Lawrence Freedman
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’.
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