Written By: Hilal Khan
Increasing Armament & Threats to Global Peace: Rising Military Expenditures Fuel Global Insecurity
The contemporary world is no less paradoxical than the world presented by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Today, it makes equal sense to say: it is the era of peace, yet the epoch of insecurity; the spring of hope, yet the winter of despair.
Unequivocally, the world is wavering amid such paradoxical realities. On the one hand, lofty pledges of peace, prosperity, and sustainability are being made; on the other, the erosion of global norms of restraint, respect, and disarmament is dragging the world into uncharted territory. Global military spending has surged to historic highs, driven by great-power rivalry, active wars, and the diffusion of emerging technologies.
What once seemed like a unipolar moment of relative peace in the 1990s has given birth to an era of contestation, coercion, competition, and heightened mistrust. Nations justify record defence budgets as safeguards of sovereignty, yet collectively push the world closer to global conflagration. From NATO’s rearmament in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to missile exchanges in the Middle East, naval stand-offs in the South China Sea, military demonstrations in East Asia, and the emerging “neo-normal” in South Asia, regions are arming at unprecedented levels.
These developments raise thought-provoking questions: Are rising arsenals truly enhancing security, or are they feeding spirals of fear that increase the risk of war? This article investigates the contemporary drivers of armament, maps its regional patterns, and explores the strategic implications for global peace. It also considers potential pathways to manage competition, restrain escalation, and build norms for a safer world.
Ultimately, the challenge is to recognise that while states may arm in the name of survival, unchecked militarisation may itself become one of the greatest threats to collective security in the 21st century.
“The arms race is not only a waste of money, it is a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Geostrategic Catalysts of the New Arms Buildup
Great-Power Competition and the Security Dilemma
The era of a unipolar world order and unrestrained liberal hegemony has been eclipsed by an unforgiving return to bloc politics, group thinking, and realpolitik. The resurgence of Russia, its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the growing Sino-American strategic rivalry have compelled states to recalibrate their threat perceptions and open the floodgates for military buildups.
Global military spending rose for the tenth successive year and exceeded $2.7 trillion in 2024, according to the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, marking a 9.4% real-term increase—the sharpest annual rise since 1990. Consequently, the global military burden—world military expenditure as a share of GDP—rose to 2.5%.
The United States remains by far the largest military spender in the world. Its total expenditure reached approximately $997 billion in 2024, 3.2 times that of China, the world’s second-largest military spender.
The structural security dilemma has consequently intensified: one actor’s defensive hedge is readily interpreted by its rival as an offensive act. In response, a vicious action-reaction spiral begins. Each state justifies its expanding military capabilities in the name of national interests, yet collectively such dynamics constitute a recipe for systemic instability.
Active Wars and Regional Contagion
The global armed-conflict landscape continues to deteriorate, with large-scale violence across multiple regions. Perhaps the most pronounced change since 2021 has been the return of extensive conventional interstate warfare in Europe and Asia and cross-border, state-led military aggression in the Middle East and Africa. Wars, like wildfires, tend to spread across borders.
The ongoing war of attrition in Ukraine continues to reconfigure the European balance of power, while Israel’s military operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and their maritime spillovers in the Red Sea have complicated the Middle East’s security matrix. American and European military assistance to Israel, Israel’s expanding regional military operations, and military responses from Iran and Iran-aligned groups have provided strong strategic incentives for further militarisation across the region.
In the same vein, recurring India-Pakistan tensions and the emerging neo-normal in South Asia have placed strategic stability and nuclear deterrence under increasing pressure. In such volatile ecosystems, military expenditure as a share of GDP can rise disproportionately, locking states into a guns-versus-butter trade-off that perpetuates a war-economy feedback loop. What begins as crisis management can easily proliferate into unfettered militarisation.
Alliance Dynamics and Burden-Sharing
Within NATO, the burden-sharing debate has translated into concrete commitments. The 76th NATO Summit produced a new collective defence-spending goal of 5% of GDP by 2035, representing a significant increase from the previous 2% benchmark.
The new framework comprises:
- 3.5% of GDP for traditional military expenditures.
- 1.5% for resilience-related spending, including critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, and support for partners.
Similarly, NATO’s enlargement through Finland’s accession in 2023 and Sweden’s in 2024 has altered the strategic geography surrounding Russia. In East Asia, Japan and South Korea have also faced growing pressure to increase military spending amid intensifying regional security concerns.
These elevated expenditures and alliance expansions illustrate both the centripetal pull of collective security and the centrifugal pressures of security externalities on adversaries.
Technological Disruption and the Militarisation of Innovation
Carl von Clausewitz’s insight that the nature of war may remain enduring while its character continuously changes remains highly relevant. Emerging technologies are revolutionising the global arms landscape and altering the cost-benefit calculations of modern warfare.
Contemporary battlefields are increasingly shaped by:
- Hypersonic glide vehicles.
- Precision-strike systems.
- Counter-space weapons.
- Offensive cyber capabilities.
- Autonomous platforms.
- Counter-drone systems.
- Multi-domain denial architectures.
States are scrambling to acquire and develop these technologies, fuelling a self-reinforcing innovation-escalation spiral. Defence-industrial policy has therefore become not merely an instrument of war-fighting but also a source of strategic leverage in geoeconomic competition.
Nuclear Modernisation and the Unravelling of Arms Control
The era of sustained nuclear-weapons reductions appears increasingly fragile. Nuclear weapons remain instruments of deterrence, but their continued expansion and modernisation create new vulnerabilities.
The world’s nuclear powers are modernising warheads, delivery systems, and command-and-control architectures. As legacy arms-control regimes erode and strategic stability weakens, the SIPRI Yearbook 2025 warns of a “dangerous new nuclear arms race.”
According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), nuclear-weapons spending surpassed $100 billion in 2024. The collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and uncertainty surrounding the future of New START further create a strategic environment in which nuclear modernisation may proceed without adequate stabilising guardrails.
Regional Axes of the Arms Spiral
NATO and Europe: Rearmament Under the Shadow of War
Between 2015 and 2024, world military expenditure rose by 37%. The largest increase occurred in Europe at 83%, followed by Asia and Oceania at 46%, the Americas at 19%, the Middle East at 19%, and Africa at 11%.
In 2024, military spending increased in every European country except Malta, while total European expenditure rose by 17% in a single year. The European theatre has therefore undergone a profound strategic recalibration.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine jolted Europe out of its post-Cold War strategic assumptions and ushered in an era of comprehensive rearmament. NATO’s elevated spending commitments and the accession of Finland and Sweden have further transformed the regional security architecture.
Russia’s spending increased by 38% between 2023 and 2024 as Moscow entrenched itself in a war-economy paradigm, mobilising fiscal resources for sustained arms production and relying on external suppliers to replenish stocks.
This action-reaction dynamic has created a security spiral: European rearmament reinforces Russian militarisation, which in turn validates further NATO buildup. Europe, once the crucible of major arms-control breakthroughs, has again become an epicentre of military competition.
The Middle East: Perpetual Flashpoint and Militarisation of Insecurity
The Middle East remains one of the world’s most volatile security environments. The Gaza conflict, fighting involving Israel and Hezbollah, tensions involving Iran, and instability around the Red Sea have widened the regional scope of militarisation.
Military expenditure in the Middle East reached an estimated $243 billion in 2024, an increase of 15% from 2023. Israel’s military expenditure surged by 65% to approximately $47 billion, representing its steepest annual increase since 1967.
In contrast, Iran’s military expenditure fell by approximately 10% to $7.9 billion in 2024 despite its involvement in regional conflicts, with sanctions constraining its ability to increase conventional spending.
Direct exchanges between Israel and Iran illustrate the region’s propensity for horizontal escalation, whereby local conflicts can develop into transregional crises. Maritime chokepoints such as Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz are consequently exposed to increasing geopolitical and military pressure.
East Asia: The Indo-Pacific Tinderbox
Nowhere is the spectre of the Thucydides Trap more palpable than in East Asia. China, the world’s second-largest military spender, increased its military expenditure by approximately 7% to an estimated $314 billion, marking three decades of consecutive growth.
China accounts for roughly half of all military spending in Asia and Oceania and continues investing in military modernisation, cyber capabilities, naval power, missiles, and its nuclear arsenal.
In response to the changing regional balance, Japan and South Korea have increased their defence expenditures. Japan’s military spending rose by approximately 21% to $55.3 billion in 2024, its largest annual increase since 1958.
Taiwan’s embrace of asymmetric denial doctrines and Australia’s commitment to nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS similarly reflect a region preparing for coercive diplomacy and grey-zone competition.
At sea, confrontations in the South China Sea demonstrate the danger of tactical incidents escalating into strategic crises. The proliferation of autonomous and unmanned systems further complicates escalation management by compressing decision-making timelines.
The Indo-Pacific consequently stands as a tinderbox of militarised interdependence, where prosperity and peril coexist uneasily.
South Asia: Nuclear Shadow and Enduring Dyadic Rivalry
South Asia remains a theatre of persistent strategic competition shaped by territorial disputes, historical rivalries, nuclear deterrence, and China’s growing strategic presence along the Himalayan frontier.
India’s military expenditure reached approximately $86 billion, making it one of the world’s largest military spenders. Its modernisation includes greater use of drones and missiles, investments in naval and space capabilities, and an ambitious defence programme shaped partly by its strategic competition with China and Pakistan.
India’s evolving security doctrine and increasingly assertive response framework have intensified Pakistan’s security concerns. Islamabad, despite significant fiscal constraints, continues to rely upon credible minimum deterrence and nuclear capabilities as an equaliser against India’s conventional military superiority.
The stability-instability paradox is particularly visible in South Asia: strategic nuclear deterrence may prevent full-scale war while simultaneously allowing recurrent crises at sub-conventional and limited-war levels.
With opaque doctrines, limited crisis communication, and a history of brinkmanship, South Asian militarisation remains a sword of Damocles hanging not merely over the region but over global security.
Peace Under Siege: Strategic Costs of Militarisation
The Thinning Margin of Error
Elevated defence spending and rapidly evolving military technology have increasingly placed diplomacy on the back burner. In today’s strategic environment, weapons can move faster than diplomacy, making the escalation ladder increasingly brittle.
Hypersonic glide vehicles, precision-strike missiles, and swarming autonomous drones compress decision-making windows, leaving policymakers with less time for deliberation. This produces the use-it-or-lose-it dilemma, heightening incentives for pre-emption and increasing the danger of miscalculation.
This is not merely technophobia; it represents a structural transformation in crisis dynamics. What was once a world of strategic patience risks becoming a battlespace characterised by hair-trigger instability.
The Unravelling of Nuclear Restraint
As weapons modernisation outpaces governance, the world stands on the cusp of a new nuclear arms race. The article notes that there are approximately 12,241 nuclear warheads worldwide, including 9,614 in military stockpiles.
The uncertain future of New START and the demise of the INF Treaty demonstrate the weakening architecture of arms control. Major powers are also fielding dual-capable systems that blur the conventional-nuclear divide and weaken the traditional nuclear firebreak.
Consequently, the longstanding taboo surrounding nuclear use risks becoming increasingly vulnerable to geopolitical tensions, doctrinal changes, and miscalculation.
Arms Racing Across Multiple Theatres
The simultaneity of militarisation across Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia is creating a polycentric arms race, in which developments in one region may have serious implications elsewhere.
Shocks in one theatre can transmit to others through political signalling, alliance obligations, economic channels, and international arms markets. States facing pressure in one region may seek strategic reassurance or advantage in another, creating cross-theatre contagion and systemic instability.
Instead of producing a stable balance of power, such dynamics risk pushing the international system towards what Hedley Bull described as an anarchical society—interconnected yet unstable, militarised yet insecure.
Economic and Humanitarian Trade-Offs
There is a significant trade-off between socioeconomic development and militarisation. Military expenditure generates both direct and indirect opportunity costs.
Direct costs involve shifting financial resources from social investment towards:
- Weapons procurement.
- Military personnel.
- Munitions.
- Military infrastructure.
- Defence research and development.
Indirect costs emerge through conflict-driven disruptions to trade routes, energy markets, investment, infrastructure, and economic confidence.
These trade-offs undermine human development and weaken long-term resilience. In conflict zones from Ukraine to Gaza, displacement, civilian casualties, and infrastructure destruction illustrate the fundamental paradox: the pursuit of security through arms can produce profound insecurity for societies.
Institutional Erosion and Normative Drift
Global governance has struggled to keep pace with the accelerating militarisation of international politics. Norms of disarmament and arms control remain formally present, yet their practical influence is weakening.
The United Nations’ difficulties in establishing rules for autonomous weapons, the paralysis of the Conference on Disarmament, and the deterioration of existing arms-control regimes collectively point towards institutional decay.
Meanwhile, norms that once constrained aggressive behaviour, including the nuclear taboo and the principle of distinction, face pressure from technological diffusion and changing military doctrines.
The world therefore risks moving towards a post-normative international order in which brute force increasingly determines outcomes while international law struggles to keep pace with strategic practice.
“Trust is sinking, while uncertainty, insecurity, impunity and military spending are all rising.” — António Guterres, UN Secretary-General
Prescriptions for Sustainable Peace
Realist Guardrails: Managing an Unforgiving Balance of Power
Realism counsels pragmatism and prudence rather than unrestrained hawkishness. For realists, peace does not necessarily require the absence of arms; rather, it requires managing military power within a credible and stable deterrence framework.
In an anarchic international system where power remains a central currency, the most practical antidote to spiralling insecurity is to establish stability mechanisms within strategic competition itself.
These should include:
- Reliable crisis-management mechanisms.
- Effective military hotlines.
- Deconfliction protocols for encounters at sea and in the air.
- Clear rules of engagement to minimise miscalculation.
- Strategic stability dialogues among nuclear rivals.
- Advance notification of missile tests and major military exercises.
- Negotiated limits on particularly destabilising weapons systems.
Even partial transparency can introduce a degree of predictability into otherwise dangerous strategic rivalries.
Liberal-Institutionalist Pathways: Harnessing Institutions and Interdependence
Liberal thought maintains that even within an anarchic international system, institutions matter. Institutions lower transaction costs, reduce uncertainty, establish rules, and provide forums for dialogue.
A reinvigoration of effective and inclusive arms-control regimes is therefore imperative. International negotiations on autonomous weapons should pursue meaningful constraints, including a global standard requiring meaningful human control over lethal autonomous systems.
Nuclear arms control must similarly be recalibrated for the 21st century by extending beyond strategic warheads to address tactical nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and emerging technologies.
Economic interdependence can also serve as an instrument of restraint. Conditional trade incentives or phased sanctions relief could be linked with verifiable pauses in missile programmes or nuclear modernisation. Greater defence-industrial transparency could similarly reduce the danger of arms transfers intensifying proxy conflicts.
Liberalism’s wager is straightforward: institutionalised cooperation and economic interdependence can help transform zero-sum rivalries into positive-sum bargains.
Constructivist and Normative Strategies: Shaping Identities, Doctrines, and Taboos
Constructivism highlights the fluidity of world politics and argues that state behaviour is shaped not only by material power but also by ideas, identities, perceptions, and norms. In Alexander Wendt’s famous formulation, “anarchy is what states make of it.”
The arms race can therefore also be restrained through norm entrepreneurship. Codifying meaningful human control over autonomous weapons in military doctrine and export regulations, for example, could establish a powerful norm against delegating life-and-death decisions entirely to algorithms.
Similarly, strengthening the nuclear taboo through public diplomacy, survivor testimony, legislative oversight, and international advocacy could reinforce the understanding of nuclear use as an unacceptable humanitarian catastrophe rather than an ordinary tactical option.
Track II dialogues among retired military officers, technologists, academics, and strategic experts can also foster epistemic communities that share best practices across borders. Joint crisis simulations and greater transparency in war-gaming could develop shared understandings of escalation dynamics and reduce the danger of misperception.
Constructivism therefore demonstrates that practices considered strategically acceptable today can eventually become internationally stigmatised, as occurred with chemical and biological weapons during the 20th century.
Hybrid Minilateralism: Bridging Theory into Practice
Minilateralism refers to international cooperation among small groups of states with shared interests to address specific problems, often through arrangements that are more flexible than large multilateral institutions.
Given the paralysis affecting many multilateral forums, minilateral approaches could provide practical mechanisms for reducing military risks.
Potential initiatives include:
- A North Atlantic-Baltic Air and Sea Safety Code to reduce accidental clashes between NATO and Russian forces.
- An Indo-Pacific missile-test notification regime to reduce miscalculation among major regional powers.
- A Bab el-Mandeb maritime corridor agreement combining naval deconfliction with commercial shipping safeguards.
- A Nuclear Risk Reduction Group involving all nine nuclear-armed states to advance transparency and confidence-building measures.
Such initiatives demonstrate that realist deterrence, liberal institutionalisation, and constructivist norm-building need not be mutually exclusive. Instead, they can function as complementary guardrails in an age of accelerating armament.
Conclusion
A world spending more than $2.7 trillion annually on defence is not inevitably destined for war, but it is living increasingly close to the edge. Today’s armament surge has rational roots: changing threat perceptions, alliance commitments, weakening norms, active conflicts, and rapid technological transformation. Yet its aggregate effect is to reduce the margin for error across multiple geopolitical flashpoints.
NATO’s rearmament may deter Russian aggression, but it must be accompanied by crisis-management and arms-control initiatives. East Asia’s missile and naval competition can preserve deterrence only if backed by communication protocols and restraint regarding destabilising deployments. In the Middle East, without regional de-escalation and maritime arrangements, conflict spillovers will continue to disrupt global trade and energy markets. In South Asia, nuclear modernisation without adequate crisis-management mechanisms remains a persistent danger.
The most realistic peace agenda is therefore not unilateral disarmament but the creation of smart guardrails: stabilising deterrence, rebuilding arms-control habits, institutionalising transparency, strengthening crisis communication, and constructing norms of restraint.
The evidence points towards urgency: the arms race is back; governance must return with it.
Otherwise, the consequences could be unimaginable. Perhaps no words capture the stakes better than those of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a soldier who became a statesman:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”
If the world is to avert tragedy, it must remember that true security lies not merely in the accumulation of arms, but in the courage and collective wisdom to restrain them.