Donald Trump’s Golden Dome

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system intercepts rockets fired from Lebanon during the conflict last year (Photo by Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)

The headlines are currently dominated by President Trump’s new tariffs. These have led to a mass of commentary, little of it favourable, to the new measures. But Trump is not abandoning the rest of his agenda. As a president who believes that there are no problems that cannot be solved with an ambitious executive order, one of those issued in his first week, on 27 January, identified what promises to be one of his top defence priorities for his second term. He requested that the Pentagon come up with plans for an ‘Iron Dome for America.’ The plans, already delayed, could reach his desk this coming week.

Here the objective is to solve one of the biggest problems of all – how to protect the homeland of the United States from deadly ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile threats. The model is Israel’s Iron Dome which has done an impressive job protecting the country from missiles launched by Hamas to its south and Hezbollah to its north. Unsurprisingly mere emulation of the Israeli system is not enough so the proposal now is for a ‘Golden Dome.’

One explanation for the change of name is that Iron Dome is a trademark owned by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense System. Another is that it follows a slip of the tongue from Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth who spoke in a video address of ‘Golden Dome, or Iron Dome’, and the White House decided it preferred the alternative. Curiously the original name for Israel’s system was Golden Dome but it was rejected because it was considered ‘ostentatious’.

A more appropriate comparison is with President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in March 1983, mocked by his opponents as ‘Star Wars.’ This was equally ambitious. It was intended to move the country away from relying on deterrence as the best way to prevent nuclear strikes against the homeland, which depended on a threat to retaliate in kind, to stopping any missiles getting through by erecting an impermeable defensive shield. Better, said Reagan, to ‘protect’ rather than ‘avenge’. It was hard to argue with the sentiment but easy to argue with the practicality. After billions of dollars had been spent on research and development the initiative petered out.

Supporters of the new initiative claim that there have been great advances in the relevant technologies over the past four decades. That was also the claim made in 1983, when the comparison was with systems first proposed in the 1960s by the Johnson Administration. Admittedly a key component of the earlier system was the Nike-Zeus anti-missile missile which was designed to disable incoming missiles by exploding a 400 kiloton nuclear weapons in their vicinity as they came through the upper atmosphere. This effort ended in 1972 when the United States and Soviet Union signed a Treaty limiting the number of anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) that could be deployed. In 2002 George W Bush took the US out of the ABM Treaty so that a limited system, designed to cope with a small number of missiles from North Korea or even Iran, could be deployed.

This is the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, based in Alaska and California, which does not inspire confidence as it has failed nearly half of its tests. It would have minimal value against a Russian or Chinese attack. In addition there is the sea-based Aegis regional missile defense system, designed to cope with medium and intermediate range missiles. A land-based version of this has been developed and deployed in the US, Romania and Poland, over Russian objections.

There are numerous systems now available for use against shorter-range missiles, cruise and ballistic, with conventional warheads. These can be regularly seen in use in in the Middle East and the Russo-Ukraine War. In addition to Israel’s Iron Dome the best known of these systems is the Patriot air defence system. But they are not what the Golden Dome is about.