The End of New START Requires A More Coherent Approach from the Trump Administration
Statement from Executive Director, Daryl G. Kimball
February 4, 2026
Today Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed what has been apparent for weeks: that President Donald Trump will not seek to maintain bilateral limits on U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals after the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty because he wants to “do something” about China’s nuclear force.
Today Rubio said: “The President has been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile.”
Secretary Rubio’s statement repeats Trump’s failed 2020 gambit to hold U.S.-Russian risk reduction efforts hostage to a three-way deal involving Russia, China, and the United States. Rubio, and the Trump administration as a whole, have failed to explain how the Trump administration seeks to involve China (and Russia) in future nuclear risk reduction efforts.
Near the end of his first term, in 2020 as New START was about to expire the first time, Trump failed to make headway with Russia on a new nuclear arms control agreement, in part because his national security team convinced him to try to include China in a three-way negotiation.
Chinese leaders rebuffed the proposal and urged the United States and Russia to make progress on further reducing their far larger arsenals. China is clearly concerned about its vulnerability to a first strike and is expanding its strategic nuclear force to ensure it retains the capability to retaliate. Russia responded by insisting that France and the United Kingdom must also be involved.
Undoubtedly, China should engage more fully and productively in the global nuclear disarmament enterprise. Like the U.S., Russia, the UK, and France, it is obligated under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), to engage in good faith talks to end the arms race and on disarmament, but the format for such discussions matters.
If President Trump and Secretary Rubio are serious, they should make a serious proposal for bilateral (not trilateral) talks with Beijing. Despite Trump’s talk about involving China in nuclear negotiations, there is no indication that Trump or his team have taken the time to propose risk reduction or arms control talks with China since returning to office in 2025.
Furthermore, there is no reason why the United States and Russia should not and cannot continue, as President Putin suggested on Sept. 22, to respect the central limits of New START and begin the hard work of negotiating a new framework agreement involving verifiable limits on strategic, intermediate-range, and short-range nuclear weapons, as well as strategic missile defenses.
At the same time, if he is serious about involving China in “denuclearization” talks, he could and should invite President Xi, when they meet later this year, to agree to regular bilateral talks on risk reduction and arms control involving senior Chinese and U.S. officials.
If the Trump administration continues to stiff arm nuclear arms control diplomacy with Russia and decides to increase the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. deployed strategic arsenal, it will only lead Russia to follow suit and encourage China to accelerate its ongoing strategic buildup in an attempt to maintain a strategic nuclear retaliatory strike capability vis-a-vis the United States. Such a scenario could lead to a years-long, dangerous three-way nuclear arms buildup.
The safer and more sensible approach would be for Trump and Putin to pledge to maintain mutual restraints on their strategic nuclear arsenals and resume bilateral talks on further nuclear reductions. They could forestall unconstrained competition and provide leverage to press China (as well as France and the United Kingdom) to freeze their forces at the current number of strategic launchers. Undoubtedly, this would bolster the beleaguered NPT regime ahead of the treaty’s 2026 review conference.
Russia and the United States each have fewer than 800 total strategic launchers; China has an estimated 550; and France and the United Kingdom have a combined total of about 100. A mutual freeze on strategic nuclear launchers at these levels would not adversely affect any one country’s ability to deter nuclear attack. These joint restraint measures would create a more positive environment for talks on further strategic reductions,
With the end of New START, Trump, Putin, and Xi can and must put the world on a safer path by taking commonsense actions to build down the nuclear danger.