John Bolton on Technology | |
"The money aspect, of course, is going to be critical," he says. "I'm going to find out if there's money out there to get behind a foreign-policy-focused effort that has the threat of international terrorism at the top of its lists, as well as the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, the ongoing collapse of the Middle East, and the threats from Russia and China."
But instead of advancing American primacy in this realm, the Obama administration has wrongly decided not only to follow a European Union draft "code of conduct" regulating outer space, but also to circumvent the Senate's central constitutional role in making treaties.
Europe aspires to prevent an "arms race" in the heavens, but in reality, its code would substantially impede advances in space technology because such innovations could also be labeled as military. While security activities receive an exception, it appears confined to self-defense, a term often defined narrowly to include only cross-border attacks. We should not take the unnecessary risk that our rivals will exploit such ambiguity to prevent legitimate American actions.