Royal Navy going to shit...

[Fidel_Castronaut]

What exactly happened to the entire NATO-thing and spending a certain amount of a country's economy on defense?

It seems to me that most NATO countries are just starting to slack.

Indeed. 

Only 5 NATO countries spend the required cash on defence required as part of the NATO guidelines (check but it was 2% of GDP I believe?) and that's the US, the U.K., Estonia, Poland and Greece (of all counties).

And of those 5 the US spends by far the most, obviously. Most likely because now there is no Cold War also most NATO countries are actually pretty poor, even south and east European states like Spain, Portugal and Italy. All suffering recessions and massive cut backs in Government spending. Unfortunate timing really because I would class Putin as more dangerous than a lot of the latter USSR dictators.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/08/news/nat...countries/