There was no real fighting after 2010, which is why it ends there. The graphic contains data after that point since Ukraine is on it. It's still only <0.15% of US GDP per year at $43bn.
Fighting on the ground winded down but the air campaign continued. Bombs & sorties aren't cheap. The spending continued in large sums.
With 2019 estimates factored in, the war in Afghanistan has now cost the United States $975 billion.
www.forbes.com
My ballpark estimate was right - the total military expenditure on Afg was close to a trillion. And that's without taking the last 2 years into account.
But the more important thing is, half of that spending was done with absolutely nothing to show for it.
The US spent more than that on the Black Budget during the Cold War, WITHOUT even adjusting for today's prices. The moon landing cost that much in 1969 WITHOUT adjusting for today's prices.
US won the Cold War - all that spending had actual deliverables that advanced American capabilities vis-a-vis USSR in case of a war. The R&D done for the space program is still useful today and will continue to be useful when colonizing the inner solar system becomes a reality.
The spending in Afg was useless - it was spent to play whack-a-mole and to prop up a corrupt regime that couldn't even stand for a week after the US withdrawal. That's wasteful expenditure courtesy Obama. Trump deserves credit for taking the decision to leave. But Biden, probably in a demented stupor which he gets all too often, decided to mess it up by leaving billions worth of military equipment in Taliban hands.
Or maybe it was the decision of the kooks that surround him. They call it the Biden-Harris administration after all.
More like Russia has learnt to manipulate the isolationist section and Trump probably did something while friends with Jeffrey Epstein and is under the thumb.
Russiagate was a hoax cooked up by Hillary's campaign office. Did Russia perform influence operations to help Trump win because they thought he'd be a better President to work with? Probably, but the Mueller report concluded that there was no compelling evidence to say that Russia colluded with Trump.
The fact is, Trump won (both times) because the American electorate liked what he stood for.
Which could then be sanctioned on oil exports.
What do you mean?
If you mean sanctioning export of oil to China, it's not gonna happen because PRC is a far more important & larger customer of MidEast oil than anyone else. Nobody in the GCC would go through with it. Iran would anyway not adhere to it.
If you mean sanctioning China - it depends on what kind you mean. The kind of stuff on the fringes like what's already happening is unlikely to hurt them much. If you want to pursue a far more comprehensive sanctions regime that suspends all imports from China - good like with that.
It already is anyway, so no change.
Not it's not.
Russia's economy is slowly crumbling. It's can't even nearly meet its target of 4% inflation even with 21% interest rates. They started hiking rates in August from 16% to 21% but the ruble kept plummeting. That's indicative of money being printed into existence rather than borrowed. Back in 2022 and 2023 when they raised interest rates the market responded and the ruble rose, but now there's no response.
If the peace deal is reached sometime in 2025, it'll likely include lifting of all sanctions on Russia. Including the price-cap on Russian crude.
Their export revenues will soar. And there's no guarantee the EU won't go back to restoring energy ties with Russia to pre-war levels.
The EU allocation is from the EU itself as an institution, it doesn't include national contributions from EU member states and Non-EU NATO states, which is what my first chart showed. Add together the member states and it comes to 80% the US contribution, and the EU contribution is slightly more. Together EU and members contribute ~2x the US contribution, so 50% more will do it.
View attachment 38024
That's including all types of aid. But the US alone is supplying as much military aid (hardware) as everyone else combined if not more.
EU countries may need to spend 50% more to account for the US withdrawal of aid in absolute terms. But EU doesn't have the military-industrial base to produce that much hardware themselves so they'll need to pay others to account for the military aid on top of that. That will add a further 50% to the total spending.
All in all, that gets you to double of what they're spending now. They could choose to just spend on military aid & ignore/cut down on economic/humanitarian aid but then again these are European bureaucrats you're dealing with. For them, signalling their virtue is far more important than actually being virtuous. So remains to be seen if they can adopt austerity.
All of NATO should be trying to do it.
There's probably a reason why they aren't.
Sensible policies you mean?
If they make sense to non-Americans but not to the American voters, then they're not sensible policies. They're misguided policies.
You might get away with freeloading off the American taxpayer when everything is fine & dandy, but when the going gets even a little bit tough (as happened in the post-COVID era), that might become difficult.
No, they're all Putin's yes-men, especially after the last man who went against him gave up and was killed.
That's the way the Russian system has always worked. Power is centralized & concentrated at the top.
Concerns from the time of Empire are no longer relevant. NATO was never about to invade Russia. If they had a mind to do that, they'd attacking them directly in Ukraine don't you think? NATO invading Russia would never get through Parliament anywhere in NATO, even if some crazy leader wanted to, which also has exactly zero probability.
Trust was broken when the US promised not to expand NATO eastwards but did it anyway.
The countries that were already part of NATO at the time USSR fell were protected by Article 5 & the US nuclear umbrella. There was no way Russia could have invaded them. So there was no reason to add former Soviet republics into NATO - you only do that if you want to add some buffer territory between you and Russia. Why do you need a buffer unless you plan on having hostilities with Russia down the line?
And remember a lot of it was done when Yeltsin was president so the 'We did it cuz Putin is Evil' theory doesn't hold.
Note that I'm NOT saying you were wrong to anticipate hostilities with Russia down the line - because NATO may not last forever, and then the only thing giving Western Europe the time to prepare for war would be these buffer countries - I'm just saying Russia wasn't wrong in anticipating hostilities with you either. That brings us to where we are. It's easy to say it's all cuz the other guy is evil - the truth is more complicated & nuanced.
So many continental European leaders over the centuries invaded Russia and so many might do it in the future. The current political & military balance in Europe is the result of a particular series of events, but this situation won't last forever.
Nukes might deter conflict...but if both sides have them, they're more likely to just ensure that neither side uses them for fear of retaliation, while conventional warfighting, probably over control of territory in Eastern Europe, will continue under the nuclear overhang. That theory was proved in the Kargil War.
Everyone is obliged to help Ukraine by International Law.
No they're not. Otherwise actual Mutual/Collective Defence Treaties (like NATO) have no meaning.
Plus there was something called the Budapest Memorandum, which Russia broke, hence why no deal with them is worth jack shit.
View attachment 38025
A memorandum is not a ratified treaty.
And any way, it calls for the UNSC to provide assistance in case Ukraine gets nuked. It hasn't. So nobody is obligated to help Ukraine.
The Budapest Memorandum was more of an instrument that was used to cheat Ukraine out of its nukes in return for jack shit. And the US & UK were a party to that. If they were serious about defending Ukraine they would've signed & ratified a Mutual Defence Agreement with Kiev in exchange for them giving up their nukes.
But all they got was essentially a word of mouth assurance (which is why Trump is now able to go back on assistance to Ukraine without breaking the law).
That's what comes of trusting American (or British) bureaucrats.
The Middle East is complicated. Yes the Saudis etc. don't like Iran but they hate Israel more, it's a complicated situation involving a region where all the world's oil comes from. You're also not correct on the latter, the position of many Iranians is not the position of the regime on the US
There is a critical mass of people that share the same vision of the regime. Otherwise the Ayatollahs would've been overthrown.
Like in any regime, there are dissenters. But right now that number isn't many. Far from the critical mass needed to change the regime's outlook.
but seeing Israel batter Palestinians simply makes them lose their capability for rational analysis of what happened and why it happened. This is one of the reasons Iran and Russia started the current war. Both Russia and Iran wanted a distraction, Russia from its atrocities in Ukraine and Iran from its police beating women to death for not wearing a hijab plus the executions that followed. By making Israel the victim and then the bad guys (because Hamas and Hezbollah hide everything under civilian apartments), Russia has distarcted the world from Ukraine and the Iranian regime has focused its people against Israel rather itself. Russia has also divided US aid between Ukraine and Israel (which probably also helped Trump win the Jewish vote in the US - less money for Ukraine = more for Israel) and Iran and Russia have turned world opinion against Israel and by extension the US and NATO. Two wrongs made it right, the irony.
US policy in this regard makes sense. Ukraine has got a lot of European countries that at least in theory have got the resources to back them up. Israel only has the US.
Too far underground, you'd need a nuke to take out their nuclear program.
Israel has been hurting & setting back the Iranian nuke program for decades. There's a lot of stuff above ground - including the scientists & generals in charge of the program.
And it worked. By the end of it the US itself was ~5x more dangerous for police than Iraq and Afghanistan combined were for US soliders. One soldier even said that it was a mere policing operation in the end.
The number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan in 2021 amounted to 13 from the Western coalition, as of October 2021.
www.statista.com
As of March 2021, 11 U.S.
www.statista.com
It didn't work. Iraq was another failed project, waste of another trillion dollars.
As soon as US forces left, the process of crumbling began. Right now Iraq is little more than a proxy or extension of Iran where IRGC can operate with free will.
The likes of Saddam & Gaddafi might be objectively terrible people, but they knew how to keep this part of the world under control. ISIS would've been nipped in the bud if Saddam or his successors were around. Going into Iraq for the second time on the cooked-up pretext of WMDs was a stupid move.
www.whitehouse.gov
