INVESTIGATION: The defense budget has become power's new thermometer

Introduction: when a percentage of GDP becomes a diplomatic language

A number that invaded every speech in Ankara

At the NATO summit held in Ankara on July 7 and 8, 2026, a single number structured nearly every public exchange between leaders: 5 percent of gross domestic product. This percentage, set at the previous Hague summit, has become the new standard by which every member country measures, and above all displays, its real commitment to the collective security of the Atlantic Alliance against the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia.

This investigation starts from a fact documented by the Atlantic Council: NATO defense spending topped 1,800 billion dollars in 2026, up roughly 11 percent from the previous year. But behind this aggregated figure lies a far more fragmented reality, one this investigation sets out to examine without illusions.

Why this number has become a full geopolitical indicator

The defense budget is no longer just a national accounting line. It has become, in the context of the war in Ukraine and rising tensions with China, Iran, and North Korea, a political signal read by allies and adversaries alike. A country that spends little sends a message of vulnerability or disengagement; a country that spends heavily sends a message of resilience and commitment, independent even of how effectively that spending is actually used.

It is this symbolic dimension, as much as the functional one, of the defense budget that this investigation intends to document, cross-referencing official figures with the statements of officials present in Ankara.

What I find most revealing in this obsession with figures is how a GDP percentage has become a full diplomatic language, almost more discussed than the actual weapons deliveries to Ukraine.

The five countries that have already crossed the symbolic target

Russia's closest neighbors lead the ranking

According to figures cited in an analysis devoted to the summit's outcomes, five NATO countries had already exceeded the 5 percent target well ahead of the decade's deadline: Lithuania at 5.33 percent, Estonia at 5.10 percent, Latvia at 4.92 percent, Poland at 4.68 percent, and Greece at 3.65 percent. This ranking is no accident: each of these countries shares a direct border or immediate geographic proximity with Russia, or carries a historical security dispute that justifies heightened budgetary mobilization.

This correlation between geographic proximity and budgetary effort may be the single most honest data point in this entire file: it reveals that real commitment to collective defense remains, even today, largely dictated by direct and immediate perception of threat, rather than by abstract solidarity toward the Atlantic Alliance as a whole.

What this ranking reveals about Western solidarity

This budgetary disparity raises an uncomfortable question for the entire Alliance: what would happen if the threat materialized more directly against a Western country geographically distant from Russia, but frontally exposed to other adversaries like China in the Pacific? Could the logic of proximity-driven mobilization, documented here for Eastern Europe, repeat itself identically for Asian allies like Japan or Taiwan?

This question, still largely theoretical in 2026, deserves to be asked seriously, because it interrogates the overall strategic coherence of a West that claims to face four identified adversaries simultaneously — Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — without a genuinely unified budgetary mechanism to respond to them.

I cannot help but see, in this ranking dominated by the Baltic states and Poland, a form of budgetary courage that the wealthier but geographically more comfortable Western powers should treat as an example, not merely a statistic.

The 140 billion euros promised to Ukraine, a figure worth breaking down

What the Ankara declaration actually commits

The final declaration of the Ankara summit, according to Defence Ukraine, commits 31 allied countries to 140 billion euros of support for Ukraine over the 2026-2027 period. This sum breaks down into a commitment of 70 billion euros in equipment, assistance, and training for 2026, with an equivalent sovereign commitment for 2027, the United States being structurally excluded from this financing formula, which thereby formalizes the Trump administration's demand for a more equitable sharing of the financial burden with Europeans and Canada.

But the same source highlights a detail rarely emphasized in the enthusiastic media coverage of the summit: the genuinely new capital generated by the Ankara negotiations, channeled mainly through NATO's comprehensive assistance package, would represent only about 2 billion euros out of the 140 billion announced. The rest reportedly consists of already-existing commitments, simply regrouped under a single political heading.

The difference between the political announcement and fresh money

This distinction between genuinely new money and commitments recycled under a new political label constitutes one of the most sensitive points of this investigation. It does not call into question the sincerity of Western support for Ukraine, but it demands a more rigorous reading of the spectacular figures systematically highlighted at the close of every international summit devoted to the ongoing war.

This is a well-known political communication practice, consisting of aggregating already-approved budgets under a new symbolic banner, without this necessarily reflecting any real additional budgetary effort compared to the prior commitments already made by the same allied countries.

This practice of budgetary recycling under a new political label deeply troubles me: it creates the illusion of renewed generosity, while the rigorously documented figures reveal a marginal effort far more modest than the 140-billion number suggests.

What the American defense budget reveals about its own priorities

An American contribution structurally set apart

The United States occupies a singular position in this budgetary equation. Its defense budget remains, in absolute terms, the highest among all NATO member countries, but its specific contribution to supporting Ukraine was deliberately excluded from the European financing formula of 140 billion euros announced in Ankara, a decision reflecting the Trump administration's determination to shift more of the financial burden onto European allies and Canada.

This American budgetary exclusion does not mean total disengagement: Washington continues to provide significant military support, notably through the Patriot production license promised to Ukraine and through the drone joint-venture program valued between 35 and 50 billion dollars according to Zelensky's own statements. But it reflects a clear doctrinal shift: the United States wants to be seen as a facilitator of capacity rather than as the principal direct funder.

The Pentagon's budget for the NATO security program

An official budgetary document from the American Department of Defense, devoted to NATO's Security Investment Program for fiscal year 2026, sets a request of 481.8 million dollars for this single specific budget line. This figure, modest compared to the hundreds of billions mobilized globally by the Alliance, illustrates the complexity of the budgetary architectures that make up the overall Western defense effort, difficult to reduce to a single GDP percentage.

This budgetary complexity, documented in official reports rarely read by the general public, contrasts with the simplicity of political speeches, which prefer to highlight round percentages and impressive global sums rather than the technical detail of the budget lines actually committed.

This apparent American budgetary retreat, offset by technological contributions like the Patriot license, strikes me as politically clever but strategically risky if Europeans fail to quickly close the financial gap it creates.

China, the invisible but omnipresent budgetary adversary

An opacity that complicates any direct comparison

While the Western defense budget is tracked precisely and publicly by organizations like the Atlantic Council or SIPRI, China's real military budget remains largely opaque, with official figures announced by Beijing systematically judged to be underestimated by Western analysts specializing in economic and military intelligence.

This information asymmetry constitutes a strategic handicap for the West: it is difficult to precisely calibrate one's own defense budgetary effort against an adversary whose real scale of military investment remains unknown, a situation that pushes some analysts to recommend an extra margin of caution in Western budgetary projections for coming years.

The link between China's budget and shows of force in the Pacific

This Chinese budgetary opacity takes on particular relief in the context of the submarine-launched ballistic missile test conducted by the Chinese navy on July 6, 2026, in the Pacific, an event that coincided almost exactly with the NATO summit in Ankara and that concretely illustrates where part of this opaque military budget is being invested: the development of a fully operational nuclear triad, now including a credible submarine component facing the United States.

This calendar coincidence between Western budgetary discussions and China's show of force in the Pacific is probably not accidental: it illustrates how Beijing times its strategic demonstrations to maximize international media visibility, including when Western attention is concentrated elsewhere, on another theater of geopolitical tension.

This Chinese budgetary opacity, combined with perfectly timed shows of force like the July 6 missile test, worries me more than any official Western figure, however imperfect that figure may otherwise be.

Munitions prices, an alternative indicator of the real budgetary strain

When industrial inflation outpaces budgetary inflation

Beyond GDP percentages, another indicator deserves careful scrutiny: the evolution of munitions prices themselves. According to industry data relayed by the Wall Street Journal and cited by the daily Khan, prices for 155-millimeter shells have more than quadrupled since the 2022 Russian invasion, an inflation rate that far exceeds what has been observed in most other Western economic sectors over the same period.

This munitions-specific inflation is a far more revealing indicator of the real budgetary strain than the simple GDP percentage devoted to defense: it directly measures the imbalance between sustained wartime demand and an industrial supply that has not had time to adapt to this new geopolitical reality since 2022.

What this inflation reveals about the real effectiveness of announced budgets

A country that raises its defense budget by 11 percent, as NATO did overall in 2026, but that must pay four times more to obtain the same volume of munitions as in 2022, does not necessarily benefit from a military capacity that has genuinely grown in the same proportion as its displayed budget. This is the essential nuance that separates the raw budgetary indicator from the real power indicator this investigation specifically seeks to document.

This distinction between displayed budgetary power and actually available military power may be the most important conclusion of this investigation: the defense budget, however symbolically powerful it has become, does not tell the whole story of a country's or an alliance's real military capacity at any given moment.

This munitions inflation strikes me as the real power indicator, far more honest than any GDP percentage proudly announced in an international summit's final communiqué.

Germany, a textbook case of a budgetary power rebuilding itself

A historic rearmament after decades of restraint

Germany is a particularly instructive case of this budgetary dynamic. After decades of military restraint inherited from its twentieth-century history, Berlin has, since 2022, embarked on a rearmament of a scale unseen since the end of the Cold War, with massive investments in its own defense industrial base, including the construction of a plant to produce air-to-air missiles for Ukrainian Patriot batteries.

This German rearmament, documented by Meta-Defense.fr, illustrates well the real time needed to turn a budgetary commitment into concrete industrial capacity: construction of this plant, begun in 2024, was not due to deliver its first missiles until early the following year, a gap of several years between the budgetary decision and actual production.

The weight of German domestic politics on this trajectory

This German rearmament does not happen without internal political tensions, with part of German public opinion remaining historically reluctant toward such a massive military investment, despite the Russian threat documented by multiple Western intelligence services since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. This domestic resistance illustrates the difficulty, for any Western democracy, of sustaining a defense budgetary effort over several years without a sufficiently robust national political consensus.

It is this tension between strategic necessity and domestic political resistance that could, over time, weaken the budgetary trajectory of several Western countries, should the Russian threat come to be perceived as less immediate by a public already weary after more than four years of war in Europe.

The German case illustrates, to my mind, the central difficulty facing every Western democracy in this war: sustaining a budgetary effort requires a domestic political consensus that remains, everywhere in the West, more fragile than official budget figures suggest.

Asian allies and their own reading of this power indicator

Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea facing the same budgetary dilemma

The West's Asian allies, notably Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, are watching the evolution of Western defense budgets with particular attention, seeing in it a direct indicator of the Atlantic Alliance's ability to honor its security commitments, including implicit ones, toward partners located far from Europe but facing threats just as serious from China or North Korea.

This close observation only intensified after the Chinese submarine-launched ballistic missile test of July 6, 2026, in the Pacific, an event that forcefully reminded these Asian countries that their own defense budgetary effort needed to follow a trajectory at least comparable to what has been observed in Europe against Russia, or risk finding themselves just as structurally underprepared in the face of a potential Chinese escalation.

A global budgetary race that goes beyond the transatlantic framework alone

This dynamic shows that the defense budget, as a power indicator, is no longer confined to NATO's traditional transatlantic framework: it now structures a global budgetary competition simultaneously involving Europe against Russia, Asia against China and North Korea, and the Middle East against Iran, in a geopolitical context where these distinct theaters of tension increasingly appear interconnected rather than isolated from one another.

This growing interconnection between distinct theaters of tension demands, according to several analysts cited in this file, a comprehensive Western reflection on the allocation of its defense budgetary resources, rather than a compartmentalized approach that would treat the Russian threat in Europe and the Chinese threat in the Pacific as separate matters.

This interconnection between the European and Asian theaters strikes me as underestimated by most Western leaders, still too inclined to treat Russia and China as separate files rather than as two faces of the same systemic competition.

What the comparison with Russian and Chinese defense budgets reveals

A Russian war economy fully reoriented

Russia has reorganized a considerable share of its national economy around military production since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to multiple independent economic analyses cited in this investigation. This reorientation, costly in the long run for Russia's economic structure, nonetheless allows it to maintain a pace of munitions and drone production that, on certain specific segments, exceeds the combined capacity of several Western countries put together, an imbalance documented by the Western defense industry's own analyses.

This Russian war economy, though weakened by Western sanctions accumulated over more than four years, illustrates an uncomfortable truth for the West: an authoritarian regime can mobilize its budgetary and industrial resources more quickly and more totally than a Western democracy constrained by parliamentary debates, electoral cycles, and public opinion divided over the scale of the war effort to accept.

A China that invests without ever revealing the real scale of its effort

China, for its part, continues to invest massively in its military modernization, as demonstrated by the July 6, 2026 submarine-launched ballistic missile test, without ever publicly revealing the real scale of its military budget, systematically judged to be underestimated by Western economic and military intelligence analysts specializing in tracking the modernization of the People's Liberation Army.

This Chinese budgetary opacity, combined with a fully mobilized Russian war economy, draws a geopolitical landscape in which the West's two principal strategic adversaries enjoy a budgetary and industrial flexibility that Western democracies, constrained by their own institutional mechanisms, cannot replicate identically, even with the best collective political will.

This asymmetry between the budgetary flexibility of authoritarian regimes and the institutional constraints of our democracies is, in my view, the real strategic challenge of this decade, far more decisive than any GDP percentage proudly displayed at a summit.

The methodological limits of the budgetary indicator itself

What the GDP percentage does not measure

This investigation must also underline a fundamental methodological limit of the budgetary indicator itself: the percentage of GDP devoted to defense says nothing about how effectively that spending is actually used, nor about the quality of the equipment produced, nor about the time needed to turn that money into operational military capacity on the ground, a nuance that American ambassador Matthew Whitaker's statement in Ankara explicitly recalled.

A country can display an impressive GDP percentage while still suffering from major industrial bottlenecks, as this investigation documents for the entire Atlantic Alliance confronting the shortage in Patriot system and conventional munitions production. The budgetary figure alone therefore remains a necessary but insufficient indicator for assessing a country's or an alliance's real military power.

Toward more rigorous complementary indicators

Several defense analysts cited in this investigation recommend systematically supplementing the budgetary indicator with measures of actual production: number of interceptors delivered, volume of munitions produced, actual lead times between order and delivery. These complementary indicators, more technical and less media-spectacular, would offer a far more faithful picture of the West's true military power trajectory.

It is this combination of budgetary and industrial indicators that should structure the future evaluation of the Western defense effort, rather than the sole emphasis on GDP percentages which, however symbolically powerful they have become, no longer suffice to tell the whole story of this silent industrial war playing out alongside the armed conflict itself.

At the end of this investigation, I argue for a more demanding reading of military power indicators: the GDP percentage is a necessary starting point, but it must never become the sole measure of how seriously the West takes its commitment against its adversaries.

The immediate human stakes these budgetary figures must serve

A deadly attack that recalls the real stakes behind the statistics

On July 9, 2026, a day after the close of the Ankara summit devoted largely to these budgetary questions, a Russian salvo combining ballistic missiles and drones struck Kyiv, killing 31 people in the deadliest attack of the year against the Ukrainian capital, according to Defence Ukraine. This attack recalls, with a brutality no budget chart can soften, the real human stakes hidden behind every GDP percentage and every billion announced at international summits.

This contrast between the sophistication of budgetary discussions and the brutality of the consequences on the ground must remain the ultimate measure of any judgment passed on how effective these power indicators really are: a defense budget only has value if it ultimately translates into greater protection for human lives threatened by Russian aggression.

The collective responsibility these figures impose on Western leaders

This collective responsibility, documented by this investigation through the full set of budgetary and industrial indicators examined, must continue to weigh on Western leaders in the months and years ahead. A defense budget up 11 percent, however impressive on paper, is only worth something if it concretely translates into fewer Ukrainian civilian deaths in future tallies of Russian attacks.

It is this demand for concrete results, more than the budgetary demand alone, that should continue to structure the judgment passed on the decisions made in Ankara, and on all those that will follow at future summits devoted to a war that, itself, still knows no lasting truce.

It must be repeated relentlessly: no budgetary figure, however dizzying, replaces the concrete protection of a Ukrainian human life. That is the simple truth the 31 dead in Kyiv on July 9 remind us of, with a brutality no spreadsheet can ever convey.

The American domestic political dimension facing these military budgets

Trump criticized at home despite his external commitment

On the American domestic political front, Donald Trump faces recurring factual criticism concerning his administration's budgetary consistency: some members of the American Congress, including within his own party, are questioning the balance between the external military spending announced in Ankara and America's domestic budgetary priorities, in a context of persistent debate over the federal deficit.

This tension between external military ambition and America's domestic budgetary constraints illustrates a political reality that the mere announcement of a Patriot license to Ukraine is not enough to resolve: the ability of the United States to sustain an external commitment will also depend on the domestic political stability of the American administration in the months ahead.

A necessary evil for the West, on a strictly geopolitical reading

On a strictly geopolitical and military level, however, Trump's commitment to the Patriot license and to strengthening NATO's budget represents a real contribution to collective Western security against Russia, even if his governing method, made up of improvised announcements before consulting the parties concerned, continues to raise legitimate questions among European allies.

This duality, between external geopolitical effectiveness and domestic political fragility, sums up rather well the complex position Trump occupies in this overall budgetary equation, an actor whose external commitment remains necessary to the West, without that erasing the justified factual criticism of his domestic American management.

This duality between Trump's external geopolitical effectiveness and the tensions of his domestic American politics deserves to be named without indulgence: supporting one does not require silencing the other.

What financial markets read into these budgetary announcements

Defense industry stocks sharply higher

Western financial markets reacted positively to the announcement of NATO's record defense budgets, with shares of major arms manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin and RTX, posting significant gains in the days following the Ankara summit, according to several financial analyses specializing in the defense sector.

This financial market reaction is, in itself, an additional indicator of how credible these budgetary announcements are perceived to be: investors, less sensitive to political speeches than to concrete industrial revenue prospects, anticipate sustained demand for Western weapons systems in the coming years, a reading that corroborates the reality of the industrial strain documented in this investigation.

The risk of a speculative bubble in the arms industry

Some financial analysts, cited in specialized economic press, nonetheless warn against the risk of speculative overvaluation of Western arms companies, driven more by the euphoria of budgetary announcements than by rigorous verification of these companies' real ability to significantly increase their production volumes in the short term.

This additional financial risk illustrates, once again, the persistent gap between the enthusiasm of political and budgetary announcements and the slower, more constrained reality of actual industrial capacity, a gap that structures the entire set of conclusions in this investigation into the defense budget as a power indicator.

I remain cautious about the stock market euphoria accompanying these budgetary announcements: financial markets often anticipate faster than industry can actually produce, a mismatch that could, eventually, come crashing down if real deliveries disappoint the expectations created.

What the next NATO summit will need to demonstrate on this front

Moving from budgetary announcements to verifiable industrial results

The main challenge awaiting the next NATO summit, according to several analysts cited in this investigation, is to move from a logic of spectacular budgetary announcements to a logic of verifiable, measurable industrial results over time. This requires setting up transparent, publicly accessible tracking indicators, allowing verification of whether the 140 billion euros promised to Ukraine actually translate into concrete, documented weapons deliveries.

This increased transparency would represent a major methodological shift from current practices, where overall budgetary figures largely dominate official communication, at the expense of rigorous verification of the concrete results actually obtained on Ukrainian ground thanks to these same announced budgets.

The need for political consistency beyond summit cycles

This investigation concludes with an observation that goes beyond the Ankara summit alone: the true measure of Western power does not lie in announcing a GDP percentage, but in the political and industrial consistency that will, or will not, transform this budgetary commitment into military capacity genuinely available to protect Ukraine and all Western allies against their shared adversaries.

It is this consistency, more than any spectacular figure announced at an international summit, that will determine whether the Western defense budget truly becomes, in the years ahead, the reliable thermometer of power its promoters claim to have already made of it today.

This investigation leaves me with a firm conviction: the defense budget has become a powerful diplomatic language, but that language will only be worth what the industrial and military actions that concretely translate it are worth in the years ahead.

Conclusion: a useful thermometer, but one that does not measure everything

What this investigation allows us to state with certainty

At the end of this in-depth investigation, one central observation stands out: the defense budget has indeed become, in 2026, the principal language through which Western countries communicate their strategic commitment against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. NATO's 1,800 billion dollars in spending, up 11 percent, and the 140 billion euros promised to Ukraine constitute powerful political signals, widely relayed and commented on internationally.

But this same investigation demonstrates, with documented rigor, that this budgetary thermometer does not measure everything: it measures neither the real industrial effectiveness, nor the actual production lead times, nor the share of genuinely new money behind each spectacular announcement, nor the concrete protection of Ukrainian human lives threatened every day by Russian aggression.

The call for a more demanding reading of this indicator

This investigation therefore calls for a more demanding and critical reading of this budgetary indicator, without denying its real usefulness as a political signal of collective mobilization against adversaries who, for their part, show no sign of restraint in their own military and industrial effort, whether that be the Russian war economy or the Chinese nuclear modernization demonstrated in the Pacific.

It is this double demand, for continued budgetary mobilization and for rigorous verification of concrete results obtained, that should guide the Western assessment of its own power in the years ahead, long after the media spotlight has turned away from the Ankara summit alone toward other diplomatic milestones to come.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

I end this investigation with a simple certainty: as long as the Western defense budget does not fully translate into verifiable human protection for Ukraine, no GDP percentage, however impressive, deserves to be celebrated as a strategic victory.

Columnist's transparency note

What I know and what I don't

I know that NATO defense spending topped 1,800 billion dollars in 2026, up roughly 11 percent, according to the Atlantic Council. I know that five countries had already exceeded the 5 percent of GDP target ahead of the decade's deadline. I know that the Ankara declaration commits 140 billion euros of support to Ukraine over 2026-2027, according to Defence Ukraine, of which a significant share reportedly corresponds to already-existing commitments rather than entirely new funds.

I do not know with certainty the exact, verified amount of genuinely new money generated by the Ankara negotiations, the available figures remaining analyst estimates rather than complete official audits. I would rather say so clearly than fill this gray area with an unverified claim.

Method

This investigation relies on data from the Atlantic Council, on the detailed analysis by Defence Ukraine published July 10, 2026, and on accounts of the Ankara summit published by Khan and by Reuters between July 6 and 10, 2026. No scene has been invented, no firsthand account is claimed.

My editorial angle is stated plainly: I consider that strengthening Western budgets against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is necessary and legitimate, while maintaining a critical demand for genuine sincerity in the figures announced at international summits.

Sources

Primary sources

NATO defense spending tracker — Atlantic Council, July 2026

What the Ankara summit actually delivered — Defence Ukraine, July 10, 2026

Ukraine's Patriot shortage was solved, Washington said — Euromaidan Press, July 10, 2026

Secondary sources

Defense is advancing, but there are no weapons, production capacity has hit its limit — Khan, July 6, 2026

Trump announces the Patriot license for Ukraine — Reuters, July 8, 2026

NATO Security Investment Program, fiscal year 2026 — U.S. Department of Defense