China said it is “gravely concerned” about President Donald Trump‘s ambitious Golden Dome project, and warned that it could upset the global strategic balance.
On Tuesday, Trump announced the Golden Dome project — a concept initially pitched during his campaign that reflects Israel’s Iron Dome but is now more analogous to former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars. Trump explicitly drew connections to Reagan’s project in his Tuesday presentation, leading some analysts to describe the project as “Star Wars on steroids.”
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Expectedly, China is playing the role that the Soviet Union previously played, and it has expressed concern over the project’s strategic implications.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning expressed her country’s concerns during a Wednesday press conference, saying the “unconstrained, global, multilayer and multidomain missile defense system” will “expand the U.S. arsenal of means for combat operations in outer space, including R&D and deployment of orbital interception systems.”
“That gives the project a strong offensive nature and violates the principle of peaceful use in the Outer Space Treaty. The project will heighten the risk of turning the space into a war zone and creating a space arms race, and shake the international security and arms control system,” she added, according to a transcript from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Mao linked the project to China’s larger problems with Trump’s “America First” policies, arguing that they prioritize the United States at the expense of everyone else.
“This is yet another ‘America First’ initiative that puts the U.S.’s absolute security above all else. It violates the principle of ‘undiminished security for all’ and will hurt global strategic balance and stability. China is gravely concerned,” she said.
“We urge the U.S. to give up developing and deploying a global antimissile system, and take concrete actions to enhance strategic trust between major countries and uphold global strategic stability,” Mao concluded.
The main deterrent of nuclear war since the start of the atomic age, almost 80 years ago, is the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Because of the Soviet Union’s first successful nuclear weapons test in August 1949, a hot war between two nuclear superpowers would require the mutual use of nuclear weapons to cause unprecedented casualties, and with the development of the hydrogen bomb and intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s and 1960s, a nuclear war today could end human civilization altogether. These possibilities made the use of nuclear weapons unthinkable and prevented their use.
The first breach of MAD was Reagan’s push of Star Wars, unveiled in March 1983. The program entailed using space lasers to destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles before they made landfall, rendering the USSR’s nuclear deterrent null. The project played a major role in increasing Soviet paranoia in the final phase of the Cold War, leading to one of the closest brushes with nuclear war in history.
The Soviets’ fear, similar to China’s current fear of the Golden Dome, was that the U.S. could annihilate their country in a nuclear first strike while being protected from retaliation.
Star Wars was controversial because most planners in the U.S. knew at the time that the country didn’t have anything near the technology it needed to field the system. Despite this, Reagan held on to the dream, even allowing it to jeopardize negotiations after tensions eased under Mikhail Gorbachev.
Over 40 years later, Trump believes the U.S. has the technology Reagan dreamed of.
“We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland,” Trump said, saying technological advances in recent decades now make the concept of an impenetrable missile shield covering the entire U.S. possible. “The success rate is very close to 100%, which is incredible when you think of it. You’re shooting bullets out of the air.”
“This design for the Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term. So we’ll have it done in about three years,” he elaborated, describing the concept as a “state-of-the-art system that will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors.”
“Once fully constructed, Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space, and we will have the best system ever built,” Trump added.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has expressed optimism about the Golden Dome, calling it a “game changer” and “generational investment in the security of America” and promising to meet the ambitious three-year deadline.
“We’re going to get to work on it … [It’s] something you’ve charged us with doing, and we’ll keep going until it is complete, sir,” he said at Trump’s Tuesday presentation.
Trump estimated the Golden Dome project to cost $175 billion, with a $25 billion down payment. A recent Congressional Budget Office estimate put the total cost of deploying and operating a constellation of space-based interceptors for 20 years at anywhere from $161 billion to $831 billion.
Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations at the Space Force and new head of the Golden Dome project, compared the project to the creation of the atomic bomb.
“The only time that I can think of in the history of the United States where we have gone after something this complex was the Manhattan Project,” Guetlein told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 12.
He insisted that it is doable.
“It’s not complex because the technology’s going to be hard. It’s complex because of the number of organizations and the number of agencies that need to be involved,” Guetlein said.
China’s objections are likely to increase as the project continues, worsening already-high tensions over Taiwan and a trade war.