Snapshots of Global Defense Spending

The go-to source for comparing national levels of defense spending arount the world is SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which has just published its data on defense spending in 2025. Here are a few snapshots from “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2025,” co-authored by Xiao Liang, Nan Tian, Diego Lopes da Silva, Lorenzo Scarazzato, Zubaida A. Karim, and Jade Guiberteau Ricard (April 2026). This figure shows the inflation-adjusted level of defense spending for the world going back to 1988. The decline after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the rise in the “Asia and Oceania” share as China’s economy and defense spending have grown, and the rise in European defense spending in the last few years are all visible. Moreover, the “Americas” defense spending–dominated by US spending–has been fairly flat since about 2010, so the growth in defense spending is happening in other regions of the world. It’s interesting (to me, at least) that the…