Re: Russian Invasion of the Baltic States
UK military spending is supposedly around 2.5% GDP, but that includes a lot of creative accounting, including intelligence and police type stuff, that, while very important, would not make the single UK Armoured division any stronger in a actual fight.
In terms of numbers; men, tanks, ships, aircraft, helicopters, etc British forces today are roughly 50% as strong as they were in 2000 and more like 25-30% as strong as they were in 1982.
French defence spending is under 2% of GDP and a lot of that, as always, goes on stuff that is very specific to France and French interests rather than NATO.
German defence spending is not a whole lot more than 1.5% of GDP and Germany, because of her size, geographical position and economy, has to be the central pivot of European defence. The smaller Western European nations, as I said, are getting close to being almost worthless. While Canada has very good, but very small and very underfunded forces.
I don't actually see Russia under Putin as much of a threat to Western Europe. Another leader might be another story. As I see it at the moment, Western Europe wants to try to push Putin and Russia while entirely lacking the military means to back that up, short of full US backing. Happily I think Brexit will lead to a stronger US-British alliance, at the expense of EU ambitions.
China, well that is a different story...
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