Thankfully Russia isn’t our geopolitical foe.
Via Slate:
In light of the increasingly tense situation in eastern Ukraine, the most eye-grabbing fact in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s newly updated military spending database may be that for the first time in nearly a decade, Russia is spending a greater percentage of its GDP on its military than the United States. Russia’s defense spending increased by 4.8 percent last year and has increased more than a third under a military modernization program undertaken following the 2008 Georgia war.
Elsewhere in the world, amid rising tensions with Iran, Saudi Arabia is now the Middle East’s pre-eminent military power with the fourth-highest military spending in the world. China increased its spending 7.4 percent to $188 billion.
Algeria, where autocratic President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, already in power for 15 years, will almost certainly win a fourth term this week, became the first African country with the dubious achievement of spending more than $10 billion on its military. Oil-rich Angola boosted spending by 36 percent as well.