As China becomes a nuclear peer, no stable order can be built around the United States and Russia alone, and Washington has accordingly been attempting to shift from bilateral arms control towards a trilateral conversation. The expiration of New START, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the rise of destabilizing new technologies have only sharpened the urgent need for a trilateral framework. Yet, it is far from clear that the three governments even share a definition of the stability they would be negotiating toward.
In May 2026, the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory convened a workshop on The Future of Trilateral Nuclear Diplomacy. Building on those discussions, this article argues that the difficulty runs deeper than competing arsenals: the United States, China, and Russia hold incompatible conceptions of strategic stability, and at least two of them may even see advantage in a degree of instability. This carries consequences for allies and for the multilateral order built around the NPT. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent any organization or employer.
Competing Definitions of Stability
The phrase “strategic stability” conceals three rather different conversations.
From its last major arms control effort, the United States learned to seek stability before aiming for arms control. New START, signed in 2010, was meant to open the way to deeper cuts and, in time, a negotiation that included China. Neither happened. The conclusion drawn is that the problem should be sequenced instead, treating risk reduction, transparency, and limits on testing as first steps, with talks on formal numbers left for later, if at all. This approach rests on a firm floor, however. The United States intends to keep modernizing its arsenal, rules out unilateral reductions, and refuses to yield to what it calls nuclear coercion, which means engagement is to proceed from a position of strength rather than restraint.
For Russia, the question is read through the prism of Ukraine and rests on a requirement plainly stated in its nuclear doctrine: forces able to inflict “unacceptable damage” on any aggressor in any situation, whatever defenses stand in the way. Moscow sees the wider strategic environment moving against this requirement, with US conventional strength, missile defenses, and NATO’s posture all eroding that confidence, and it reads American conduct as closer to coercion than to restraint. Russia’s modernization program, from hypersonic systems to novel delivery vehicles, is built to preserve that retaliatory capability. Golden Dome and other US missile defense efforts are treated in Moscow as systems it must be able to defeat, whether or not they work as advertised.
China’s intentions remain the most opaque of the three. It is difficult to grasp China’s understanding of strategic stability, but Beijing’s concept appears fundamentally political, anchored in the overall state of the US-China relationship rather than in any fixed military formula. China will not openly acknowledge the scale of its own buildup, which complicates any discussion of limits from the outset. However, China seems to be watching above all for a single signal: whether Washington will ever accept mutual vulnerability. Golden Dome, among other indications, suggests to Beijing that the answer is no.
Three definitions yield three points of departure. A P5 or trilateral process can assemble all of them in a single room, yet convening is not the same as converging. Absent a shared vocabulary, such talks risk becoming an exercise in performance, with each capital professing an interest in stability while quietly pursuing advantage.
Who Actually Wants Stability?
It is unclear whether Moscow and Beijing have any real interest in strategic stability, since both appear to find a measure of instability useful. For Russia, keeping the West off-balance carries its own rewards, as uncertainty erodes allied confidence in US extended deterrence. For China, ambiguity preserves freedom of maneuver. Still the weaker nuclear power and midway through a buildup it refuses to acknowledge, Beijing benefits from keeping Washington uncertain about the size and trajectory of its forces: that opacity buys time to close the gap and denies the United States the clear picture it would need to constrain China while it remains behind. From that perspective, transparency looks less like a confidence-building measure and more like a concession that Beijing has little incentive to grant.
As for the United States, it increasingly frames its objective as freedom from coercion and a rejection of unilateral restraint, and it describes two pathways forward: dialogue where willing partners exist, and, where they do not, a reshaping of the security environment through the expansion and diversification of its own forces and its extended deterrence commitments. This might be a coherent competitive strategy, but it is not a viable path to stability, reading more as a strategic pause than as a strategic settlement.
If all three powers are, each in their own way, reasonably comfortable with managed instability, the prospects for a durable bargain are dim. The most that diplomacy may achieve in the near term is something more modest: a set of arrangements that prevent instability from tipping into catastrophe.
Allies in the Crossfire
Trilateral nuclear diplomacy is conventionally described as a conversation among Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, but in practice, allies are woven through every part of it. US extended deterrence commitments in Europe and Asia shape Russian and Chinese threat perceptions, while allied anxieties shape what Washington can credibly bring to the table.
In Europe, Russia’s war against Ukraine has reopened longstanding debates over NATO nuclear sharing, conventional burden-sharing, missile defense, and the credibility of American commitments. Some allies seek reassurance that the United States will remain firmly engaged, while others have begun to ask, more openly than before, what genuine European strategic autonomy would actually require. This bears directly on how Moscow assesses NATO’s cohesion and on how much pressure it believes it can apply.
Northeast Asia presents an even more complicated picture. Japan and South Korea confront Chinese military modernization, a steadily expanding North Korean arsenal, and persistent uncertainty about the long-term reliability of the United States. The growing calls for stronger extended deterrence, for more regular nuclear consultations, and even for an indigenous South Korean option all reflect the same underlying anxiety. Beijing, for its part, treats these moves as threats in their own right: at this year’s NPT Review Conference it issued an unusually pointed working paper accusing Japan of pursuing nuclear weapons, a sign of how sharply it reacts to any hardening of allied posture in the region.
What allies fear is that risk reduction will give way to risk redistribution. Any serious strategic stability dialogue with Beijing or Moscow will eventually touch on US regional posture, missile defense, conventional strike, and alliance commitments, which are precisely the areas in which allies are most sensitive to being traded away. Stability among the great powers, if it is purchased by pushing risk downward onto the states that rely on extended deterrence, will not amount to stability at all, and will not endure.
The Strain on the Nuclear Order
These divisions in the trilateral arena also extend into the broader nuclear order. This year’s NPT Review Conference concluded without a consensus outcome document for the third consecutive time, foundering on disputes over Iran, Ukraine, disarmament, and the wider security environment. That outcome did not break the NPT, and the regime is not collapsing; no party has repudiated the treaty or its core bargain. Even so, the repeated failure to agree on even heavily qualified language is a warning that should not be ignored.
The deeper difficulty that the NPT faces is a divergence in priorities. Many non-nuclear-weapon states continue to treat disarmament and the NPT’s grand bargain as the heart of the regime, while nuclear-armed states and their allies increasingly emphasize deterrence, regional security, and risk reduction. The strain is visible in the “negative linkage” now running through the review process, the frustration that nonproliferation obligations are tightened while disarmament stalls, to the point that states once supportive of stronger safeguards have begun to resist them. It is equally visible in the conference’s harder edges, among them Russia’s renewed insistence on keeping North Korea off the agenda, and in China’s willingness, as its working paper on Japan showed, to turn the review process itself into an instrument of great power rivalry.
If the most consequential nuclear conversations continue to migrate outside the multilateral forums, the NPT risks becoming a venue in which states rehearse grievances while the substantive agenda moves elsewhere. A treaty disconnected from the security concerns that drive nuclear policy cannot remain healthy for long.
The Case for Small Bargains
A workable agenda has to carry disarmament and stability together. Disarmament remains a binding legal and political obligation, and neglecting it only erodes confidence in the regime further. Strategic stability and risk reduction, however, should not be dismissed as distractions from the nuclear order. Under present conditions, they may be among the few practical means of keeping that order from deteriorating.
What those conditions will not produce is a sweeping new arms control treaty. The politics are poor, the strategic landscape is far more crowded than the Cold War era ever was, and the three principal actors do not share a diagnosis of the problem, let alone a prescription for it. The hope for a comprehensive deal is understandable, yet building around a series of smaller, partial steps is the wiser course.
This argues for a layered agenda: sustained strategic stability talks, transparency around nuclear testing, crisis communication channels, a serious effort to address the role of artificial intelligence in nuclear command and control, missile launch notifications, and, above all, consultation with allies before, during, and after any engagement with adversaries. No single one of these measures would transform the nuclear order, but taken together, they might prevent its further unraveling. There is a reflex in this field to regard anything short of a treaty as second-best, an understandable instinct for those who recall what arms control achieved in its prime. The present environment, however, calls for a broader diplomatic imagination: keeping channels open, narrowing the room for miscalculation, and cultivating habits of communication well before the next crisis arrives.
Building a trilateral nuclear order will be slow, untidy work, if it proves possible at all. Whatever emerges will be less structured than the bilateral architecture it would replace, more politically fragile, and more dependent on incremental gains. Yet in a world of deepening mistrust, expanding arsenals, and compressed decision timelines, even modest guardrails are worth constructing, and far preferable to discovering, too late, how badly they were needed.
Umi Ariga is a Research Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs and a Pacific Young Leader since 2025. The views expressed here are solely her own and do not represent the views of any organization.
All views expressed are his own and do not reflect any institutional affiliation.
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