Ramped Up NATO Spending Will Deepen Insecurity and Inequality
by Alex Neve | July 2, 2025
We knew it was coming, but when the announcement landed at the end of the NATO Leaders’ Summit in the Netherlands, it nonetheless seemed inconceivable. NATO members had agreed to boost their defence spending to reach 5% of annual GDP by the year 2035, in other words within a decade.
My first soul-shaking feeling was how desperately, dramatically far we are from committing to anywhere near that level of funding where it matters most. What of the human rights programs, humanitarian agencies, public health institutions and frontline environmental groups and activists who do the heavy lifting of keeping our world safe and equitable, day in and day out, forging a sustainable future for us all? If only.
Prime Minister Carney immediately released a statement confirming that Canada had indeed joined that new “NATO Defence Investment Pledge”, which would see 3.5% of our national GDP go towards core military spending and 1.5% for critical defence and security-related expenditures such as airports, ports and telecommunication.
For a sense of scale, Prime Minister Carney has indicated that 5% of our annual GDP would amount to $150 billion, annually. The country’s projected total federal expenditures for 2024-2025 were $450 billion. Estimates provided to NATO by the Canadian government projected $41 billion of defence spending in 2024, amounting to 1.34% of GDP. Are we truly imagining a nearly fourfold increase in military spending, such that roughly 25% of our federal budget would go to defence?
I’m not a defence expert or military strategist, so I do not intend to analyze this from the perspective of strategic military need (or not) of that much money, how it could or should be spent, and whether it does or does not help create a more stable, secure world. That said, I have very serious doubts and misgivings. We know from history that arms races and ramped up militarization do not unleash the stability and security promised by their proponents. Quite the contrary, with more weapons, war, conflict and insecurity tends to deepen and spread.
Military and security strategy aside, I do not have to be a defence expert, or an economist or financial analyst for that matter, to know that this is a staggering amount of money.
Which, of course, begs the question: how will that level of spending be funded? And, inevitably, where will the savings be found (and on whose backs)?
It certainly won’t come through tax hikes; no government wants to go there. The biggest federal expenditure lies in fiscal transfers to provinces and territories to equalize crucial programs such as healthcare and education across the country; can’t imagine any government wanting to meddle much in that space. Royalties and tax revenues from pipelines and critical minerals? In part, perhaps, though the timeline is uncertain and there are very real concerns related to the climate crisis and respect for Indigenous rights.
I ask that question about where the funds will come from with very real trepidation as I know that many of the programs and services that are likely to be at greatest risk will be in such areas as international development assistance, human rights protection and climate justice; with implications both globally and domestically.
The United Kingdom government has already set that example. Governments that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are urged to spend .7% of their Gross National Income on international development assistance. Canada has never been anywhere near that figure, most recently coming in at around .34%. Last year the UK hovered at around .5%. But the Starmer government has announced that will be slashed by 6 billion pounds, bringing that figure down to .3%. Why such drastic cuts? The savings are to be diverted to increased defence spending.
In the federal election earlier this year the Conservative Party made it clear that they would cut foreign aid in order to boost military spending. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre promised “massive cuts” to Canada’s $15 billion of development assistance, which he described as “wasteful and corrupt foreign aid grants.” That does not bode well for the Official Opposition readying to push back if the Carney government does indeed follow the UK lead and make substantial cuts to the international development budget.
All of this is, of course, against the backdrop of the devastating cuts to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other US global humanitarian, health and environmental funding agencies and programs, overseen by Elon Musk and Marco Rubio, cheered on and championed by Donald Trump. USAID in particular had overseen US$63 billion in humanitarian assistance in 2023. Oxfam and other humanitarian organizations have launched a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s decision to shut USAID down.
As a consequence, funding for a wide range of UN agencies and for humanitarian groups has been decimated. Crucial bodies such as UNICEF (dedicated to children), the UNHCR (the UN’s refugee agency), the World Health Organization, UN AIDS, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Food Program and countless other agencies are all reeling and having to make drastic cuts to their life-saving and rights-protecting programs. The impact, of course, falls most heavily on the most vulnerable. Learning centres for Rohingya refugee children in camps in Bangladesh have all been closed due to lack of funds, leaving 437,000 children with no access to education and no prospect of being able to return safely to their homes in Myanmar.
The situation has become so dire that Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, talks of UN agencies being forced into a “triage of human survival,” noting that “brutal funding cuts leave [them] with brutal choices.” Putting the amount of money that is being sought into very pointed perspective, Fletcher stresses that all that is being asked now in a “hyper-prioritized appeal” is “one per cent of what [governments] chose to spend last year on war.” That one percent of what states spend on war, however, remains beyond reach.
The consequences are life and death. As just one harrowing measure, a study published in the Lancet predicts that “up to 2.9 million more children and adults will die from HIV-related causes before 2030 because of aid cuts by countries including the US and Britain.”
The Trump Administration has also slashed billions of dollars from a wide range of crucial programs in the area of environmental protection and addressing the climate crisis. The dystopian absurdity of doing so while climate-induced fires ravaged neighbourhoods in and around Los Angeles made no difference.
There are also very real consequences for mechanisms and processes meant to hold states accountable for human rights violations. For instance, funding cuts have led the expert committees that are responsible for overseeing and enforcing the principal UN human rights treaties to scale back their activities, including cancelling a number of their sessions. Review of states’ human rights records will be delayed, as will proceeding with individual complaints of alleged violations. That comes at a time when these committees were already seriously under-resourced and therefore considerably backlogged. It comes at a time, as well, when the need to strengthen human rights accountability is more pressing and challenging than ever.
The list could go on for pages.
Yet, pockets are deep – almost bottomless it would seem – when it comes to funding this massive increase in military spending. Doing so at the expense of the rights, well-being and even survival of hundreds of millions of people around the world is not only reckless and counter-intuitive, it is a disgraceful abdication, both legally and morally, of the foundational human rights obligations and humanitarian principles that are ultimately the surest guarantor of our collective security. One of the first pieces of business for the newly established United Nations, dedicated to healing and rebuilding a world torn apart by the ravages of war, was to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It is time to go back to first principles; and commit the political will and resources that demonstrate we truly mean it.
Alex Neve is a visiting professor of international human rights at the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie University, and a Senior Fellow at Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He served as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada from 2000 to 2020 and currently chairs Canadian Leadership for Nuclear Disarmament. He will deliver the 2025 CBC Massey Lectures, to be published by House of Anansi as Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World.