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By Daniel R. DePetris
Fellow, Defense Priorities
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This week, history was made. For the first time in nearly a half-century, the United States and Russia, the world’s two biggest nuclear weapons powers, don't have any restraints on their arsenals.
The New START Treaty, the 2010 accord that restricted the U.S. and Russia's number of deployed nuclear-capable missiles and launchers, expired on Thursday. As expected, proponents of that agreement spent the last several days urging the powers that be in both capitals to extend its provisions by at least another year. Former president Barack Obama, who negotiated and signed the deal, has warned that New START’s demise "would pointlessly wipe out decades of diplomacy, and could spark another arms race that makes the world less safe.” Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev claimed that the club of nuclear-armed states will likely grow with the treaty’s demise.
President Donald Trump, however, hasn’t demonstrated much concern over this development—a somewhat odd response given that he’s expounded about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in the past. “If it expires, it expires,” Trump told the New York Times in early January when asked about New START. “We’ll do a better agreement.” Of course, this is what he said when he pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal during his first term. Eight years later, a new, better nuclear agreement with Tehran remains elusive (although U.S. and Iranian officials are expected to meet in Oman on Friday).
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On the whole, New START has been dead on the vine for a while. Although the U.S. and Russia kept to the numerical limits spelled out in the treaty, the transparency, verification and reporting protocols that were designed to ensure both sides had a complete understanding of one another’s nuclear stockpiles became inoperable after Putin withdrew from them in February 2023. Inspection visits between Washington and Moscow never recuperated after the COVID pandemic, and information exchanges have stalled.
Trump wasn’t particularly fond of New START to begin with. He viewed the treaty as a relic of the Obama years. The first Trump administration tried to leverage the treaty’s expiration date, hoping the pressure of the calendar would convince Moscow to push China into an arms control process. But that effort failed—and predictably so. At the time, China's nuclear weapons stockpile was far smaller than the U.S. and Russia’s, so the prospect of capping its arsenal would in effect lock Beijing into an inferior position. Trump left office in January 2021 without a deal, and his successor, Joe Biden, quickly extended New START for another five years.
What should the Trump administration do now that the treaty is officially dead? Trump has made his intentions clear: he wants a bigger, better deal that involves more states (like China), includes a greater number of nuclear warheads and captures a bigger range of strategic weapons platforms. He reiterated this grand vision on the day of New START’s dissolution. But the chances of this happening are slim. China’s position on arms control talks is the same now as it was when the Trump administration attempted to get Beijing involved nearly a decade ago—under no circumstances will it enter a trilateral negotiation when the other two parties, Russia and the U.S., have a superior numerical advantage. Trump’s current strategy, therefore, is akin to bashing his head against the wall and hoping that China eventually gets tired of the noise.
Another option would be to focus exclusively on Russia’s strategic systems. One of the big knocks on New START was that it didn’t encompass the full range of Russia’s strategic arsenal. Complaints aside, there was some logic in that course of action; Moscow was highly unlikely to agree to a more comprehensive arms control regime if it didn’t include limitations on U.S. missile defenses. Yet this was not a concession the Obama administration was willing to offer at the time, in part because arms control skeptics in the U.S. Senate would have blocked the treaty.
Incorporating more of Russia’s strategic weapons into any follow-on treaty also hasn’t gotten any easier with time. Putin continues to devote a significant portion of Russia’s defense budget to the modernization of Russia's nuclear weapons arsenal. This includes the development and production of new systems, like the Poseidon nuclear submersible and Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile, that U.S. defense officials are increasingly worried about. But again, it’s hard to envision Putin squandering all this investment when his conventional forces remain tied up in Ukraine and the probability of Trump ditching his Golden Dome pet project is as likely as him giving up his love of Coca-Cola.
The best, and it seems only, alternative for Trump as this stage is to plug the gap with a moratorium. In other words, Trump should approach Putin with an offer to keep to New START’s protocols operable for as long as the Russians do the same. This can be done quickly, without having to reenter highly technical negotiations. It would also mirror Putin’s own proposal last October, one the White House itself called “pretty good.”
Such an extension wouldn’t be the most ideal option on the table. But “pretty good” is still preferable to “very bad."
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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