Last US Russia Nuclear Treaty Nears Expiration, Geopolitics Tighten

The New START treaty, long the backbone of transparency between the United States and Russia, is once again at the center of global strategic anxiety as it approaches its scheduled expiration. The treaty’s impending end comes at a moment of heightened rhetoric between President Trump and President Putin, whose public exchanges about weapons testing and force posture have added urgency to a standoff that now spans three nuclear powers.

For much of the last decade Washington has sought to bring Beijing into multilateral arms control discussions. Senior officials in the Trump administration concluded that China would not meaningfully engage until it felt closer to parity with American forces, a position that many analysts believe will not be reached until about 2030. That assessment shaped a negotiating approach that hinged on creating immediate constraints between the United States and Russia to create leverage with China.

One former official involved in those discussions said the plan included a short term freeze between the two larger nuclear powers. The official explained that a yearlong pause on new warhead production and on deploying additional warheads could have encouraged Chinese involvement. China at that time began low level conversations with Washington, enough to suggest tentative interest in discussing arms control, but not enough to produce formal commitments. The official said, “We believed that when China began engaging in talks about talks that they had resigned themselves to the inevitability of having to negotiate eventually, and we were building the leverage to get them there.”

Those quiet tracks dissipated when the 2020 United States election produced a change of administration. President Biden moved swiftly to extend New START for five years, temporarily locking in verification mechanisms and limits on strategic delivery systems. That decision removed immediate pressure to finalize a broader three way arrangement but also shifted the diplomatic responsibility to a potential future administration.

Now the treaty’s expiration is again on the table, and the political climate is less conducive to patient diplomacy. Public posturing between Washington and Moscow is complicating avenues for backchannel negotiation, and China’s insistence on parity before committing narrows the options for a new framework that would include Beijing. Without common limits and the verification that New START provides, military planners warn of an acceleration in qualitative and quantitative competition, with implications for NATO members, regional rivals in Asia, and the global nonproliferation regime.

Legal and diplomatic experts say the loss of the treaty’s verification elements would hinder predictability and increase the risk of miscalculation. Arms control grapples with the erosion of Cold War era confidence building instruments and with new technologies that complicate traditional definitions of strategic weapons. As capitals weigh whether to extend, replace, or expand agreements, the calculus will be shaped not only by the numbers of warheads but by political will, domestic politics, and the extent to which Beijing can be drawn into a durable bargain.