Fear mongering is the main way to motivate people to spend on weapons, but I would encourage anyone to go look at the actual data on spending levels:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

For spending as % of GDP the Saudis have been the big leaders among sizable players for ages. Russia and the US were next at similar percent of GDP for a long time until the Ukraine war, but with Russia having a much smaller GDP.

China has been consistently pretty close to 1.7% for decades, below the old 2% NATO target and way below the new 5% NATO target.

China's spending growth has all just been as a result of a growing economy and the GDP getting larger as the % of GDP spent on military has remained the same. Their % of GDP on military spending has been half or less of the US % of GDP.

The US alone has been over 1/3 of global military spending and will now be $1T on their own.

Reaching the new 5% NATO target would put NATO collectively at over $2.5T.

At 5%, NATO spending would be around 8-10× Chinese spending.

Even factoring in purchasing power and using the figures pushed by US hawks that China is secretly spending double their official figures, NATO would still be multiples higher than China.

On a per capita basis, at 5% of GDP, those of us in NATO will be spending 7-8 times what Chinese are spending.

Russian spending has obviously escalated dramatically since 2022, but even then is still very small compared to what NATO is aiming to reach.

We are all heading into austerity for social programs to fund massive increases in military spending that are way, way beyond the spending of Russia and China combined.

At 5%, NATO will be spending 5× the combined defense spending of all of BRICS+.

In fact, at 5% NATO will be spending more than the entire global military spending during any time during the Cold War, adjusted for inflation.

To me, this level of spending is not reasonable and we're only doing it because the US has pushed us into doing it because it serves their interests.

Is this really how to defend the West? We're going to spend ourselves right out of the types of social benefits that we take so much pride in just to fund an insane arms race as the US pushes towards WW3 under a fascist dictatorship.