The New START treaty, the final remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, will expire on February 5, 2026, with no replacement in sight. Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, stated on February 2 that the world should be alarmed that the two largest nuclear powers will operate without binding limits for the first time since the early 1970s. The treaty's death marks the end of over five decades of legally enforceable constraints on strategic arsenals.
This development signals not merely the failure of a single diplomatic instrument, but the collapse of the entire arms control architecture that defined superpower relations since the Nixon-Brezhnev era. From a realpolitik perspective, the treaty's demise reflects the structural reality that bilateral agreements designed for a bipolar world cannot survive in a multipolar nuclear competition.
The strategic calculation behind collapse
Russia suspended its participation in the treaty's verification measures in 2023, effectively freezing the agreement's inspection regime long before its formal expiration. In September 2025, President Putin proposed a one-year voluntary continuation of the treaty's central limits—1,550 deployed warheads and 700 deployed launchers—but received no official response from Washington. The Trump administration's posture has been dismissive, with the President stating, "If it expires, it expires. We'll just do a better agreement." This suggests a calculated willingness to accept a period without constraints.
The American position reflects a fundamental strategic reassessment. The rise of China as a third nuclear peer has invalidated the bilateral logic that underpinned Cold War arms control. From Washington's perspective, maintaining numerical parity with Moscow while Beijing expands its arsenal unconstrained creates an untenable strategic imbalance. The treaty has transformed from a stabilizing framework into a strategic liability—a self-imposed constraint in a three-player game where only two players are bound by the rules.
Members are reading: Why the death of verification mechanisms creates three simultaneous nuclear security dilemmas that structurally incentivize expansion.
The new normal of strategic competition
Medvedev's warning serves multiple purposes. It positions Russia as the responsible actor advocating for continued restraint while casting Washington as reckless. Yet his alarm also reflects genuine Russian concern about entering an unconstrained competition with the world's wealthiest military power. Both the rhetoric and the underlying anxiety are real.
The treaty's expiration represents not a catastrophic failure but a fundamental shift in the strategic landscape. The five decades of negotiated limits between the superpowers were enabled by the bipolar structure of Cold War competition, a framework that has now been overtaken by multipolar realities. The world now enters an era where national interest, unmediated by binding agreements, dictates strategic force structure. This is neither safer nor more dangerous by default—it is simply the logic of multipolar nuclear competition asserting itself. The era of <a href="https://crisis.zone/europe-explores-shared-nuclear-deterrent-as-transatlantic-security-doubts-deepen">unconstrained strategic calculation</a> has arrived not through choice, but through structural inevitability.
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