And yet you hear less about China and Iran than Russia. That’s not to say Russia isn’t a factor but what a strange sense of proportionality the media have.
NPR
Together, the U.S. and China make up half the world’s military spending, expending as much as the rest of the world combined. In fact, the “significant increases in spending” by the two countries drove total global military spending up 2.6% from 2017, researchers said.
“The spending boom is driven, above all, by the contest between America and China for primacy in Asia,” writes The Economist in summarizing the report. America’s increase “reflected the Trump administration’s embrace of what it calls ‘great power competition’ with Russia and China — requiring fancier, pricier weapons — in place of the inconclusive guerrilla wars it had fought since 2001.