A rchive Date
[ 16-06-2025 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/golden-dome-means-trump-can-tell-carney-to-pay-up-or-shut-up
Golden Dome means Trump can tell Carney to pay up or shut up
Trump’s latest blathering is just a plain statement of likely fact: only American territory will enjoy the protection of Star Wars II by right
By Colby Cosh Published May 29, 2025 Last updated May 29, 2025
It’s hard to feel anything but pity for Pete Hoekstra, the United States ambassador to Canada. I mean, yes, it’s hard to feel anything else about any diplomatic representative of the new Napoleon-model United States. You go into a job like that expecting, or just hoping, to be able to carry out the careful instructions of a professional foreign service. To speak and act on behalf of an enduring vision of your country, and in pursuit of an established grand strategy.
Then the people put a gorilla in the White House, re-electing a TV star who loves to blab and improvise and threaten, and you’re left with nothing but a series of damage-control efforts, most of them completely futile. It’s gotta be hell, or hell with slightly nicer parties.
It just strikes me that Hoekstra’s predicament must be particularly harsh, since he’s not somebody who was flung into some distant warm country as a political favour. He’s from a part of Michigan that has relations with Canada for which the word “intimate” doesn’t suffice, the curling-and-hockey part of the mitten. He understands and likes Canada: in last week’s interview with CBC News, he showed that he had a pretty decent grasp of why the King visited us this week and what a throne speech is all about.
Unfortunately, he also made the mistake of telling Canadians to “move on” from his president’s endless “51st state” catcalls and menaces, insisting that all the contrived contention over Canadian sovereignty was “over” and that U.S. President Donald Trump “is not talking about it.” Yesterday, as if on cue, Trump posted to social media that, “I told Canada, which very much wants to be part of our fabulous Golden Dome System, that it will cost $61 Billion Dollars if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation, but will cost ZERO DOLLARS if they become our cherished 51st State. They are considering the offer!”
The “Golden Dome” system is an ill-defined missile-defence project that President Trump made a show of signing off on last week. Trump told reporters the “Dome,” which is basically a 2.0 version of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), would be ready in three years and would cost $175 billion. I’m no defence expert, but I think I can promise that deadline won’t be hit. From a game-theory standpoint, the important part of the announcement was that Trump is ready to spend cartoon sums on orbital missile defence — and the Republicans in Congress are prepared to begin allocating billions for it, without too much squawking from the taxpayer.
During the Cold War, Reagan’s SDI (reflexively lampooned as “Star Wars” by the mass media) ran up against a credible strategic objection. Yes, critics acknowledged, it might be possible to use space-borne sensors and weapons to knock out intercontinental ballistic missiles of the kind owned in large numbers by the Soviet Union. But if knocking out one warhead was a lot more costly to you than building one was to your adversary, you would just intensify the existing arms race, mostly at your own expense. Russia would simply build ever-large amounts of new weapons to get through your more expensive defence screen.
“Simply,” they said. At the time, any clown with a calculator could and would tell you that the SDI math couldn’t work, because having NASA launch and maintain satellites was much too expensive. Nevertheless, Reagan’s embrace of SDI, by itself, helped contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It turned out that the U.S. might have to outspend the U.S.S.R. enormously in a re-intensified arms race, but the U.S. could quite easily do this after 60-plus years of Russian communism. And now that Elon Musk has shown up on the stage of history, putting small inter-operating satellites in orbit is a matter of millions of dollars, not billions.
This probably doesn’t have much to do with Trump. The number of nuclear-armed states is not ever likely to dwindle, and the U.S. no longer faces one primary strategic adversary covered like a hedgehog with ICBM silos. That means it can’t strengthen continental security very much by making bilateral bargains with Russia. Several hostile countries are fooling with sophisticated new missile tech, and since they’re all otherwise dirt-poor, they may be tempted to engage in tactical or demonstrative anti-American nuclear strikes that wouldn’t necessarily attract the assured genocidal response that was a security premise of the Cold War. At least that’s the Heritage Foundation’s theory, which is the one Trump’s probably listening to if he’s listening to anybody at all.
This is part of what our politicians are really talking about when they natter about a “complicated” and “more multi-polar” world. Their/our real anxiety relates to the possibility that the United States will acquire a terrifying all-new level of military supremacy — total, truly instantaneous power to identify and crush any threat to the U.S. that manifests anywhere on the earth’s surface. And do we go along with this, as our old defence minister Bill Blair suggested we might before he was supplanted?
Back when the issue was ICBMs, Canadian participation in continental defence was an important sine qua non, and once we started enforcing a territorial taboo on nuclear weapons, co-operation was largely taken for granted even when Canada-U.S. economic and political relationships foundered. We were guardians of the Pole, close enough to Russia to smell the vodka and zakuski. We were geographically essential. If the U.S. pursues the Golden Dome dream — a grid of fast-acting and fast-moving space drones in low orbit everywhere — they’ll be able to take or leave us as a missile-defence partner.
This is, from one point of view, obviously good news for Canada. It means that our annexation by the U.S. isn’t a long-term strategic imperative for the U.S.! It also means that we can’t expect continental protection under the new Star Wars II umbrella as a matter of course. Thus, in a way, Trump’s latest blathering is just a plain statement of likely fact: only American territory will enjoy the protection of Star Wars II by right.
In other words: join up, pay up or shut up. Nuclear disarmament advocates, of course, have always made the argument that a country that refuses nuclear weapons has nothing to ever fear from anybody else’s. We may, soon enough, be making a high-stakes long-term test of that proposition. Whether we want to or not.
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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