In Europe it can be 2.0 or 2.5, while in the US it’s somewhere between 4 and 6

Those numbers in the above headline are the percentages of Gross Domestic Product that each country’s government and politicians figure needs to be spent on the military annually in order to be “safe” from potential Russian aggression.

Just to give readers a “sense” (if such a term can be applied to the concept of defense by percentages of national economic activity), that 4- 6% “safety” figure for the US represents an the share US GDP that military spending in the 2022 fiscal year represents. In FY2022 the actual dollar figure for he total military budget was somewhere between the $768.5 billion which the Office of Management and Budget reports went directly to the Pentagon and all the armed forces branches under its jurisdiction, and the $1.58 trillion figure which also includes all the military spending that goes to other agencies like the NSA, CIA, Energy Department (nuclear arsenal), NATO, Veterans Affairs, etc. and interest on the national debt for America’s wars.

Now think about this for a moment. The world is currently at the edge of a precipice like the sheer face of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park portrayed above as the US has been prodding and provoking Russia over Ukraine now for a decade, threatening to bring that former soviet of the old USSR into NATO. Once Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent such a thing from happening right on it’s eastern border, Washington has been providing advanced weapons as well as satellite intelligence to the Ukrainian military to help it kill Russian soldiers. Most recently, the provocations have reached the scary point of providing Ukraine with longer-range missiles which can strike deep inside Russia itself to hit military targets and key infrastructure like rail centers and oil depots. Britain, America’s faithful poodle, has joined in this dangerous game by providing its own longer-range cruise missile the Storm Shadow.

Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin has responded by accurately declaring as “acts of war” the escalatory actions by the US and UK in supplying these new weapons to Ukrainian troops, training them in how to use them, and providing them with the use the precise geolocation data from US military satellites necessary for successful guidance to targets inside Russia . He followed this up by openly changing Russia’s rules for the use of nuclear weapons to include targeting any nuclear powers that provide non-nuclear powers with the weapons to attack Russia.

Certainly anyone can understand the logic of that change. If Russia were for example to give Cuba or Venezuela missiles that could strike Florida or the US Gulf Coast and one of those countries were to start firing them at US targets, and Russia began flying in or shipping in more rockets, would the US refrain from attacking Russia, or its planes and ships and limit itself to bombing Cuba or Venezuela? Of course not!

To make matters even worse, after d Putin sent a powerful message by ordering the firing of a new Russian hypersonic strategic missile with a range of over 3000 miles to hit a city in central Ukraine with six independently maneuverable warheads. The missile, which Putin said was a “test,” took 15 minutes from its launch site in central Asia to reach the target \city of Dnipro. The explosions there were relatively small and involved conventional explosives, but the point was made that the same warheads are designed to carry nuclear bombs.

Putin pointedly said that the UK itself or any country providing weapons to Ukraine to strike targets in Russia, not just Ukraine itself, could be targets of Russian missiles like this new one called the Oreshnik.

The Pentagon confirmed that it has no anti-missile system that could defend against this new Russian missile. Okay, so what is all this nonsense about assigning percentages of GDP for military spending that are supposed to assure the safety of the US and the nations of NATO Europe all about?

If Russia has nuclear missiles that cannot be stopped, how is increasing the percent of GDP spent on a country’s military got anything to do with keeping the country “safe”?

There has been no word fromBiden’s White House or British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s No, 10 Downing Street about reversing the permission granted to Ukraine to use UK and US-supplied longer range rockets to hit deep inside Russia, as Ukraine has just. done. No word either on whether more such missiles will be supplied to Ukraine, as that country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for.

If this fraught situation doesn’t sound insane, I don’t know what does.. Here’s the situation: Russia’s over-confident army was initially bloodied by Ukrainian forces backed with US and NATO supplied weapons, but eventually its much larger military figured out how to deal with those weapons and it has been steadily degrading Ukrainian forces, who have reportedly suffered 500,000 casualties and are losing ground daily. The US and UK missiles, unless supplied in vast quantities, will not turn the tide of battle, yet even if the small number currently n Ukrainian hands are used they could spark a Russian strike on Ukraine’s main government buildings in Kiev or even the huge US embassy compound there (the US Embassy was evacuated a few days ago because of fears that could happen). Then where are we? (It’s an act of war to deliberately attack a country’s embassy.)

Wars Have often begun small but then grow in tit-for-tat escalations. When nuclear weapons are added to that equation the time between steps on the upward-moving stairway can occur very quickly, as generals look at an opponent’s missiles, and their own and wonder if they hold their fire whether they will find their own missiles struck before they can launched, leaving them at the mercy of the enemy’s nukes. Given that risk, in a crisis a leader or even local commander could easily decide that if “use it or lose it” is the operative situation, launching first is the safest bet. And then it’s game over. Full scale nuclear war is on.

And all those percentage-of-GDP spending won’t have accomplished a damned thing.

The absurdity of it all was highlighted today as it was reported that Britain’s PM Starmer, after approving the launch of a British Storm Shadow missile by Ukraine into Russia, said Britain, which is facing a budget crisis at present that has it cutting winter heating subsidies for poor people, has “no defense” against a Russian missile attack, but that he would boost Britain’s military spending, despite the budget crisis, from 2% to 2.5%.

Would such a spending boost offer protection? Not when designing and building a whole new generation anti-missile system takes years and with no guarantee of success.

All he’s doing is offering magical thinking to the anxious masses.

The proper response to this current situation is to call a halt to escalation in Ukraine and negotiate an immediate cease fire between Russia and Ukraine with negotiations for an end to that to commence at the same time.

The idea of defense budgeting by percent of GDP has been idiotic from the outset. After all, GDP actually shrank during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, which automatically made the existing military spending a larger percentage of each country’s total economic activity, but with no gain in national security of course.

This kind of numerical nonsense would never be permitted if the budget were about education or healthcare spending.

It’s only in the area of national security where huge parts of the spending is kept secret, hidden in black boxes like the CIA budget.

And it turns out that all that $1.58 trillion the US is spending on “defense” (sic) isn’t making us or the world any safer. In fact it appears to be putting us in the greatest danger humanity has been in since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, except that back then we had a brilliant man, John F Kennedy, who knew when to fold ‘em and backed away from a nuclear war by secretly agreeing to remove nuclear tipped Jupiter missiles the US had provocatively placed just inside Turkey’s border with the Soviet Union — the whole reason Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev started setting up nuclear missiles in Cuba in the first place.

Now we have a brain-addled lame-duck President Biden with only weeks left in his White House tenure threatening us all with nuclear war in an attempt to leave office saying he “stood with Ukraine.”

That’s 100% nuts!

The post The Magic Number Is 2.5 in the UK appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.