Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boyes Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is the Golden Dome Missile Defense System.

With me to discuss President Donald Trump's proposal to build a multi-layered defense system to protect the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles is Todd Harrison.

Todd is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

He has written prolifically over the years on defense budgeting, the defense industrial base, and space policy.

His assessments of the Golden Dome proposal include how much would a space-based missile

interceptor system cost and does it make sense?

And is Trump's Golden Dome a brilliant idea

or a gilded boondoggle, both of which can be found on the AEI website? Todd, thank you for coming

on the president's inbox. Thanks for having me. Todd, let's begin with what precisely it is that

President Trump has proposed to build.

My understanding, it's essentially a space-based defensive system, but give me a sense of what is trying to protect against and how it would do so.

Sure. Well, we don't know a lot of the details yet. Most of what we know is what was in the executive order that came out back in January. And what that says is they want to build a robust homeland air and missile defense system that could defeat attacks from peer, near peer, and rogue adversaries.

Can you translate that into English? What do we mean we say peer near peer, and rogue adversaries. Can you translate that into English?

What do we mean we say peer-near-peer adversaries?

Rogue adversaries we typically think of as North Korea and Iran,

but peer or near-peer, that is a clear reference to Russia and China.

So he wants a missile defense system capable of protecting

against very large scale tax that Russia and China could potentially launch against the United

States. So that is probably the biggest difference in this system compared to, you know,

what President George W. Bush, you know, and administration

since then have been working towards. But an important part of it that they outline in the

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