The world is not paying the price of peace. It is paying the price of an international order that can no longer preserve it. In 2025, global military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion, or 2.5% of world GDP, according to a report released this week by SIPRI, the Stockholm-based institute widely regarded as a global reference on conflict, armaments and military spending. It was the highest level ever recorded in the series and the 11th consecutive year of growth. War has returned as a fiscal priority.
The scale helps explain the absurdity. Global military spending in a single year is already larger than Brazil’s annual GDP, estimated by the IMF at about $2.6 trillion. In other words, humanity allocates to armed forces, in 12 months, more than one of the world’s largest emerging economies produces in an entire year.
Europe — where the two world wars erupted — is at the center of this shift. For decades, much of the continent lived under the peace dividend: relatively low defense spending, economic integration, cheap Russian energy, an American security umbrella and the illusion that conventional war belonged to the 20th century. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine destroyed that arithmetic.
NATO countries accounted for 55% of total global military spending in 2025. In June, the alliance approved a new target: reaching 5% of GDP by 2035, including 3.5% in core military spending and 1.5% in defense- and security-related expenditure. Germany lifted its military spending to 2.3% of GDP in 2025. Poland reached 4.5%. The United Kingdom stood at 2.4%. France was at 2%. Ukraine devoted 40% of GDP to defense.
Five percent of GDP is a civilizational choice. The comparison is uncomfortable. The OECD estimates that its member countries spend, on average, 4.7% of GDP on educational institutions, from primary school to higher education. NATO’s new military ambition therefore places defense on the scale of an entire national education system. Tanks, missiles, submarines, drones and ammunition are beginning to compete, in fiscal size, with schools, universities, teachers and human-capital formation.
The United States is pushing Europe to spend more because it no longer wants to carry the continent’s security bill alone. Yet Washington remains by far the world’s largest military spender, with $954 billion in 2025. The country spends 3.1% of GDP on defense and has found itself involved, directly or indirectly, in many of the planet’s main flashpoints: Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Venezuela.
Russia shows what happens when war stops being an event and becomes an economic model. Moscow spent 7.5% of GDP on defense in 2025, while military expenditure reached 20% of total public spending, the highest level ever recorded by SIPRI for the country. China operates differently: it spent 1.7% of GDP, a seemingly moderate share, but on a huge economic base and after 31 consecutive years of rising military expenditure — enough to alter Asia’s strategic balance without looking like a war economy.
Brazil sits on a different scale. It spent 1.1% of GDP on defense in 2025, or $23.9 billion, up 13% in real terms. That is little compared with the new global arms race. Brazil does not face Ukraine’s military emergency, does not share Poland’s strategic frontier, does not dispute Taiwan, does not attack Iran and does not sustain America’s global military apparatus. But it does have the Amazon, the South Atlantic, vast borders, transnational crime, sensitive technology and a defense industry under reconstruction.
The point is not to defend naive pacifism. States need defense. The problem is different: when military spending becomes a political target in itself, it starts competing for legitimacy with everything else that also produces security — education, health care, housing, energy, infrastructure, technology, diplomacy and state capacity. A more heavily armed country is not necessarily a safer country.
If the United States keeps exploding multiple military fronts, if NATO moves toward 5% of GDP, if Europe continues to rearm, if Russia remains at war, if China keeps expanding its military capacity and if the Middle East continues to operate as a succession of open fronts, the 2.5% of global GDP spent in 2025 may look like only the beginning of a new arms era.
The peace dividend is over. In its place comes a new tax to finance geopolitical conflict.
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