REFLECTIONS | If World Cuts Arms Spend; More Funds For Essentials | Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

If Nato’s purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”, as its first chief Lord Ismay famously summed up, President Donald Trump’s latest bombshell may have succeeded in sabotaging all three objectives. Yet, Mr Trump may inadvertently serve the cause of peace by promising (threatening?) to reduce the collective fighting power of the 32-nation military pact that rose after the Second World War from an initial 5,000 American troops to an unspecified minimum.

Financially, this outcome of his spat with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz means saving at least some (if not the bulk) of the $2.88 trillion the world’s militaries spent in 2025: a hike of 2.9 per cent from the year before, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s latest report. That money could now be diverted to more constructive causes. It was calculated that $2.88 trillion amounts to $350 of military spending for each person on the planet. It sounds a paltry sum, but that is a sizable amount in Rwandan francs or Bangladeshi takas. We might have a less disgruntled global population if this could somehow be diverted to nutrition or medicines or some nourishment for infants.

The United States again tops the list in military spending: by blowing up $954 billion last year, followed by China ($336bn), Russia ($190bn), Germany ($114bn) and, finally, poverty-stricken India, which squandered no less than $92 billion on arms last year, and whose five-yearly election (not the recent truncated exercise) may cost an astronomical Rs 32,500 crores. Together, the five countries are believed to account for 58 per cent of global military spending. The lone superpower is by far the biggest spender, as always since World War II, its annual budget exceeding the combined military expenditure of the next six countries, including India.

As Winston Churchill’s chief military assistant during the war, Lord Ismay, who defined Nato’s purpose so cynically, was the archetypal India hand, born in Nainital in a colonial family. His ICS father was also born, served and died in India. Ismay himself was military secretary to Lord Willingdon, the viceroy; after retiring from the military, he became Lord Mountbatten's chief of staff in India, helping to oversee the country’s Partition.

He had seen poverty at close quarters and knew the power of money.

The phrase about Nato attributed to Ismay was first used by the English writer, George Orwell, also born in India but had been packed off to Eton by his civil servant father, and whose real-life name was Eric Blair. He was a member of the Indian Police, serving in Burma (now Myanmar). In 1945 Orwell predicted a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds”. Bernard Baruch, the first American to use the phrase, a financier and presidential adviser, in a 1947 speech in South Carolina also highlighted the goal of containing Soviet expansionism, ensuring a permanent US security presence in Europe, and preventing a resurgent post-World War II Germany.

The “super-states” Orwell and Baruch had in mind were of course Nato and the retaliatory Warsaw Pact, established in 1955 with eight member countries: the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Albania walked out in 1968, and East Germany left in 1990, before the alliance was dissolved in July 1991. Warsaw Pact arms spending was characterized by heavy Soviet dominance, with the former USSR bearing nearly all direct incremental costs, such as the estimated $400 million spent on the 1968 Czechoslovakia invasion. Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members faced significant economic burdens, often spending heavily on defence, though their reported budgets sometimes omitted R&D and specific procurement costs.

Meanwhile, there has been hardly any let-up in the joint US-Israeli assault on Iran. At least Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, can complain that Tehran backs the anti-Zionist Hezbollah, but President Trump has no direct quarrel with the mullahs who rule Iran. The hostilities began on February 28, 2026, following strikes targeting Iranian military sites and officials and are continuing featuring missile strikes, threats to maritime shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's key strategically important choke points. In 2023-2025, 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas and 25% of seaborne oil trade passed through the strait annually. It is a major route of petroleum products for Europe and Asia and is critical for Europe's energy supply as well as for China. Indeed, one of the mysteries of this war within a war is China’s seeming reluctance to attempt any kind of peacekeeping.

Cold War arms spending was a constant recurring drain on scarce resources. It involved a massive, sustained military buildup, with global defence expenditures rising from roughly $284 billion in 1950 to over $1.7 trillion by 1988. Driven by the US-Soviet nuclear arms race and conventional conflicts like Korea and Vietnam, the US invested between $8 trillion and $9 trillion, while the Soviet Union dedicated over 20 per cent of its GDP to defence. There was a new twist in February 2022 when Russi invaded Ukraine, starting the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II, in a major escalation of the existing war between the two countries that began when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014.

Despite renewed suggestions of talks, there are no signs of a realistic peace initiative. In fact, the outside world has little notion of the ancient grievances that keep hostilities going. But Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President, published a paper titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in July 2021, in which he called Ukraine “historically Russian lands” and claimed there is “no historical basis” for the “idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians”. Mr Putin was accused of promoting Russian imperialism, historical revisionism and disinformation, and nothing came of the Nato-Russia Council meeting in January 2022. However, it would appear that the West has tacitly accepted Russia’s December 2021 ultimatum that Nato end all activity in its East European member states and ban Ukraine or any former Soviet bloc state from ever joining the alliance.

It all sounds as complicated as 19th century Europe’s Schleswig-Holstein dispute which, Lord Palmerston famously remarked, only three people ever understood: the Prince Consort who was dead, a German professor who was mad, and he himself and he had forgotten all about it. That’s probably how baffled the rest of the world also feels about the 79-year-old India-Pakistan conflict and the money it robs from South Asia’s hard-pressed development budgets.