This piece, by Naman Habtom of Quincy Institute, is something that Europeans should think long and hard about: why has integrating Russia into regional frameworks produced security and low military budgets in Asia, while excluding Russia has produced the opposite in Europe?

Very striking to see that over the past 30 years, most of Russia's neighbors in Asia - and that includes China - have been REDUCING their military budgets as a share of GDP.

I actually checked and European neighbors of Russia spend roughly 3x more on defense as a share of GDP than Russia's Asian neighbors. Even more striking, the closer a European country is to Russia and the further east it sits, the more it spends (Poland/Baltics at 3-4%), while in Asia the pattern is reversed - Mongolia and Kazakhstan, with the longest borders, spend the least (0.5-0.6%).

And it's not an "autocracy" thing. As the article highlights, Mongolia is actually rated more democratic by Freedom House than several NATO members like Bulgaria or Poland (freedomhouse.org/countr…). And it is, like them, a former Soviet satellite state.

Which means the difference isn't regime type - it's strategic architecture. Mongolia, and the region as a whole, chose integration over exclusion. The result: more security, and at a fraction of the cost.