Trump wants a nuclear deal. Can he be the ultimate negotiator?

The world has entered the third nuclear age, and nuclear weapons are increasingly seen as valuable—and even usable—weapons by a growing number of states. Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons, China’s rapid nuclear buildup, the United States’s unprecedentedly expensive nuclear modernization, and ongoing nuclear work in North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Iran all make clear the 21st century will be defined by nuclear risks.

The re-election of President Trump is likely to accelerate many of these trends as US allies increasingly question whether the United States will defend their security in a crisis, all while it doubles down on its nuclear investment. This modernization-turned-expansion will likely include at least one new nuclear weapon—a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile—and could also include the resumption of explosive nuclear testing in the United States. Despite these negative developments, Trump suggested at the Davos World Economic Forum last week that he may try to negotiate a new arms control agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s initial offer also included calls to negotiate with China. But it is very unlikely that China will agree to any such talks until its nuclear build-up reaches some parity with the United States and Russia, something that will take perhaps two decades. Until then, any agreement will likely be bilateral between Washington and Moscow.

Sadly, President Trump’s track record of actually negotiating nuclear agreements is poor. During his first term, Trump said he wanted to negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea (he tried and failed), with Iran (he never tried and withdrew from an existing agreement), and with Russia and China at the same time (he failed at both). But this time around, Trump has a chance to prove his negotiating skills—but only if he does it the right way.

Terms of a nuclear deal. Trump is a baby of the Cold War, an era when nuclear weapons were seen as the ultimate symbol of US and Soviet national power and prestige. And Trump has always seen himself as the ultimate negotiator. In the 1980s already, Trump even reached out to the Reagan administration and proposed himself as the lead negotiator for nuclear talks with the Soviets. Reagan’s team passed on his offer and eventually negotiated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty or INF in 1987 and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty or START I in 1991—the first nuclear agreement to effectively reduce nuclear arsenals. Ironically, President Trump withdrew from the INF treaty in 2017, some 30 years after he was passed over for the job. But past rejections and failures die hard with Trump.

Trump’s comments in Davos beg some serious questions: Should Trump negotiate with Russia’s Putin, and what terms should he pursue if US and global security is to be enhanced?

The United States and Russia are currently parties to the New START agreement—a successor to START I—negotiated in 2010 by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev. The agreement caps each country at no more than 1550 strategic offensive weapons on 700 deployed launchers. Russia has stopped reporting nuclear forces as required by the agreement since March 2023, but both states have pledged to continue to abide by the treaty’s limits. The Biden administration announced in its final days that Russia may have exceeded these limits by a small margin, casting doubt on the entire agreement’s future under Trump. In any event, New START expires in February 2026 and no extension is legally possible. If any limits are to be put in place, a new deal will need to be negotiated, and the clock is ticking on Trump.

China’s nuclear expansion will clearly influence any US effort to negotiate with Russia. In addition to Russia remaining a nuclear peer, US nuclear and security officials from both parties are concerned about China building up its nuclear forces. Yet here, too, facts matter: China has roughly 600 total nuclear warheads, compared to the United States’s 1550 accountable strategic weapons under New START and 3700 weapons in total. And Russia’s arsenal is even larger. However, as China catches up, some analysts and officials believe the US must expand its arsenal to deter and, if needed, defeat Russia and China at the same time. This has yet to be proven militarily or strategically, but politically, in the United States, it is being taken at face value. The policy being pushed is that the United States should try to match the combined nuclear arsenals of Russia and China. That mindset will result in a never-ending arms race—the same one that led Russia and the United States to possess combined arsenals of 70,000 nuclear weapons at the peak of the Cold War—to no one’s advantage or security.

This is where the possible terms of a Trump deal might come together.

The United States and Russia have been part of arms limitation agreements since 1972. Allowing these agreements to lapse altogether opens the door to further arms racing and instability. Into this gap, Trump might be tempted to offer Russia a shorter-term deal of perhaps five or 10 years that puts an upward cap on nuclear arsenals but allows both to expand their forces from where they are now. Because arms control negotiations typically favor nice round numbers (New START is an exception), the United States and Russia might agree to, say, 3000 strategic weapons each. This new limit would allow Russia and the United States to roughly double their deployed strategic weapons while creating the illusion that the arms race is under control. However, an agreement that does not require weapon reductions would be a major step back in such agreements. The last time Washington and Moscow agreed to a deal that allowed both sides to build up their arsenals was in 1972.

In addition, arms control negotiations—from Reagan through Obama—all featured on-site inspections and effective verification. Support for this approach has broad political consensus. Yet agreeing to such steps requires hard and determined work, something the Trump team has yet to demonstrate in this arena. Trump may, therefore, bypass such steps and simply agree to an exchange of data with Russia and rely on national intelligence means (spying) and satellites for the rest. Trump’s negotiators offered Russia a similar approach during his first term, in a deal that never came to fruition. And while any agreement without effective verification would be far less effective than New START or its predecessors, it could still be sold as offering some marginal intelligence and defense value. This is not what any traditional arms control approach should seek to produce, but it should be clear to anyone by now that Trump does not tend to follow traditional approaches.

Bottlenecks. The form of a US-Russian nuclear deal is also an open question.

In the past, most but not all nuclear arms control agreements with Russia have been submitted as treaties to the Senate for its advice and consent. The now Republican-controlled Senate would likely pair approval of any such agreement with additional funding and requirements to accelerate and expand the ongoing nuclear modernization program, which is already slated to cost almost $2 trillion over the next 30 years. Of course, the current Congress is likely to fund this program, treaty or not. Still, Senate Republicans have railed against agreements in the past that cannot be enforced or effectively verified, and any deal without it would put them in a tough spot. However, in the current US political environment, it is easy to see Senate Republican leaders rubber-stamping any of Trump’s efforts in this area—as they might do in so many others.

It is not entirely clear how and when Trump will make negotiating a nuclear treaty with Russia a priority. However, it is easy to see why this kind of strategy might be attractive to Russia’s Putin. Indeed, the benefits of such a deal for Putin are what may lead Trump to invest time and energy on this nuclear agenda. Putin remains an indicted war criminal (Russia has stolen and re-educated Ukrainian children throughout the war), and he might seek to repair his global reputation and regain his position on the world stage. If the war in Ukraine ends or achieves a cease-fire—another goal Trump has promised but has yet to fulfill—the next step would be for Putin to ensure that Trump lifts US sanctions against Russia. A new nuclear arms control agreement might fit very well into Putin’s public relations campaign and facilitate Trump’s efforts to build political support to undo US pressure on Russia. This will also put the Republicans’ puzzling but sustained admiration for Russia under Putin to the test.

Last, Trump might find this approach to the deal attractive because it would put the Democratic caucus in the Senate in a tight spot. Democrats have traditionally supported negotiated nuclear arms control with Russia to control arms racing and nuclear dangers. Asking them to support a deal, even with Putin—and commit to even larger nuclear budgets to pay for it—is all but certain to divide Senate Democrats. To gain Senate approval, a treaty would require 67 votes. It is not hard to see at least two dozen Democrats or so supporting a deal to cap—even at such a large increase of forces—nuclear weapons and fund what will be billed as a necessary expansion of the US deterrent forces.

Bad deal vs. no deal. These bottlenecks beg the central question of whether a US-Russian agreement along these lines is in the United States’s interest. Put in terms familiar to conservatives: Is a bad agreement worse than no agreement at all?

Answering this requires deciding whether the United States needs to expand its nuclear force to deter Russia and China at the same time. But that is hotly debated right now. Needed or not, the United States is taking steps now that will enable it to expand its forces in the future year. The Biden administration considered steps to pursue this expansion, and the Trump team is likely to follow suit, including by putting more warheads on existing US land-based missiles and bombers.

By any historical standard, an agreement that is not effectively verified and does not substantially limit the growth of US, Russian (or Chinese) nuclear forces has marginal value for the United States and its allies. One that enables a doubling of strategic forces is better described as performative arms control. A hollow agreement might feel good, but it would likely do little to reduce nuclear risks or address growing international pressure to take serious steps toward disarmament.

Of course, these voices are likely to have little, if any, influence on the Trump administration, which now feels empowered and eager to destroy past norms and agreements. And such a nuclear deal might even bolster Trump’s self-promoted case that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, another one of Trump’s long-held wishes. But even if negotiated and approved, such a treaty would not bring stability or peace—and it would have to be heavily scrutinized. Yet without an agreement, the three largest nuclear powers will likely keep building up their arsenals. Weighing the benefits of a performative agreement versus no agreement at all is a choice the United States can and should seek to avoid.

The ultimate negotiator. Trump has an opportunity to negotiate a deal that effectively reduces nuclear risks and improves US security.

There remains hope that the president might put in the hard work required to achieve a treaty that caps US and Russian strategic weapons at current or lower levels—a level still far above what China possesses. If Washington and Moscow lock in current levels, it could take China as long as 20 years for them to catch up. This means Russia and the United States together would have almost 10,000 total weapons and China would have no more than 1500 for at least the next decade. And if China’s arsenal ever gets to a size that undermines the United States’s deterrent, whoever is president at the time would always have the possibility of withdrawing from a treaty that no longer serves US interests. Given how quickly the international security environment is changing, the new agreement could have an initial period of five years, with the option to extend for additional five-year periods, as needed. In the intervening years, circumstances and leaders will change. Creating some nuclear stability and predictability for a decade or more is a worthy achievement and should be seriously considered.

A new agreement at current or lower levels should and could include robust on-site verification that uses the lessons learned from over 50 years of inspections, as well as rely on advanced satellite and other sensor technology. All can be brought to bear in a way that protects secrets but provides the necessary transparency to make a deal worth having.

Certainly, a bad nuclear deal with Russia can, in many ways, be worse than no deal at all. But in this case, President Trump has a chance to prove his negotiating prowess and produce a deal that benefits US security now and into the future without compromising the ability of the United States to deter both Russia and China, at the same time. If President Trump seizes that chance, he will deserve accolades.