By Chris Fry
On May 20, President Donald Trump unveiled his “Golden Dome” weapons program. Similar to Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” program, Trump promised that this would prevent missiles from reaching U.S. shores:
“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they’re launched from space,” Trump continued. “We will have the best system ever built.”
This would allow the U.S. to launch a “first strike” nuclear attack with impunity.
Chinese and Russian officials quickly condemned Trump’s Golden Dome proposal:
The project “carries a strong offensive nature” and could heighten “space militarization” and an arms race, undermining global security, said Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Golden Dome program clearly violates the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty.
Trump’s announcement comes just a few days after his forced capitulation on his 145 per cent tariff on products from China. His expectation that China’s leadership would “bend the knee” to his trade war escalation came crashing down.
Trump failed to intimidate China’s leadership to obey his and other billionaire’s wishes, to give up development of renewable technologies, to stop their AGI and advanced computer chip research and much more.
U.S. computer chip sanctions have not stopped China from creating their own alternative, even allowing them to create a low-cost powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) package called “Deep Seek”.
Socialist China will not give up its social ownership of major industries, nor its use of scientific planning. Nor will it give up control of the country’s financial apparatus and its currency.
With Trump’s huge tariffs, U.S. workers found more and more empty shelves and sky-high prices. But more importantly to Wall Street, this hits the bottom line of retailers like Target and Walmart.
U.S. Imperialism prepares to wage war
Trump’s Golden Dome is his “Plan B,” turning from economic warfare against Socialist China to military threats.
This is not really a new development. In his first term in office, Trump established the Space Force as a separate entity in December 2019. It will manage his Golden Dome program.
Realizing that this program would be powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Silicon Valley magnates stood right behind Trump at his inauguration, as the Atlantic reported:
The power that each of these men represents may be rivaled by only the presidency itself. Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta; Bezos founded Amazon and Blue Origin and owns The Washington Post; Pichai runs Google; Musk heads Tesla and SpaceX and owns X; Cook is Apple’s CEO. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was also in attendance in a back row, and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was reportedly seated in the overflow crowd in Emancipation Hall.
These tycoons are eager to “get in on the action” of this new massive weapons program:
A key part of the Trump plan is to place both missile-sensing and missile-destroying satellites into orbit above the Earth. The constellation would likely involve thousands of small satellites capable of attacking a missile in the moments after it launches from its submarine or silo.
Such a vast network of satellites would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but it now seems at least theoretically within reach. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has been using low-cost rockets to launch a constellation of internet-transmitting satellites known as Starlink. SpaceX says the Starlink system currently has around 7,000 satellites in orbit, a scale that is comparable to most estimates of what a limited space-based missile defense capability would require.
Why does Trump want to seize Canada and Greenland? One reason is this would allow more “over the horizon” control of the Golden Dome’s satellite network, since incoming missiles from China or Russia are likely to use the polar route.
Trump’s tariffs enable his Golden Dome war strategy. By increasing costs for commodities made overseas, particularly in China, for the working class here, it pressures the corporations to move their production, the so-called “supply chain”, back into the U.S., underneath Trump’s Golden Dome. That way Big Business’s profit streams will continue after a U.S. attack on China.
On May 28, a Federal Court ruled that Trump exceeded his presidential authority by imposing all his tariffs. The Constitution gives the power to enact tariffs to Congress, not the president. But it is certain that Trump will assert his “national security” authority to continue them.
Given the dominant militarist posture of U.S. Imperialism, with both political parties in total agreement on hostility towards Socialist China, Trump will likely prevail in Washington, whether in the courts or Congress, at least with China.
The cost for the Golden Dome? Trump gave a low-ball estimate of $125 billion. But experts say that the space part of the project will actually cost between $500 billion to a trillion.
That figure does not include the AI platform to manage this extremely complex system, nor the new power generators, many of them coal-fired, to power this platform. This would amount to several hundred billion, perhaps several trillions, going into the pockets of Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley cohorts, along with the Big Energy monopolies.
And who will pay for all this? Not the billionaires. They’re getting huge tax breaks.
It would be paid for by the workers and oppressed people, who will now be paying a huge “tariff tax” on top of inflated prices, while all the social services won through struggle are cut right to the bone.
In the end, this mad imperialist venture will fail to “protect” the country. The U.S.-created vaunted Zionist “Iron Dome” has failed to stop Yemen’s missiles reaching Tel Aviv, and those were non-nuclear.
Next – Part 2: Taiwan, the first shot.
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