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,........

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