After the end of the Cold War, there’s a clear trend in US spending where it ratchets down every year during Democratic administrations and up again during Republican administrations. The only exceptions are the first two years of the Obama admin, after he inherited Bush’s wars, and 2023, after Russia invaded Ukraine
Cmon murica, the rest of the world combined is now spending more than just the US. How could this happen?
what is sad, is that for 10 perfect year between 1990 and 2000 we could believe that humanity was on its way to world peace…now we’re back to total annihilation program
Ugh, that Reagan bump
Ok I’m actually shocked that the sino-Soviet split and Chinese development of thermonuclear weapons doesn’t show up on china’s portion of this graph
Can we get this adjusted by CPI?
I agree in spirit but a CPI applied to military expenditure would be adjusting for prices of irrelevant items and could become very skewed at such large scales
Admittedly I don’t know have a better idea either so… Guess I’m hoping somebody smarter than me can chime in
Yeah, what this graph mostly tells you is that things cost more in the US.
So depressing…
I don’t understand how to read this graph.
Each column represents the total military spend of the world’s countries in that year. Each column is further broken into what separate parts spent that year, the categories for those parts being America, Russia/USSR, China, NATO except America, and the rest of the world.
So to pick some examples out, we can see Soviet expenditure (the bright red section of each column) crash enormously when the country fell apart in 1991. Post-Soviet Russia hardly spent anything by comparison, so the red section of each column got really small all of a sudden. This combined with the reduction in American expenditure (the pale blue section) in the 90s resulted in a low total spend for the world (the total height of each stack), even though the spending of every other country outside of those two stayed fairly constant (the pink for China, dark blue for non-USA NATO, and grey for everyone else).