Rightwing Washington Post Editorial Board Endorses Trump’s Golden Dome

November 6, 2025
Melvin Goodman
Over the past several months, the editorial board of the Washington Post  has moved steadily to the right, endorsing greater defense budgets, the use of military force, and even making a case for the U.S. military to return to its largest air base in Afghanistan.  In a recent editorial, “How to live in our nuclear ‘House of Dynamite’,” the Post has reversed a long-standing position in order to endorse the building of the Golden Dome national missile defense. The system could take more than a decade to build and require more than $1 trillion in funding.

Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of current and future missile threats to the U.S. in 2025 – Public Domain

The United States has already spent nearly $400 billion dollars for defensive systems over the past 50 years without any reason to believe a Star Wars system can be successful.  The tests themselves have been conducted under careful conditions to ensure success and to avoid realistic scenarios that would not be assured of success.
The current defense budget already has carved out a modest down payment of $25 billion for a system that is not workable.  The only certainty is that billions of dollars will be pumped into the pockets of defense industry.  More gold for the oligarchs.
Several decades of testing on theatre and national missile defense systems show that it is not easy to hit one missile with another, and there is no system thus far that can distinguish between an actual ballistic missile and a decoy.  One of the reasons why the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to an Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972 was their recognition that any national defense system would be ineffective, and would provoke another round of escalation in offensive strategic delivery systems.  The ABM Treaty was considered a landmark achievement in arms control and disarmament, expected to permit greater reductions in offensive systems.  The abrogation of the treaty opened the door to justifying new offensive systems.
In a world without national missile defense systems, the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia reduced their nuclear stockpiles by more than 80 percent, and nuclear testing (except for North Korea) had ceased.  However, Donald Trump has now threatened to resume testing for the first time since 1992.  The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty bans nuclear testing, but the United States, Russia, and China—signers of the CTBT—have never ratified the document.  The Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1969 has also been successful in limiting the number of nuclear weapons states, but resumed testing and a national missile defense in the United States would lead to more threatening scenarios.
One of the best reasons for negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine would be the possibility of the United States returning to the negotiating table with Russia regarding arms control and disarmament.  The last extant arms control treaty between Russia and the United States—the New SALT Treaty—will expire in February 2026, and Russian President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have indicated that Moscow is prepared to extend the life of the treaty and discuss other arms control issues.  Such a step would help to reduce the level of tension and suspicion that exists between the two largest nuclear powers, and could even induce China—the third largest—to enter an arms control dialogue.  Meanwhile, China is on target to have an inventory of 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2020.
The Washington Post editorial glibly asserts that mutual assured destruction and the threat of overwhelming retaliation have prevented a nuclear attack.  Nevertheless, it concludes that, as “missile defenses can fail, so too can deterrence.” It therefore concludes that a Golden Dome is needed.   We certainly don’t need a system that doesn’t work, and that would likely lead to a greater buildup of offensive weapons and a costly arms race.
The United States and the global community would be better served by talks to reduce offensive weaponry, prevent any notion of national missile defense, prevent the weaponization of space, and take on the challenge of AI that could potentially lead to the accidental use of nuclear weapons.  Meanwhile, the United States is prepared to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that has never been successfully tested in a way that combines interceptors, radars, and controlling computer networks.  Any national defense system will only hinder the cooperation needed to reduce the dangers of accidental launches and compromise the cooperation needed for early warning systems.