You are offering a pretty narrow worldview here, and a blatant simplification of geopolitics. Ignoring the elephant USA in the room here who’s militarization dwarfs any competition, then escalation (or even answers in kind) is not the only option on the table. There is also international agreements.
International agreements has proven much more effective as a grand strategy then escalation. The nuclear non-proliferation is a good example, but so is the Iran nuclear deal (which even gives us an AB testing scenario since Iran’s nuclear armament became much closer to reality after the USA withdrew).
Now if USA was really concerned about militarization of space, then they would have pushed for international agreements long ago.
Exactly. We haven’t seen weapons in space, and I think this treaty is partially to thank for that. International agreements is usually a pretty solid strategy for de-escalation.
If the USA would be concerned about foreign powers using satellites to spy about their military activity, or otherwise plot and command an invading armies and weapon systems, they wouldn’t try to one-up these foreign powers with their own spying and communications infrastructure, they would push for strict international regulation for what you can do with data collected from space, as well as for what kind of information and commands you can upload to which kind of vehicles on or near the ground.
If you know the history China/Russia are doing smaller-scale R&D type development mainly to respond to to US ditching arms control treaties and building offensive tech first (usually happening when Republicans in power).
This is non-sense, unless you are in the know about the Russia’s and China’s space programs. Their space technologies are generally behind the US (although China is working hard to catch up), and are less transparent, so we’ve heard more about initiatives such as SDA. That doesn’t mean their military space R&D are purely in response to US’s programs. Russia intended to use space for reconnaissance very early on after Sputnik [0]. They didn’t wait for the US to make a move first.
International agreements has proven much more effective as a grand strategy then escalation. The nuclear non-proliferation is a good example, but so is the Iran nuclear deal (which even gives us an AB testing scenario since Iran’s nuclear armament became much closer to reality after the USA withdrew).
Now if USA was really concerned about militarization of space, then they would have pushed for international agreements long ago.