Every American president for the past half-century had come into the White House and presented a vision to the world on how he intends to reduce the risk of thermonuclear war.
Successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, went about it in the same basic way: signing deals with Russia (and, before that, the Soviet Union) to open lines of communication and slash the number of nuclear weapons in their respective arsenals.
Each new nuclear deal built upon the last one, weaving a safety net of treaties and agreements to ensure nuclear stability and predictability between adversaries so the unthinkable never occurred. The approach was far from perfect, but it worked: The number of warheads fell from roughly 70,400 in 1986 to 12,500 today.
President Trump ripped up that well-established strategy this week when he failed to extend the last major nuclear deal with Russia. That treaty, known as New START, went into effect in 2011 and limited each side to 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on bomber planes, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Once it expired on Thursday, he posted on social media that the world needed a “new, improved and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.”
On Friday, his administration provided more details on what that might mean. Thomas DiNanno, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, said the United States would instead try to initiate talks with the world’s largest nuclear weapons states on a broader multilateral deal.
“The next era of arms control can and should continue with clear focus, but it will require the participation of more than just Russia at the negotiating table,” he said at a U.N. conference on disarmament in Geneva. “We cannot promise that this process will be quick or easy.”
That’s an understatement. The plan is aspirational at best and, at worst, disingenuous.
The Trump team’s proposal for an all-encompassing nuclear deal has a surface appeal. Why should it just be the United States and Russia who are treaty bound to limit their nuclear weapons? Shouldn’t we try to restrict all the world’s arsenals and ensure all states with nuclear arms are accountable to one another?
It’s admirable for the administration to attempt to wrangle other nuclear-armed states into agreements that could limit the size of their arsenals and the types of weapons they develop. But it’s an enormous challenge. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States — are all recognized nuclear weapons states, but they rarely agree on anything and their arsenals vary widely. The four other nations that have nuclear weapons, but aren’t officially recognized as nuclear states — India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — are unlikely to get invites.
Mr. DiNanno did not list the countries the administration plans to involve, but it hasn’t been shy about its intention to bring China and its fast-expanding arsenal to the table. But China, like other nuclear powers, has expressed little interest in limiting its arsenal. Lin Jian, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, said Thursday at a news conference that Beijing “will not participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”
Beijing’s clear reluctance to get involved is one reason this grand strategy approach looks like a bad-faith effort aimed at hobbling strategic arms control altogether. The president has repeatedly said he wants fewer nukes in the world, but he’s abandoned multiple nuclear deals, fired diplomats who handle the nonproliferation portfolio and routinely reminded the world of the sizable arsenal he commands.
Even if there is a diplomatic breakthrough, there’s little chance of reaching a functional new treaty soon. It took negotiators a year to hammer out New START, which itself was a product of decades of diplomatic work. Haggling with one country is hard enough. Adding even one more to the mix would render the task exponentially more complicated and time-consuming.
Alexandra Bell, who was the deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear affairs in the Biden administration, said that while getting China engaged in arms control talks was a worthy goal, Mr. Trump’s all-or-nothing approach was counterproductive. “The idea that we should forsake a half-century worth of effort to create stability between the U.S. and Russian arsenals for a nebulous attempt at a trilateral agreement is foolish bordering on reckless,” she said.
The United States possesses some 3,700 estimated weapons and Russia has 4,300, compared with China’s estimated 600. Beijing appears to want to wait until it can negotiate from a position of parity, and it is working on reaching that goal. The Pentagon believes China is on track to almost double the number of its warheads to more than 1,000 by the decade’s end, a pace unmatched by any other country today. Beijing might not think it has enough weapons for treaty negotiations, but its growing capabilities have already upended the two-country balance that has dominated the atomic age.
During his speech in Geneva, Mr. DiNanno accused China of conducting a secret nuclear test in 2020, which would be a breach of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the international agreement that prohibits all nuclear explosions. (China is a signatory but has not ratified the treaty.) Mr. DiNanno did not provide evidence of his claim, nor did he explain why this alleged violation took almost six years to come to light, but it could be an attempt to coerce Beijing into talks.
“The U.S. laid out its grievances about Russia and China, and that’s a legitimate part of the process,” said Thomas M. Countryman, who was acting secretary of state for arms control and international security in the Obama administration. “The question now is whether the U.S. will make, privately, concrete proposals for negotiation with Russia and a dialogue with China, as the vast majority of Americans favor. Or will it go directly to uploading warheads as some influential people around Trump are pushing?”
The backdrop to all of this talk of arms control is that there’s now political momentum to add nukes to the American arsenal. Part of this fresh interest is a reaction: The United States, along with China and Russia, is developing a range of space-based and hypersonic technologies that couldn’t have been foreseen more than 15 years ago when New START was drawn up. In that sense, Mr. Trump is correct in wanting to “modernize” arms control. But instead of building on something, we now have nothing. A costly, risky and destabilizing arms race may soon emerge in that vacuum.
The reason the United States focused its arms control efforts on Russia for all these years is that the two countries possess nearly 90 percent of all nuclear warheads. Capping the number of weapons was not only mutually beneficial, but good for the globe.
In the blink of an eye, the United States went from having five decades of virtually uninterrupted arms control talks and deals with Russia to having none — with no new deal in sight. The president and his national security team made no meaningful statement about New START or any outward attempt toward salvaging the deal. Mr. Trump even ignored President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s public offer in September to mutually observe the treaty’s limits for one year after the its lapse.
Now the American president faces a new risk: What happens if his new offer goes nowhere? The proposal is just the latest illustration of Mr. Trump’s willingness to break norms in pursuit of what he hopes will be a better deal. But the world watched him fail to achieve nuclear agreements with North Korea and Iran in his first term. His latest proposal is equally audacious — and potentially more dangerous.
