraine. Over the previous three years, Washington had pledged a combined $127 billion to Kyiv. That reduction proved temporary on paper and illusory in trajectory. Congress has already approved defence spending exceeding $1 trillion for 2026, and if Donald Trump’s budget proposal clears the legislature, that figure could reach $1.5 trillion by 2027.
Read also: Israel Opposition Leader Warns It Faces Security Disaster
The engine of last year’s global increase was Europe, where spending surged 14 percent to $864 billion — encompassing Russia, Ukraine and every NATO member recalibrating its defence posture in the shadow of a war that has been running for more than three years with no end in sight. “That is driven by two major factors,” Scarazzato said. “One is the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the other is the decreased US engagement with Europe.” Washington’s consistent pressure on European allies to carry more of their own defence burden has produced a measurable response.
Germany, now the world’s fourth-largest military spender, raised expenditure by 24 percent to $114 billion — a number that would have been politically unthinkable in Berlin a decade ago. Spain recorded a 50 percent jump to $40.2 billion, pushing its military spending above two percent of GDP for the first time since 1994. Country after country across the continent reached into budgets already strained by inflation and post-pandemic debt to fund a rearmament that their governments had spent years insisting was unnecessary.
Ukraine and Russia both recorded the highest share of government spending allocated to military purposes in their respective histories. Russia’s defence budget rose 5.9 percent to $190 billion — equivalent to 7.5 percent of GDP, a wartime commitment that is restructuring the Russian economy around the conflict. Ukraine spent $84.1 billion, a 20 percent increase that represents a staggering 40 percent of its entire GDP. A country directing four in every ten dollars of its national output toward military survival is not managing a defence budget. It is sustaining an existential effort.
Read more: Judge Refuses To Dismiss Nicholas Maduro Narco-Terrorism Case
In Asia and Oceania, spending reached $681 billion — an 8.5 percent increase and the region’s largest annual jump since 2009. China’s estimated $336 billion, the product of three unbroken decades of annual increases, sits at the centre of that picture. But Scarazzato pointed to the reactions of China’s neighbours as the more revealing signal. Japan raised military expenditure by 9.7 percent to $62.2 billion, equivalent to 1.4 percent of GDP — its highest share since 1958, a year when the country was still rebuilding from the destruction of the Second World War. Taiwan increased spending by 14 percent to $18.2 billion. South Korea also expanded its budget. The threat perception radiating outward from Beijing is generating its own arms race in real time.
The Middle East, despite being home to some of the world’s most active conflicts, saw spending rise only marginally — 0.1 percent to $218 billion. Both Israel and Iran recorded declines. Iran’s fell 5.6 percent to $7.4 billion, though that figure is distorted by 42 percent annual inflation; in nominal terms spending actually increased. Israel’s 4.9 percent drop to $48.3 billion reflected reduced intensity in Gaza following a January 2025 ceasefire, though the figure remains 97 percent higher than Israel spent in 2022 — a baseline that itself reflected a country already on a war footing.