The impending expiry of New START marks more than the end of a treaty; it signals the unravelling of a strategic framework that shaped global security for five decades. The superpower duopoly that sustained that system is already giving way to a more fragmented, more dangerous landscape. In such a world, who will build the new rules of strategic stability?
The New START Treaty between Russia and the United States expires on February 5, 2026. It is the last in the long series of agreements between Moscow and Washington that began at the turn of the 1970s, and its lapse would signify the end of arms control as we know it.