By L Todd Wood | June 19, 2020
The Trump administration has revitalized American exploitation of space for the interests of the United States, taking back territory long ago ceded by former administrations to Russia and more importantly — China.
The Pentagon unveiled its new agenda for space this week and caused quite a stir in adversarial foreign capitals.
“China and Russia present the greatest strategic threat due to their development, testing and deployment of counterspace capabilities,” it said, formerly painting Beijing and Moscow as adversaries in the ‘final frontier’.
The Kremlin seems to be feeling the heat of a coming arms race they know they cannot win.
Russia’s space corporation, Roscosmos, is advocating the adoption of a resolution to prevent an arms race in space as a response to the defense space strategy developed by the Pentagon, said Sergei Savelyev, Roscosmos Deputy Director General, reported Russian state news agency TASS.
“”We act consistently on all possible venues including, in particular, the Conference on Disarmament, in order to adopt a resolution to prevent an arms race in space,” Savelyev was quoted in the statement by Roscosmos on Thursday.
According to the corporate executive, Moscow warily reacts to claims that Russia is going to place weapons directed against the US in space. Savelyev stressed that the space agency is ready to boost cooperation between Moscow and Washington in various directions in the field of space exploration. “The militarization of outer space with the subsequent emergence of the dominant roles of our US partners can disrupt the already fragile structure of relations between the two countries in this area,” he explained.
The Russian Foreign Ministry was even more direct, calling out the new space policy of the United States ‘aggressive’.
“The document confirms the aggressive course by Washington in the space sphere,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement, reported The Moscow Times.
“Space is seen by the U.S. side as an arena for warfare,” it said, calling this a “destructive” approach which “provokes an arms race in space.”
“Russia holds the diametrically opposing position, giving priority to using and studying space only for peaceful goals,” it said.
The document being released on the heels of the successful launch of the Crew Dragon by SpaceX, which returned American astronauts to space via an American launch vehicle, albeit civilian, has shaken the Russian space establishment, and war planners in the Ministry of Defense.
Russians remember well the fall of the Soviet Union, mainly caused by an arms race with the American military industrial complex which the USSR could never hope to win. They also know history doesn’t always repeat itself but sometimes rhymes.
During the Kremlin’s saber rattling over the last several years, one could be forgiven for wondering if Moscow was only awakening again the American sleeping giant.
Perhaps this is another reason why China is fomenting the ‘race wars’ in the U.S. along with Beijing’s globalist elite allies. They know an America focused on space can’t be beaten.
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This piece originally appeared on Tsarizm.com [3] and is used by permission.