New START should not be extended.
New START should not be extended.
V ladimir Putin has suggested several times in recent months that the 2010 New START nuclear arms treaty due to expire in February 2026 should be extended. President Trump has expressed interest in making an arms control deal and has even considered the possibility that Xi Jinping’s PRC might be added to the agreement. The treaty contained a clause allowing a one-time, five-year extension that, in 2021, the Biden administration agreed to without much consideration. Now Putin appears to have something similar in mind, offering to keep his strategic forces within the treaty’s limits for another year (although evidently without abiding by the treaty’s verification and inspection limits) if the U.S. would do the same. According to White House statements, Trump is considering accepting the offer. Such an agreement would be very much in Russia’s interest, but it is harmful to America’s national security interests.
New START, conceived and signed 15 years ago, was designed for a world very different from today’s. In 2010, the U.S. and Russia were not adversaries. Neither side had begun modernizing its strategic nuclear forces and Putin had not yet occupied Crimea, let alone unleashed a bloody war of aggression against Ukraine. The situation is totally different now. Russia’s nuclear forces, thanks to massive investments by Putin, are now 95 percent upgraded and improved, according to the Russian president; conversely, the U.S. nuclear modernization program, after 15 years of careful planning, has yet to deploy a new strategic nuclear platform. Since 2010, Russia has embarked on a murderous overt campaign of aggression against Ukraine, a not-so-hidden policy of intimidating the European members of NATO, and a serious covert war attacking NATO infrastructure. In addition, China, whose leader, Xi Jinping, is now Putin’s ally (including in the war in Ukraine), has emerged as a major national security threat in the Indo-Pacific, thereby increasing our deterrent requirements such that we must be prepared to deter Moscow and Beijing simultaneously — a task our 2010-oriented force cannot accomplish.
Some believe Putin is truly interested in arms control, but that would be a dramatic misreading of the facts. With this new offer, Putin has seemingly changed his tune on New START’s extension. But in reality, when the Biden administration’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, offered to undertake discussions with Russia about strategic nuclear arms control in June 2023, Putin responded with crude sexualized vulgarity. Hardly an indication of interest in pursuing arms control.
So what has changed and why is Putin interested in a New START extension? He almost certainly rates it more likely that nuclear modernization will be fully funded under Trump than it was during the Biden administration. The Trump administration’s announcement that it will build out U.S. missile defenses with a “Golden Dome” undoubtedly also contributed to Putin’s newfound interest in arms control. Finally, the Russian leader, who after 25 years in power is intimately familiar with these issues, almost certainly thinks that he can derive a significant advantage for Russia in any negotiation with a president who is famously indifferent to details and nuances of major national security issues.
As for New START itself, it provides no constraints on Russian strategic forces. Putin would continue to pursue several new strategic systems designed to avoid constraint by New START. His offer to continue to abide by the treaty does not include any verification or inspection provisions (treaty provisions he suspended in February 2023, thereby adding to the list of eight other arms control agreements he has violated), meaning we would not know whether his offer is made in good faith (his track record clearly indicates it is not). As the State Department’s January 17, 2025, Arms Control Compliance Report notes:
Since 2022, Russia has failed to comply with its obligations to facilitate U.S. inspection activities on Russian territory and to convene sessions of the Bilateral Consultative Commission (BCC). Additionally, in the wake of its legally invalid purported suspension of the New START Treaty starting in February 2023, Russia further violated the Treaty by failing to comply with its obligations to provide Treaty-required notifications and data updates, as well as its obligations related to the exchange of telemetric information. . . . Therefore, this constitutes a serious compliance concern.
Putin knows that holding the U.S. to 2010 levels of strategic nuclear forces keeps us below what we need to deter Russia and China simultaneously. This is a totally novel situation facing U.S. strategic planners, which requires not only fully resourcing our nascent nuclear-modernization effort but also placing additional warheads on Trident and Minuteman missiles and returning to nuclear deterrent service submarine missile tubes and B-52 bombers that were neutered to meet New START limits — but only once the treaty’s constraints lapse.
What’s in a New START extension for the United States? Absolutely nothing: it undercuts our 2025 deterrent needs, prevents the administration from declaring an intent to buy more bombers and ballistic-missile submarines than planned in 2010, and allows Putin an opening to use extension as a tool to delay the president’s efforts to proceed with a “Golden Dome” to protect the U.S. and our allies from ballistic- and cruise-missile attacks.
An extension of New START benefits Putin and his ally Xi. It hurts America, and it is not consistent with the idea of “America First.” President Trump should spurn Putin’s cleverly conceived and demonstrably self-serving offer.
Eric S. Edelman is counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and is a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Finland and undersecretary of defense for policy.
Franklin C. Miller served for three decades as a senior nuclear policy and arms control official in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff. He is a principal at the Scowcroft Group.