By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: In 2025, the Pentagon unveiled its latest grand ambition: the so-called “Golden Dome,” a space-based anti-missile shield projected to be operational by 2028. The initial price tag is USD 175 billion. Yet even before a single satellite is launched, independent estimates suggest the real cost will balloon to between USD 500 billion and USD 800 billion.

For a West already groaning under the weight of overstretched finances, declining industrial capacity, and escalating global commitments, the Golden Dome is not a shield. It is a millstone.

A fantasy built on debt

The U.S. national debt already surpasses USD 34 trillion, with interest payments now consuming more federal dollars than many critical social programs. To plough another half-trillion or more into a system that may never work is less a strategy than an act of fiscal self-harm.

This is not a uniquely U.S. folly. Washington has made clear that it expects NATO allies to share the costs, dangling the promise of an “anti-missile umbrella” in exchange for increased defence spending.

But Europe, facing its own crisis of affordability, can scarcely manage existing commitments. Few governments have the political will to sustain even 2 percent of GDP on defence, much less the 5 percent now whispered in NATO corridors.

Adding the Golden Dome into the mix is tantamount to daring electorates already restless over inflation, energy costs, and strained social services to rebel. Publics across the West are increasingly sceptical that enormous sums funnelled into weapons systems translate into genuine security.

Strained military budgets

The irony is glaring as the West is spending more on defence than at any point since the Cold War, yet producing less. U.S. and European stockpiles remain depleted from transfers to Ukraine. Armaments factories, even after years of emergency funding, struggle to meet basic replenishment targets.

The entire procurement system is clogged by bureaucratic overreach, mismanagement, and the profit motives of defence contractors.

The Golden Dome would only magnify these contradictions. Building a constellation of interceptors capable of reliably detecting and neutralising hypersonic missiles, manoeuvrable warheads, or swarms of drones requires technological leaps that remain unproven.

The costs of each delay, redesign, and test failure will accumulate relentlessly. Hundreds of billions will be spent and nothing of operational value may emerge.

New realities: de-dollarisation and parallel systems

The West is not only constrained by debt and inefficiency. It now faces a strategic environment in which its old financial levers are steadily eroding. The dollar’s dominance, once a cornerstone of U.S. power projection, is being chipped away.

More countries are settling trade in national currencies, bypassing the U.S. dollar. Parallel systems outside of SWIFT are taking root, from China’s  Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) to local clearing arrangements in the Global South.

Cryptographic settlement tools, digital currencies, and barter-based arrangements further reduce reliance on Western-dominated financial infrastructure.

These shifts may appear gradual, but they have profound consequences. If Washington and Brussels cannot weaponise financial tools with the same ease as in the past, then financing vast new military projects becomes harder. Investor confidence, long buoyed by dollar supremacy, will not be infinite in the face of mounting debts and dwindling returns.

Technical impossibility masquerading as strategy

Beyond the finances lies the engineering challenge. Creating a global anti-missile shield has defeated every serious attempt since the Reagan-era. The Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s spent billions chasing science fiction. Subsequent land-based and sea-based missile defence systems have produced mixed results at best, with success rates in carefully scripted tests but limited real-world reliability.

Now, the Pentagon proposes a system orders of magnitude more complex, designed to counter next-generation threats. Hypersonic glide vehicles can outmanoeuvre existing interceptors. Decoys, electronic warfare, and simple numerical saturation can overwhelm even the most sophisticated detection systems.

Space-based constellations themselves are vulnerable to anti-satellite weapons, a field in which Russia, China, and even smaller powers are making strides.

In short, the Golden Dome rests on the illusion that technical limitations can be overcome by throwing money at them. History suggests otherwise.

Retreat into fantasy

Western politicians justify these initiatives with sweeping rhetoric about security, deterrence, and protecting the free world. But the reality is less inspiring. For electorates watching health systems crack under strain, education budgets squeezed, and living standards stagnating, the sight of politicians promising “impenetrable domes” rings hollow.

This is not leadership but retreat into fantasy, the comforting illusion that vast spending can conjure safety in a volatile world. The notion recalls medieval kings bankrupting their realms on castles too expensive to garrison, only to watch them crumble under more nimble foes.

What the West requires is sober prioritisation. Investing in capabilities that are achievable, affordable, and directly relevant to present threats. Instead, it is doubling down on vanity projects that benefit contractors more than citizens, and that offer adversaries every incentive to innovate around them.

The coming backlash

The likely trajectory is clear. The U.S. will commit to the Golden Dome. Costs will escalate beyond projections. NATO allies will be pressed to contribute. Domestic political pressures will mount as social programs are squeezed further. And the technical hurdles will remain stubbornly unresolved.

Public trust, already fraying, may snap altogether. In Europe, where inflation has eroded purchasing power and protests are common, another layer of defence spending could ignite a political backlash that weakens NATO cohesion rather than strengthens it.

In the U.S., the project will deepen partisan divides over spending priorities, feeding into an already poisonous election cycle.

Meanwhile, adversaries will watch, adapt, and build their own cheaper counters. Just as guerrilla fighters learned to outlast the trillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, strategic competitors will find ways to bypass or neutralise an overpriced shield in space.

A self-inflicted wound

The Golden Dome is not just a flawed military concept. It is a symbol of the West’s current malaise: overcommitted abroad, divided at home, financially overstretched, and politically adrift. It reveals a system where fantasy substitutes for strategy, and where contractors’ balance sheets outweigh the public interest.

Far from protecting the West, it threatens to weaken it further — a dome not of security but of delusion.

If the U.S. and its allies insist on pursuing this path, they may discover too late that the real dome is not golden at all, but made of glass, fragile and brittle, waiting for the first stone to shatter it.