By Tom Fowdy
Last week, US President Donald Trump announced the creation of a space-based missile defence system known as the "Golden Dome." Inspired by the name of Israel's Iron Dome, this system would aim to counter the threat of ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The US government is set to invest billions into it, with key contractors such as Lockheed Martin and SpaceX bidding for it.
Analysts have nonetheless criticised its excessive costs and the realism of implementing it. While Israel's Iron Dome is designed to protect a smaller geographic space, the Golden Dome is proposed to cover the entire US homeland. China's foreign ministry openly condemned the idea, stating it violates "the principle that the security of all countries should not be compromised and undermines global strategic balance and stability."
The Golden Dome is, in my opinion, a Trumpesque vanity project of the most obvious kind. Its very name and concept contain the embodiment of MAGA bravado that likes to wave around male phallic energy, saying "look how big and tough we are!" Hence, the colour gold is one of Trump's favourite expressions of status, hence, Trump Tower is plated in it. Because of this, it is little wonder that the project is being criticised for its overtly ambitious nature, existing as "style" rather than substance in terms of what it offers the US.
However, beyond Trump's branding, demands, or vision, there is also a strategic impetus for such a system, which likely came from the US defence establishment. The United States wants to fortify its strategic and military supremacy in an era of new state competition to maintain the upper hand, in particular about competitors such as Russia and China, and to an extent even North Korea, who have developed ballistic and hypersonic missile capabilities that are capable of striking the United States.
For some time now, a new global missile race has been underway, and actually began with Trump himself when he rescinded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) by withdrawing from it in 2019 under the guise of Russian non-compliance. The US, of course, believes that it has the technological and economic capability to always sustain the upper hand militarily; therefore, why should it be legally constrained to come down to the level of competitor states? Instead, the strategic logic, as it were in the Cold War, is that the United States ought to keep pushing forwards with arms races and expansion of capabilities, and thus aim to cripple the adversarial states endeavouring to keep up, as it did with the Soviet Union.
Thus, this logic produces programs in Washington, D.C that are deliberately aimed to "up the ante" and nullify the premise of "mutually assured destruction" by trying to make an asymmetry in military capabilities. This was the primary logic of the Strategic Defence Initiative or "Star Wars Program" devised in 1984 by the Ronald Reagan administration, which I will note is strikingly similar in concept to the Golden Dome. Again, the strategic aspects of this program in relation to outer space were revived by Trump's first administration in the year 2019, which also created the US "Space Force" or "Space Command."
While this sounds like Sci-fi nonsense, Trump's administration and the US defence establishment as a whole see outer space as a new frontier of battle with technological ascendency, which is critical to obtaining the upper hand. This is critical in the sphere of missile defence, and it is mostly China that is seen as the primary rival in this field rather than Russia. Thus, I have noted for a few years now that there has been a creeping "second space race" in the bid between two powers to develop capabilities surrounding the earth, now seen as paramount to their own national security.
While Trump as an individual often presents an egotistical rendering of these ideas and projects, sometimes mocked and defended, what we see is only the branding, not the strategic logic. China, having already demonstrated profound hypersonic missile capabilities, is likely to be able to keep up with the US and readily hold its own, as it is not the Soviet Union. The United States, of course, responds as it has always done, as it did with Apollo in 1969; it simply meets challenges by dramatically upping the ante, aiming to be more ambitious, daring, and confident than ever, thus we get the "Golden Dome."
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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