The Trump administration’s recent unveiling of the Golden Dome, a sweeping missile defense architecture, has invoked swift condemnation from China.

In response to the announcement, Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin issued a joint rebuke—timed, pointedly, on the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end. As tanks and soldiers rolled through Red Square, the mood felt less like commemoration and more like a throwback to Cold War brinkmanship. The irony was hard to miss.

That irony only deepened with the content of the statement. In it, China voiced concerns about the system’s space-based capabilities, accusing the U.S. of turning “outer space into a new arena for armed confrontation” and “deeply destabilizing” the global order. Beijing also claimed the proposal violates long-established international norms.

But these accusations are not only unfounded, they’re deeply hypocritical. The Golden Dome is a defensive system, developed in response to the rapid expansion of military space programs by China and other adversarial powers. Its purpose is to serve as a shield, designed to intercept a range of inbound threats, including ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles.

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The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), a product of the original Space Race, remains the cornerstone of international space law. It lays out broad principles governing military activity in space and explicitly prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction. Both the U.S. and China are signatories.

Under the framework of that treaty, the Golden Dome is entirely permissible. It is neither a nuclear weapon nor an offensive system. Rather, the program would expand the existing constellation of satellites used for early detection and interception—tools of defense, not aggression.

Paradoxically, it’s not U.S. ambition that makes the Golden Dome necessary, it’s China’s. Between 2018 and 2024, China tripled its number of intelligence satellites in orbit. In 2021, the Chinese military began exploring the revival of the “fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS),” a Cold War-era space technology designed to evade early warning radars.

If fully developed, FOBS will give the U.S. endlessly sleepless nights. They are orbital platforms capable of dropping weapons—including, nuclear weapons, which China has contemplated—from space onto terrestrial targets with little to no tactical warning. FOBS can launch attacks from any direction, obscure their true target, and, alarmingly, operate without range limitations.

The fact that China is even considering fielding such capabilities is deeply troubling. According to U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessments, if China decided to pursue such means, they could develop 60 operational FOBS by 2035.

The Chinese Aerospace Studies Institute, a think tank under the U.S. Air Force, translated several Chinese military doctrinal documents, revealing that FOBS “could increase PLA power projection capabilities against bases and territories globally, including targets in the 50 states.”

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China’s development and apparent intent to deploy advanced offensive missile capabilities suggest ambitions beyond mere deterrence. A 2024 Department of Defense report found that Chinese leaders have shown a “growing willingness to use military coercion to achieve foreign policy aims.” If Chinese offensive systems severely outpace U.S. defensive capabilities, the risk isn’t just theoretical, we could see missile-based threats used to coerce or constrain U.S. decision-making in future crises.

Against this backdrop, China’s demand that the U.S. limit its defensive systems is not just contradictory—it’s absurd. The current American missile defense network, built around interceptors like the Patriot-3, THAAD-ER, Standard Missile-6, and the emerging Glide Phase Interceptor, already requires significant upgrades to keep pace with China’s rapidly advancing hypersonic capabilities. That need becomes even more urgent considering China’s hypersonic missiles are now capable of reaching global targets within 30 minutes, a sobering reality for U.S. defense planners.

Interestingly, it appears that China does not hold all countries to the same, unreasonable standard. Last year, after intelligence indicated Russia might be developing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon, the U.S. put forth a UN draft resolution explicitly reaffirming OST principles and restricting nuclear weapon deployment in outer space.

To be clear: anti-satellite weapons are offensive by design. Russia’s reported push to nuclearize them would be a blatant violation of the OST. Yet when the U.S. introduced the UN resolution to reaffirm those very principles, China didn’t stand up. Days later, Beijing even signaled deeper cooperation with Moscow, offering to collaborate on an automated nuclear power plant on the Moon.

China isn’t concerned about the militarization of space; it’s concerned that the U.S. might finally build something that works. In a world made more perilous by authoritarian regimes, led by Beijing, the Golden Dome represents the kind of comprehensive defensive shield America urgently needs. That’s not destabilizing—that’s deterrence.