Global stockpiles of nuclear weapons are increasing and reversing decades of nuclear disarmament, a top conflict think tank reported Monday. For years, an annual decrease in the global inventory of nuclear weapons combined with the disarmament of retired warheads by the U.S. and Russia has outstripped the number of new warheads. But a report released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found this trend will be reversed in the coming years as dismantlement slows while the deployment of new nuclear weapons increases. “The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, which had lasted since the end of the Cold War, is coming to an end,” said Hans M. Kristensen, associate senior fellow with SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction program. “Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms control agreements,” he added. Out of the nine nuclear-armed states — the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea — all are upgrading existing weapons and adding new versions to their stockpiles. According to SIPRI’s 2025 yearbook, an estimated 12,241 nuclear warheads existed worldwide as of January. Of those, approximately 9,614 are held in military stockpiles ready for potential use, with more than 2,100 kept on high alert — primarily by the United States and Russia. China is leading the pack, with its nuclear arsenal having grown by 20 percent in just one year to an estimated 600 warheads. Projections indicate it could rival U.S. and Russian stockpiles by 2030. Meanwhile, India, Pakistan and Israel are also actively expanding or modernizing their nuclear capabilities. The study’s findings come amid escalating attacks between Iran and Israel and just a few weeks after stalled peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Israel’s recent targets in Iran included military sites and prominent nuclear scientists. On the early 2025 tensions between India and Pakistan, Matt Korda, associate senior researcher at SIPRI, said that strikes on nuclear-related military infrastructure risked turning a conventional conflict into a nuclear crisis. “This should act as a stark warning for states seeking to increase their reliance on nuclear weapons.” Reflecting concerns over the confrontation between Israel and Iran in the Middle East, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday it was monitoring the situation “very carefully” and confirmed that radiation levels remain stable following recent bombings of the Iranian uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. “The IAEA is ready to respond to any nuclear or radiological emergency within an hour,” said IAEA Director Rafael Mariano Grossi. “For the second time in three years, we are witnessing a dramatic conflict between two member states, in which nuclear facilities are under fire and their safety compromised.”

U.S. and Russian representatives will meet for a second time at some point in the next two weeks, according to Russian state news agency RIA. Citing Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the news agency reported that the meeting is expected to take place in a third country not yet specified. “A dialogue on strategic stability and arms control is possible when we see visible shifts for the better in American policy,” Ryabkov was quoted saying. The diplomat also floated the possibility for the U.S. and Russian representatives to discuss the Middle East. The Kremlin said earlier this week that a face-to-face meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump was possible as early as this month, according to media reports. Moscow and Washington have already held talks in Saudi Arabia to discuss the war in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, without any European leaders present at the meeting. Earlier this week, some EU leaders gathered in Paris for emergency talks about the war in Ukraine and European security. Last week, Russian officials were publicly delighted to see the U.S. administration’s apparent U-turn in its discourse on the Russia-Ukraine war, after Trump wrongfully accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being a “dictator.” Meanwhile, the U.S. and Ukraine are still in talks over a proposed deal for Ukrainian rare earths and other minerals in exchange of financial support to fend off Russia, according to media reports.

Wolfgang Ischinger is a former German ambassador to the U.S. and the U.K. He is president of the Munich Security Conference Foundation, and chaired the Munich Security Conference from 2008 to 2022. He teaches at the Hertie School Berlin and the University of Tübingen. A sigh of relief was heard in Davos recently, when U.S. President Donald Trump, on the heels of his inauguration speech, made it clear he wouldn’t be a pushover by sacrificing Ukraine. (If the sigh was a little a muted on Europe’s end, it was probably because he also made it clear to Denmark, one of NATO’s smaller partners, that he didn’t consider its sovereignty over Greenland to be absolute.) But are we really on the fast-track to U.S.-Russia talks? Are we on the way to negotiations on a possible cease-fire, or even a peace settlement, in Ukraine, which can all be wrapped up in weeks? Some seem to believe so. But skepticism is warranted. The idea that establishing security guarantees for Ukraine and a cease-fire line along the current front line is all that’s needed is the West’s wishful thinking. We need to be preparing for a much longer and extraordinarily complex process that will take many months. Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t want to give the impression that he’s dancing to Washington’s tune. The whole security situation in Europe, the lifting of sanctions, nuclear and conventional arms control, and overall strategic stability — it will all have to be discussed. The Russian leader will demand equal footing with Trump, and he knows two things for certain: Trump will be gone for good by early 2029, and the U.S. president will want to avoid a military conflict with Russia at almost all costs. And with Europe’s united front as shaky as it is, this could be an invitation for Putin to stall. Some initial conclusions from the various rounds of talks in Davos and the preparatory discussions for this week’s Munich Security Conference can be outlined as follows: Firstly, the cheaper the price of a cease-fire and the less watertight it is, the more expensive the peace that follows will be. Therefore, under no circumstances should support for Ukraine be reduced — on the contrary, it should be intensified. The price for Putin must be made as high as possible. Next, Trump must exercise restraint when considering summit encounters with Putin: An early summit would be a completely undeserved reward for the Russian leader. It should only be considered toward the end of a promising negotiation process. Moreover, the Russian side may well be planning a surprise military attack or major offensive in order to undermine Western or Ukrainian ideas about the negotiating framework. And while the West certainly shouldn’t make things easy for Russia, there has to be room for realism. U.S. President Donald Trump, on the heels of his inauguration speech, made it clear he wouldn’t be a pushover by sacrificing Ukraine. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Take, for example, the much-discussed idea of having European troops secure a cease-fire line. The political objective here is clear and sound: It would allow Europe to show Trump it’s prepared to do more for its own security than it has so far. But the devil is in the details. Estimates of the number of troops required to effectively secure a 1,000-kilometer contact line vary from 50,000 to 200,000 — the latter figure came from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. Realistically, could Europe politically or militarily manage this, while the Bundeswehr is struggling to deploy a brigade to Lithuania? Doubts can, therefore, be expressed as to whether Europe would even be capable of credibly securing a cease-fire with a large numbers of troops. And the possible involvement of troops from third countries, including for example India, should be given proper consideration. For its part, Washington isn’t even thinking about putting “boots on the ground” — a stance which breaks the NATO principle that risks should be shared. It will also make it more difficult for European governments to get the buy-in they need from their parliaments. As seen from Germany, the slogan “in together — out together” has always been a healthy NATO principal. It’s important we not come up with short-sighted solutions, but set long-term priorities and prepare for a difficult, painful negotiation process, which could take a long time due to its extreme complexity. Above all, we must not only continue to provide military and financial assistance to Ukraine but increase it. This is the ideal way to achieve a successful outcome for the future of a sovereign, free and undivided Ukraine, and the restoration of Europe’s security.

Moscow wants to resume arms control talks with the United States “as soon as possible,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.  Such negotiations are “in the interests of the whole world” and the peoples of both countries, Peskov told reporters at his Friday briefing, adding that the ball is now in the Americans’ court. “Russia considers it necessary to resume disarmament negotiations as soon as possible, especially since the legal framework in the area of arms control has been significantly undermined, and not through the fault of the Russian Federation,” Peskov said. “The United States has closed its participation and, in fact, undermined the existence of this legal framework.” Tensions over arms control treaties intensified after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Putin declared in February 2023 that he would suspend Moscow’s participation in the New START treaty — the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States. As a countermeasure, Washington announced in June 2023 that it would suspend several provisions of the treaty, including not exchanging data with Moscow and not facilitating inspection activities on U.S. territories.  Peskov’s comments on Friday come as a bit of a surprise, as only a week ago Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the opposite, rejecting U.S.-Russian arms control talks because of Washington’s support for Ukraine. But now, just days after the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, the mood in Moscow seems to be changing as Trump tries to forge a deal to end the war in Ukraine.  The U.S. president directly blamed Putin for the fact that the war in Ukraine is still raging and threatened massive tariffs and sanctions on Russian products if he fails to make a deal to end the conflict. 

Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s Across the Pond column. While attending a virtual transatlantic seminar on burden sharing recently, I heard two Americans arguing that Washington needed to prioritize military engagement in Asia over continued engagement in Europe — a view closely aligned with the incoming administration. But my ears perked up when one of them said the U.S. “would maintain its extended nuclear deterrent,” even though Europe would need to defend itself against Russia’s military threat. This was reassuring, for America’s nuclear arsenal has been the cornerstone of NATO’s nuclear security for decades. However, I have my doubts. NATO’s nuclear history consists of one long effort to reassure nonnuclear European allies that the U.S. would risk the destruction of New York or Washington to defend Berlin or Warsaw. One way it has done so is by deploying nuclear weapons in Europe and offering some European allies to fly their own aircraft carrying U.S. nuclear weapons. The more important reassurance, however, has always involved the deployment of U.S. troops on the front line, which guarantees America will be involved in any war from the very first shot. It is those troops that make America’s security commitment, including its nuclear deterrent, very real — both for Russia and for NATO allies. When I pointed this out, though, the presenter suggested that European countries may want to consider getting nuclear deterrents of their own then. After all, they argued, Washington had supported “good proliferation” before — just look at France and the U.K. But while this view isn’t all that far removed from what President-elect Donald Trump has been saying, it’s also a very slippery slope. Indeed, back in 2016, then-candidate Trump argued that Korea and Japan might want to get nuclear weapons to deal with North Korea’s arsenal. He then offered them little reassurance that the U.S. had their backs. And later, as president, he was more concerned with getting allies to “pay up” than defending them in the event of an attack. Of course, worries about nuclear proliferation are nothing new. In 1963, then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy warned of a “world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons.” But while Washington did help some allies with their nuclear programs, its longer-term effort was to stem the desire for acquiring nuclear weapons through a combination of arms control and alliance building. Together with the Soviet Union, the U.S. negotiated the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which committed nonnuclear states to remain so, and nuclear states to work toward nuclear disarmament. Washington also bolstered its nuclear commitments to allies in Europe and Asia, sharing nuclear information and inviting some allies to participate in nuclear missions. These efforts have been extraordinarily successful. Since the NPT was signed in 1968, only five other countries developed nuclear weapons — and one of those, South Africa, dismantled its small arsenal in the 1990s. Over the past few decades, arms control agreements— as well as stronger alliances — reduced nuclear inventories by nearly 90 percent. But now, this strategy is under severe stress. New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russia strategic arms control agreement, will expire in little over a year. Moscow has already made clear it doesn’t seek another extension, and Washington is now concerned that Beijing’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal means future negotiations will mean trying to pull off a more complicated and difficult tripartite agreement. Meanwhile, Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine and its shadow war against Europe have created the most threatening security environment the continent has seen in decades, putting alliances under increasing strain. Plus, China’s rapid expansion of its armed forces, coupled with its growing willingness to use military muscle across its borders and in the waters of the Pacific, now challenge America’s longstanding predominance in the region. America’s actions have long been running counter to Washington’s nonproliferation interests, writes Ivo Daalder. | Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images All this, at a time when the U.S. is sowing doubts about its own global staying power. Lest we forget, during his first term, Trump’s “America First policy” had a tendency to put allies last — weakening alliances long vital to combatting the desire for proliferation. But it’s not just Trump — America’s actions have been running counter to Washington’s nonproliferation interests for longer than that. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, for example, the U.S., Britain and France did little to counter the effort, even though all three nuclear powers, along with Russia, had signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. That agreement was meant to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty in return for its transfer of the nuclear weapons and missiles deployed on its territory when still part of the Soviet Union. The same can be said of America’s more recent actions in Ukraine and the Middle East too. When Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones against Israel in April and October last year, a beefed-up U.S. military in the region was critical to Israel’s defense. But when Russia shoots hundreds of missiles and drones against civilian targets in Ukraine almost every day of the week, all Washington does is promise more air defense missiles. The difference is clear: As a nuclear power, Russia deters the U.S. and its allies from directly defending Ukraine, but as a nonnuclear power, Iran can do little to prevent the U.S. and its allies from directly defending Israel. No surprise, then, that the International Atomic Energy Agency recently announced Tehran had “dramatically” accelerated its uranium enrichment efforts. In a world less constrained by international norms and rules, and increasingly governed by sheer power, the strictures that long constrained nuclear proliferation are now in danger of loosening — if not untangling altogether. And in such a world, even “good” proliferation can soon lead to very bad results.

LIMA, Peru — President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping met for just under two hours on the sidelines of the APEC summit Saturday, marking the end to their 15-year diplomatic relationship and ushering in a new era of uncertainty as Donald Trump prepares to return to office. The two leaders agreed to avoid giving artificial intelligence control of nuclear weapons systems, and they made progress toward the release of the two U.S. citizens behind bars in China that the State Department considers “wrongfully detained.” Biden also pressured Xi to rein in North Korea’s support of Russia in its conflict with Ukraine. Biden is looking for ways to emergency-proof the U.S.-China relationship before Trump takes over the White House. And Saturday’s substantive meeting was a sign that both leaders were trying to make the most of Biden’s remaining few weeks in office. The surprise agreement on AI marks a breakthrough in the Biden administration’s efforts over the past four years on issues of nuclear safety and proliferation. Beijing has repeatedly rebuffed those efforts and canceled a working group meeting on nuclear arms control in July in protest of a U.S. weapons sale to Taiwan. The agreement Saturday commits both countries to ensure that “there should be human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters in a post-meeting press briefing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s readout of the leaders’ discussion confirmed the agreement and described it as a joint recognition “to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.” The Chinese also reiterated their desire for “more dialogue and cooperation” with the U.S. and the need to avoid a “new Cold War,” while warning that “containing China is unwise, unacceptable and bound to fail.” In brief public remarks at the Chinese delegation’s hotel, the two leaders emphasized the importance of stability in the U.S.-China relationship. Speaking through a translator, Xi said both countries should “inject more certainty and positive energy into the turbulent world.” Biden said that such in-person conversations “prevent miscalculations, and they ensure the competition between our two countries will not veer into conflict.” It was a notable shift in tone from the last time the two leaders met at the 2023 APEC gathering in San Francisco, in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon incident. Biden walked out of the four-hour long meeting then and, in a news conference, called Xi a “dictator” for the second time. Biden officials had downplayed expectations ahead of this year’s meeting, telling reporters not to anticipate the president emerging from the discussion with a list of deliverables. But the surprisingly productive meeting comes as Trump threatens to upend the relative stability between the two countries when he takes office in January. Trump promised during his campaign to impose punishing tariffs on China, and his recent Cabinet selections have indicated he will take a much more hawkish approach to the U.S.-China relationship, tacking away from Biden’s strategy of responsibly “managing competition.” Trump said he would nominate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a fierce critic of Beijing, to be his secretary of State. He has also selected Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as national security adviser, and former Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to lead the CIA, both of whom have also been critical of China. Beijing has limited its comments on Trump’s electoral victory to a congratulatory message from Xi and hasn’t addressed the president-elect’s appointments of China hawks over the past week.. But in a nod to the incoming Trump administration, Xi warned that productive U.S.-China ties were at risk if either country makes moves to “pursue vicious competition and seek to hurt each other,” China’s official news agency Xinhua said in post-meeting reporting. In a speech earlier Saturday, Xi also hinted at the potential challenges of a Trump’s presidency, warning of “rising tendencies of geopolitics, unilateralism and protectionism.” Still, as he greeted Biden Saturday afternoon, Xi said China “is ready to work with the new U.S. administration to maintain communication, expand cooperation and manage differences, so as to strive for a steady transition of the China-U.S. relationship for the benefit of the two peoples. … China’s goal of a stable, healthy and sustainable China-U.S. relationship remains unchanged.” Biden did not host a press conference after the meeting, as he’s done the previous two times he’s met in-person with Xi since he took office in 2021. Instead, national security adviser Jake Sullivan took questions from reporters gathered in a hotel ballroom overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Although Biden officials attending APEC have downplayed Trump’s looming presence at the meeting, Sullivan acknowledged that the incoming administration was a feature of Biden’s discussion with Xi. “President Biden noted the obvious facts that there will be a new administration,” Sullivan said. “From President Biden’s perspective, he wasn’t projecting ahead to what was going to happen after January 20. He was really focused on the fact that there is a transition unfolding that President Biden’s determined — for that transition to be smooth and for him to pass the relationship off — and he’d like to pass it off on stable terms to the new administration.”

In the wake of NATO-skeptic President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, backers of the alliance are taking comfort in a year-old U.S. law that says he can’t withdraw unless Congress approves. But Trump may have a way around it — and it’s a method he has used before. In 2023, Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) authored legislation requiring that any presidential decision to exit NATO must have either two-thirds Senate approval or be authorized through an act of Congress. Lawmakers passed the measure as part of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law. Legal experts warn that Trump could try to sidestep Congress’s NATO guardrail, citing presidential authority over foreign policy — an approach he used before to bypass congressional restrictions on treaty withdrawal. The law is “not airtight,” said Scott Anderson, a Brookings Institution scholar and senior editor of Lawfare who has argued for firmer restrictions on a president leaving NATO. What it does do, he said, is set up a direct constitutional conflict with Congress if a president does try to withdraw. “This is not open and shut, this is about Congress telling you you can’t do this, and if you ignore Congress, you’re going to have to fight us in the courts over it,” Anderson said. If Trump simply declared he was pulling out of the alliance, it’s unclear whether Congress would have the legal standing to sue him for ignoring the law, according to Curtis Bradley, the Allen M. Singer distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The Supreme Court has generally held that institutional conflicts between the branches are political questions best resolved through the political process rather than through judicial intervention. “For the issue to be litigated, there would need to be someone with standing to sue,” Bradley said in an email. “The only party I can think of who might have standing would be Congress itself, but it is not clear that the Republicans in Congress (who will at least control the Senate) would support such a suit.” Anderson said lawmakers should strengthen the law by adding language explicitly authorizing litigation, which would improve Congress’ chances of establishing standing in court. He also explains that while Congress has the strongest standing to sue over a presidential withdrawal from NATO, service members or private individuals — such as Americans who own property in NATO countries — may have potential arguments, but those are less certain. Another possibility, he said, is that one of the chambers could try to sue, if both don’t agree. Even if the Supreme Court took up the case, it’s not clear who would win because the constitutional question is murky. Congress has never mounted a direct legal challenge to a president withdrawing from a treaty. “It’s very contested legal terrain, and it’s not 100 percent clear,” Anderson said. That doesn’t mean a withdrawal, if Trump were able to pursue one, would happen quickly. Under the NATO treaty, a member state would have to submit a “notice of denunciation” to inform the other members of the decision. The country’s membership wouldn’t officially end until after a one-year waiting period. Meanwhile, Trump could undermine NATO without formally leaving. Democratic lawmakers have warned that he could refuse U.S. support by withholding ambassadors or keeping troops from participating in military exercises. While several lawmakers in February called for new legislative measures to guard against these risks, nothing serious has materialized since. “Following Trump’s threats in his first term, the Congress — recognizing the vital importance of NATO — acted on a bipartisan basis to prevent any future presidents from unilaterally withdrawing,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “While Trump may resort to his old tricks, we’ll continue working to shore up NATO and stand ready to fight back against any attempts to undermine the strength of this alliance.” Asked to comment, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “The American people re-elected President Trump because they trust him to lead our country and restore peace through strength around the world.” It wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s team ignored legal requirements on treaty withdrawal. In 2019, amid a debate over the Open Skies Treaty, Congress included a provision in the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act requiring the defense secretary and secretary of state to notify Congress at least 120 days before withdrawing. The 34-nation pact allowed reciprocal surveillance flights between members to monitor military forces and weaponry. Arms control advocates and internationalists in Congress supported the Open Skies Treaty because, with Russia and countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and France as parties, it promoted transparency and trust. But the Trump administration and some congressional Republicans argued Russia was violating it and that satellite imaging technology made the flights obsolete. In May 2020, the Trump administration announced its intention to leave the Open Skies Treaty and ignored the legal notification requirements. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, at the time led by Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, issued an opinion arguing that the notice requirements infringed on the president’s constitutional authority over foreign affairs. “The President’s power to withdraw from treaties flows from his constitutional role as the ‘sole organ of the nation in its external relations,’ granting him discretion in conducting foreign affairs and implementing or terminating treaties without congressional constraints on diplomatic decisions,” Engel wrote in the administration’s final days. Asked about congressional guardrails on a president leaving NATO, Bradley said the Trump administration’s argument in 2020 that Congress has no regulatory authority isn’t necessarily on solid footing because Congress has a history of regulating treaties. “I think there should be a heavy burden on presidents to show that a statute is unconstitutional before acting to disregard it, given that our checks and balances depend on presidents having to follow the law, and I don’t think that burden has been met here,” he said. A NATO spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment. Because NATO runs on the confidence of allies, former alliance officials said that signaling an exit is as good as leaving. “De facto the day you send the letter it is in a way effective immediately,” said Camille Grande, a former NATO assistant secretary general and now a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Because what you’re saying is ‘I’m no longer committed.’” Beyond the legal aspects of withdrawing, the United States would have to figure out what to do with more than 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe — a number that has grown by one-fifth since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. The Defense Department might also have to pull out of NATO’s military command structure, which has been run by an American general dating back to its establishment under then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in 1949. “We are not sort of having a discussion in very quiet times where there is a guy in the White House who’s not a strong believer in alliances and in old-fashioned NATO,” Grande said. “We have a war in Europe. We have a serious concern for many Europeans that the confrontation with Russia might escalate in some shape or form, and then where are we?” Trump repeatedly criticized NATO allies during his first term for not meeting defense spending targets, openly suggesting reduced U.S. support and even hinting at withdrawal. At a rally this year, he recalled telling allies, “If we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us? … Absolutely not.” Trump hasn’t said publicly that he would pull out of NATO, but reportedly has discussed it repeatedly in private. He did say on the campaign trail that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies who don’t spend enough on defense. Trump told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in 2020 that the U.S. wouldn’t come to Europe’s defense if it was attacked, POLITICO reported. He has said NATO countries subsequently spent “billions and billions” of dollars on their defenses in the wake of his threat. While critics argue the strong rhetoric is undermining the alliance, some Republicans view it as effective pressure that prompted NATO members to increase military funding. Both Trump and pro-NATO advocates stress the need for allies to meet defense spending targets, but Trump has at times framed it as a condition for U.S. support. Those allies appear to be relying on the law to bar Trump from taking extreme measures. “Congress passed legislation according to which you cannot leave NATO without the consent of Congress,” former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview on Wednesday. “And during my visit to U.S. Congress, I have seen a very strong bipartisan support for NATO, staying in NATO. Obviously, a U.S. president can, as a commander in chief, make life difficult for NATO, but to see the U.S. leave NATO? No.”

KYIV — The West should spend less time fretting about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s red lines and set its own, says veteran German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger. “Russia keeps saying, if you do this, if you cross this or that red line, we might escalate,” said the 78-year-old onetime chairman of the Munich Security Conference. “Why don’t we turn this thing around and say to them: ‘We have lines and if you bomb one more civilian building, then you shouldn’t be surprised if, say, we deliver Taurus cruise missiles or America allows Ukraine to strike military targets inside Russia’?”  That way the onus will be on Moscow to decide whether to cross the red lines — or face the consequences. Talking with POLITICO on the margins of  the recent annual Yalta European Strategy conference, a high-level gathering of Ukrainian and Western leaders and officials, Ischinger, added with a chuckle:  “Of course, as many of my friends remind me, the problem, is that if you paint a red line you’ve got to stick to it. You can’t do what Barack Obama did with his Syrian red line against the use of chemical weapons, which he then didn’t enforce.” Ischinger is no warmonger. His thinking is also bent towards kick-starting peace negotiations and how to shape the circumstances for a resolution to the war which maintains Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty and advances its ambitions to join the European Union. He sees India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, as someone who can play a key role as an intermediary in a contact group, which would need to include the Europeans, the Chinese, the Saudis, Qataris and Turks. Ischinger held a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier this month to discuss a follow-up peace summit to the one held in Switzerland in June. That summit involved a hundred countries and organizations but without Russian or Chinese participation. China refused to attend due to Russia’s absence and instead pitched an alternative peace plan. Kyiv is planning to arrange a second global peace summit before the end of 2024 and hopes to develop a new joint peace plan based on Zelenskyy’s long-standing 10-point peace proposal. ‘Russians do respect strength’ Ischinger has deep experience in getting warring parties to talk, having been a German negotiator during the Balkans wars, working alongside the likes of America’s Richard Holbrooke in the 1990s. But he doesn’t underplay the importance of negotiating from a position of strength. “We need to remind ourselves that Russia, because of its history, because of its own experience and because of its cultural behavior, it doesn’t respect concessions or weakness; but Russians do respect strength,” he said. He argued that Washington and Moscow would have to set the overall framework for any talks. And that isn’t going to happen this side of the November elections in the U.S., he reckoned. In the meantime, Ischinger added: “If we want to encourage  movement in that direction in Russian thinking, the right thing to do is to make sure the Ukrainians don’t lose more territory in the Donbas and to help them weather this winter.” “If there is going to be a process, it will be first sketched out between Moscow and Washington,” he said. He doesn’t believe that Putin and his cronies will want to make arrangements with either German Chancellor Olaf Scholz or French President Emmanuel Macron. “They regard Europeans as vassals of Washington,” he said. But he could imagine that, after November, some tentative discussions could start, if there were not already some secret exchanges. He saw some fundamental questions being examined in any U.S.-Russian conversations to shape a framework. “What about NATO membership for Ukraine? Is that negotiable or non-negotiable? What about territory and borders? How do we deal with those? And what about arms control? Could, at some second or third stage, some arms control talks emerge? But some discussions between Washington and Moscow will be the first step that I think will need to be taken,” Ischinger reckoned. “What I learned when I was the German negotiator during the Balkan wars, you have to try to start with something that’s really easy, and you go from the very easy to the less easy to the very difficult. The diplomatic textbooks outline that approach but I learned it first hand. In other words, don’t talk about territory at the start. Talk about, for example, the nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia and making it safe. If it goes up in flames it will kill as many Russians as Ukrainians. You talk about more POW exchanges and food transport in the Black Sea, these are the types of issues you can begin with and progress towards the more difficult questions,” he said. And that’s where a contact group of intermediaries and facilitators will be needed — with China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and India all playing roles. How would the U.S. election result change things? “It will make a difference, yes. It will make a difference whether it is [Kamala] Harris or [Donald] Trump. But if the latter, the risk I see is that Trump would think he can do it himself by just calling Vladimir,” he added.

Joel H. Rosenthal is president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and the editor-in-chief of the Ethics & International Affairs journal. His first book “Righteous Realists” is an examination of the political realists who shaped post-World War II America. As leaders gather in New York for the U.N. General Assembly this week, we find ourselves in a world without a single treaty limiting the number of strategic nuclear weapons. Let me be clear: In an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment, there’s no nuclear ceiling — and worse, there’s no plan to establish one. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. had approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads to the Soviet Union’s 40,000 — numbers driven by the strategy of deterrence, which was normalized as the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction.” And despite these seemingly astronomical arsenals, arms control agreements like the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) managed to temper competition. Today, however, we’re walking a fraying nuclear tightrope. Russia’s departure from the New START agreement after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine marked a moment of danger, uncertainty and diplomatic retreat. Couple that with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s subsequent nuclear saber-rattling and China’s rapidly expanding nuclear weapons program, and we now find ourselves in an environment with little or no restraint at a time of worsening instability and threat. But the current moment’s volatility isn’t the result of benign drift — it’s the result of long-developing trends: With its inventory now at 500 nuclear weapons, and plans to reach 1,000 by 2030, China’s nuclear program currently ranks third in the world behind the U.S. (about 3,700) and Russia (about 4,400). And in addition to the traditional perils associated with arsenal expansion, the integration of AI systems — such as large language models — into military planning and decision-making is introducing new escalatory risks. Not only are the few remaining restraints, such as the NPT, showing signs of vulnerability, there’s also little reassuring news from current and potential conflict zones like Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula. Reflecting on this concerning state of affairs, the famed Doomsday Clock of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” was recently set at 90 seconds to midnight — the closest it’s ever been to catastrophe. Our nuclear future wasn’t always this bleak, however. Toward the end of the Cold War — when the threat of nuclear war still loomed, and the possibility of Soviet collapse was yet to be seriously entertained — key institutions and academics were engaging with the ethical questions at the heart of nuclear weapons. In their pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace” from 1983, the National (U.S.) Conference of Catholic Bishops made the case that the only justifiable use of nuclear weapons was as a deterrent, and even then, only “as a step on the way to a progressive disarmament.” Complementing this work, Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. released his 1986 book “Nuclear Ethics,” arguing that such justification is conditional on the duty to reduce risk by lowering stockpiles and creating policies to minimize risk of use in war, as well as accidents or miscalculation. Later, as American leaders of the Cold War era began to retire from active duty, some wanted to ensure their experiences in managing nuclear weapons yielded actual lessons learned. And in the 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn argued that the moment to think seriously about nuclear abolition had finally come. The massive destructive capacity of nuclear weapons rendered them unusable, the “four horsemen of the nuclear apocalypse” said. As leaders gather in New York for the U.N. General Assembly this week, we find ourselves in a world without a single treaty limiting the number of strategic nuclear weapons. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images As these statesmen knew better than most, the bane of national security is instability. As a result, they worked hard on arms control, and by the time the New START agreement went into effect in 2011, the number of nuclear weapons had been reduced by tens of thousands, stabilizing at around 15,000 worldwide. Of course, progress wasn’t without setbacks. The U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 were significant stumbling blocks, as was Russia’s withdrawal from New START. But what we’re experiencing right now is far more than a normal diplomatic setback. We’re in a moment of ennui when we should be seeing it as a moment of urgency. What is it that accounts for this complacency? Is it ignorance? Indifference? Or is it a sense of helplessness in the face of a complicated and terrifying challenge? Now is the time to launch an energetic response; it’s the time to revisit the ethical demand of deterrence — to return to a world where less is more and non-proliferation is sacrosanct. The first 80 years of a nuclear world were far from perfect, but they were punctuated by occasional breakthroughs. There were moments when geopolitical rivals came together to sign new treaties, when weapons were destroyed and the future looked calmer and brighter. And despite present-day headwinds against such international cooperation, our leaders must embrace the idea that power and peace go together, and that we need new political arrangements. This is a moment to readdress the norms that have guided policymakers and kept nuclear peace until now. Norms evolve and change over time, and we would be foolish to think that they don’t erode without care, maintenance and, on occasion, revision. It’s also a moment for accountability. Leaders should be held responsible for their public statements and private actions as they pertain to nuclear weapons. Should the “nuclear taboo” be broken, the consequences for humanity are difficult to imagine. And at this perilous moment, a recommitment to nuclear arms control is nothing short of a moral imperative. We’ve done this work before; we can do it again.