Mark Carney is trapped under Donald Trump's Golden Dome
Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, won over a gullible electorate in April by promising to defend Canada's independence from Donald Trump. He pledged to increase defence spending and boost domestic manufacturing, and bluntly told the US president that Canada was 'not for sale' at a meeting in the Oval Office.
Unfortunately for Carney, the rhetoric was easier than the reality. Consider the case of the Golden Dome.
Trump signed a large number of executive orders when he returned to the White House in January, including the announcement of an 'Iron Dome for America'. Inspired by Ronald Reagan's unrealised plan to build a defence system against nuclear weapons, it would help protect the US from the 'threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks'.
Fittingly, given Trump's penchant for gold, the president's Iron Dome was effectively renamed the Golden Dome in May (perhaps also to distinguish it from Israel's Iron Dome air defence system). The estimated cost has been put at $175 billion (£147 billion), with a down-payment of $25 billion (£18.2 billion) included in a Republican reconciliation spending bill. The project will be headed up by General Michael Guetlein, with the US Space Force, and will apparently take three years to construct.
Some are sceptical that the Golden Dome can be built on time and on budget. The congressional budget office has suggested the real costs for constructing constellations of space-based interceptors could be in the range of $161 billion (£117 billion) to $542 billion (£395 billion) over 20 years. Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican Senator, predicted the final price tag could reach 'trillions of dollars'.
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