The ISS was Built as a Political Space Station. With Russia challenging the U.S. all over the World, the ideal behind the ISS is no longer working. On the one hand they help us, on the other hand they threaten us. This makes no sense!

The ISS was never supposed to end like this

Reagan promised that the station would bring "quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines." It was also supposed to foster collaboration with Europe, Canada, and Japan while preserving America's preeminence in space. Then came the harsh realities of translating Reagan's vision into hardware.

From article, (The origins of the ISS date back to 1984, when President Reagan announced plans to build Space Station Freedom in a Kennedy-esque state of the union speech.

Reagan promised that the station would bring “quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines.” It was also supposed to foster collaboration with Europe, Canada, and Japan while preserving America’s preeminence in space.
Then came the harsh realities of translating Reagan’s vision into hardware. Freedom’s cost was initially estimated at $8 billion. That number quickly doubled, leading to a series of painful design compromises that still failed to stop the budget bloat.

The station might not have been built at all were it not for the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 1993 the U.S. and Russia signed an agreement to work together on a new International Space Station. The merger gained broad U.S. support as a way to keep Russian scientists gainfully employed (rather than, say, building bombs for the Taliban) while rescuing both nations from space station projects that had become embarrassingly unaffordable.

Yet even with the Russian assist, the “$8 billion” space station has wound up costing the U.S. roughly $90 billion in construction and transportation over the 19 years it’s been operating. On top of that, we pay $3 billion to $4 billion a year to operate the station.

Those expenditures have put NASA in a bind: The ISS was designed to be a gateway to new deep-space missions, but the agency cannot afford such missions as long as it continues to fund the ISS. As a result, for nearly two decades, American astronauts and their international partners have had nowhere to go except a canned outpost circling just 240 miles above the ground.

That left the station with a lot of critics in the scientific community. “One unexpected side benefit of the ISS was in producing make-work projects for private industry like SpaceX to develop their rockets, and that would be useful down the road,” says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss. “But they probably don’t need that now, so no tears here if the project is terminated.”

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Me, "The ISS was Built as a Political Space Station. With Russia challenging the U.S. all over the World, the ideal behind the ISS is no longer working. The ISS was supposed to keep Russians Engineers from outsourcing their skills to Rogue Countries. Now that that goal has been achieved, Russia is using these same engineers to create all kinds of new weapons to use on the battlefield and in Space. We kind of kicked the bucket away from Rogue Nations and let Russian Engineers stay in their own country, and, now, they are working against us."