On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order to build a major new missile defense system for the United States, a project that would have a huge price tag and likely fuel a new arms race.
Trump has dubbed the plan “the Iron Dome for America,” likening it to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. But Israel’s Iron Dome is designed to intercept crude, short-range rockets, and Trump envisions a system that can down the most advanced missiles in the world.
The order directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to submit a plan for a “next-generation missile defense shield” that can defend the US “against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”
The order also specifies that the system must include “space-based interceptors.” A fact sheet released by the White House said the missile shield would guarantee the US’s “second strike capability,” referring to the ability to respond to a nuclear attack with another nuclear attack.
The White House said that President Trump was fulfilling a campaign promise by signing the order. While on the campaign trail, Trump vowed to “build a great Iron Dome over our country, a dome like has never seen before, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield that will be entirely built in America.”
Antiwar.com contributor Daniel Larison said in an article on his site Eunomia that the missile defense project could fuel an arms race by “pushing other states to expand their missile forces so that they could overwhelm whatever defenses the US might create.”
“The only things that the US would get from massively expanding its missile defense systems is a lot more debt and arms races with other nuclear weapons states,” Larison added.
In 2002, the George W. Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a Cold War-era treaty between the US and Russia that reduced the need for nuclear proliferation by limiting each side’s ability to intercept a nuclear attack. President Trump has said he’s interested in discussing “denuclearization” with Russia and China, but so far, there’s no sign arms control talks are happening.
