Furthermore, NATO's expanded "global responsibilities" would easily provide the imperial US military machine new excuses for unilateral military interventions. By the same token, such military adventures would also provide the US military-industrial-security complex additional rationale for continued escalation of the Pentagon budget.
The expansion of NATO to include most of the Eastern Europe has led Russia, which had curtailed its military spending during the 1990s in the hope that, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US would also do the same, to once again increase its military spending. In response to the escalation of US military spending, which has nearly tripled during the last 10 years (from $295 billion when George W. Bush went to the White House in January 2001 to the current figure of nearly one trillion dollars), Russia too has drastically increased its military spending during the same time period (from about $22 billion in 2000 to $61 billion today).
In a similar fashion, US military encirclement of China (through a number of military alliances and partnerships that range from Pakistan, Afghanistan and India to South China Sea/Southeast Asia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, New Zealand and most recently Vietnam) has led that country to also further strengthen its military capabilities.
Just as the US military and geopolitical ambitions have led Russia and China to reinforce their military capabilities, so have they compelled other countries such as Iran, Venezuela and North Korea to likewise strengthen their armed forces and buttress their military preparedness.
Not only does aggressive US militarism compel its "adversaries" to allocate a disproportionately large share of their precious resources to military spending, but it also coerces its "allies" to likewise embark on a path of militarization. Thus, countries like Japan and Germany, whose military capabilities were reduced to purely defensive postures following the atrocities of World War II, have once again been re-militarizing in recent years under the impetus of what US military strategists call "the need to share the burden of global security." Thus, while Germany and Japan still operate under a "peace constitution," their military expenditures on a global scale now rank sixth and seventh, respectively (behind the US, China, France, UK and Russia).
US militarization of the world (both directly through the spread of its own military apparatus across the globe and indirectly by compelling both "friends" and "foe" to militarize) has a number of ominous consequences for the overwhelming majority or the population the world.
For one thing, it is the source of a largely redundant and disproportionately large allocation of the world's precious resources to war, militarism and wasteful production of the means of death and destruction. Obviously, as this inefficient, class-biased disbursement of resources drains public finance and accumulates national debt, it also brings tremendous riches and treasures to war profiteers, that is, the beneficiaries of the military capital and the finance capital.
Secondly, to justify this lopsided allocation of the lion's share of national resources to military spending, beneficiaries of war dividends tend to create fear, suspicion and hostility among peoples and nations of the world, thereby sowing the seeds of war, international conflicts and global instability.
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