Trump on New START: ‘If It Expires, It Expires’

January/February 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump has asserted a noncommittal attitude toward the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which expires Feb. 5.

“If it expires, it expires. We’ll just do a better agreement,” he said in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times published Jan 8. “You probably want to get a couple of other players involved also.”

The new comments suggest Trump would allow the last U.S.-Russia strategic arms control treaty to lapse without accepting a formal offer from Russian President Vladimir Putin to continue to respect the central limits of the agreement for one year if the United States also agreed to do so. When asked by a reporter Oct. 5 what he thought of Putin’s proposal, Trump said it “sounds like a good idea to me,” but the White House has not formally responded to the Kremlin offer.

Trump’s Jan. 8 remarks to the Times about the expiration of New START stand in contrast with comments he made in July when he said, “We are starting to work on that.… That is a big problem for the world, when you take off nuclear restrictions.”

Since taking office last January, his administration has neither outlined a strategy for negotiating a new nuclear arms control agreement with Russia nor outlined how it would bring China into nuclear risk reduction or arms control talks.—DARYL G. KIMBALL