Despite serious doubts about the technical feasibility, affordability and completion date of the “Golden Dome” anti-missile defense system that US President Donald Trump touted on May 20, in principle a missile defense system that would protect the United States is uncontroversial to Americans.
The view from China, however, is different. Trump’s announcement of a plan to begin funding the ambitious project immediately ratcheted up the tension in Sino-US relations. The Golden Dome elicits yet another demonstration of how the strategic outlooks of the US and the PRC are dramatically and perhaps irreconcilably different.
Beijing strongly opposes the Golden Dome. The official PRC response to Trump’s announcement, given by Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning on May 21, calls on Washington to “give up developing and deploying [a] global anti-missile system.” Mao also argued that the Golden Dome is more evidence that the US is a selfish, disruptive and law-breaking country – all opposites of how China portrays itself.
This supports the larger point Beijing tries to make, which is that America is not worthy of international leadership. Specifically, Mao said the Golden Dome would violate the Outer Space Treaty by “turning space into a war zone,” that it would “hurt global strategic balance and stability” and that it “puts the US’s absolute security above all else.”
Mao’s reference to a US drive for “absolute security” put a global spin on China’s essential fear: As China is trying to reduce a large historical gap in nuclear capability with the US, Washington is trying to render China’s nuclear arsenal useless. If the Golden Dome or some other US anti-missile system proved credible, America would have escalation dominance over China at the nuclear level, an advantage that would loom over even a conventional US-China military conflict.
To be clear, it’s not absolute security per se that China objects to but, rather, American absolute security. If China ever ascends to a position of global dominance comparable to that of the postwar US, Beijing will, of course, similarly aspire to absolute security for China. The same could be said of any other country. States can never have enough security.
In the case of the US, the search for nuclear security is amplified by the current US president being especially worried about America’s vulnerability to a nuclear attack. Trump often speaks about the horror of nuclear weapons. “It would be great if everybody would get rid of their nuclear weapons,” he said in March, “because the power of nuclear weapons is crazy.”
During his first term, Trump seemed very concerned about North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the US homeland – but relatively unconcerned about shorter-range North Korean ballistic missiles, even though these could threaten US allies South Korea and Japan. His declaration, after meeting with Kim Jong-un in 2018, that “There is no longer a Nuclear threat from North Korea” seemed to confirm that Trump’s objective was getting the US (and not necessarily US allies) de-targeted by North Korea.
On top of Trump’s personal views, Americans express alarm about an “aggressive” and “destabilizing” expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal and posture. China had 235 nuclear weapons in 2003, about the same number as the UK, but is expected to have 1,000 by 2030.
The construction of a field of over 100 new long-range missile silos in China’s western desert in 2021 shocked observers. The PRC has begun a policy of keeping nuclear warheads attached to their delivery vehicles on deployed platforms during peacetime. Chinese forces are also shifting to a “launch on warning” stance rather than expecting to launch a retaliatory nuclear attack only after absorbing an enemy’s first strike.
Mao’s complaint about the Golden Dome violating the Outer Space Treaty was disingenuous given that China is already weaponizing space at a brisk pace. China carried out 68 launches of rockets carrying payloads into orbit during 2024, the most by any country other than the US.
In April, General Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations of the US Space Force, said China is dedicating more resources to space war preparations than is the US. China is “heavily investing” in weapons to destroy or disable an adversary’s satellites, with “hundreds of satellites now dedicated to tracking US assets in orbit,” Saltzman said.
Space Force Vice Chief of Operations General Michael Guetlein added that China is practicing satellite “dogfighting,” using satellites to knock out other satellites. This is consistent with discussions by PLA academics who consider the destruction or damaging of an adversary’s reconnaissance and communications satellites an essential part of modern warfare.
The Chinese government has downplayed the expansion, repeating that China’s nukes are only for self-defense and that China, unlike the US, has a no-first-use policy. Even with a larger nuclear weapons capability, China will be a distant third to the US and Russia, each of which possesses over 5,000 warheads.
Although new to China, “launch on warning” and deploying ships and aircraft during peacetime armed with ready-to-use nuclear weapons have long been standard practices in the US armed forces. Therefore, Beijing is not sympathetic to the US view that China’s nukes threaten America and justify the Golden Dome.
In the management of their bilateral nuclear tensions, there are three possible paths the two governments could take. None is encouraging.
First, they could acquiesce to a continued nuclear arms race, with all of its risks, costs and potential futility. PRC technicians are already working on ways to defeat a US anti-missile defense system: mixing in decoys among real warheads, adding moveable fins to allow projectiles to maneuver, deploying hypersonic glide vehicles that can attack from low altitudes and unguarded directions, developing methods to fire missiles from space and thus avoid the vulnerable boost phase, and enhancing anti-satellite capabilities.
Second, the US and China could reach a grand bargain to remove the main sources of tension in their relationship and thereby assuage both sides’ fear of nuclear attack. Under the present circumstances, the only way this could happen would be a US accommodation of Chinese strategic dominance over eastern Asia. Thus far Washington has made no movement in this direction.
Third, the US and the PRC could reach an arms control agreement. Indeed, some observers wonder if the Golden Dome is a bluff to prod China into negotiations, akin to the extraordinarily high US tariffs announced in April. The idea of bilateral arms control talks, however, is not new and has proved problematic.
The US government has repeatedly invited Beijing to engage in arms control talks. The consistent Chinese response is that such talks are not possible unless the US reduces its much larger nuclear arsenal to a level similar to China’s. Up to now Washington has not expressed a willingness either to cut deeply or to place serious restrictions on its own forces. George Perkovich argues that US nuclear policy-makers tend to “see arms control as a fetish of powerless NGOs and diplomats.”
A problem in bilateral discussions of strategic stability is that the Americans typically want to talk specifically about how to avoid unwanted escalation, while the Chinese want to talk more broadly about creating strategic trust, which inevitably leads to demands that Washington accept PRC “core interests” such as claims to ownership over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Furthermore, the Chinese government insists that, prior to talks about nuclear crisis management and before China will divulge details of its nuclear capabilities, Washington must publicly acknowledge that the US and China are mutually vulnerable. The Americans have refused to do this, either out of a conviction that the US should maintain nuclear dominance over China or out of fear of appearing to appease Beijing.
It is not unreasonable for a national leader to aspire to rescue his people from vulnerability to nuclear annihilation. Within the present geopolitical context, however, the Golden Dome is less likely to deliver safety to the US than to intensify the security competition with America’s cold adversary.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center.
