The 11th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons opened Monday at United Nations headquarters in New York. For 25 days, representatives of 191 states-parties will negotiate over the future of a treaty that has served as the cornerstone of global nuclear order since 1970. The stakes could not be higher, and the system has never looked more fragile.
For the first time in decades, the number of nuclear warheads in the world is rising. Global military spending soared to $2.7 trillion last year, which is thirteen times the total amount of global development assistance, roughly equivalent to Africa’s entire GDP. Two consecutive review conferences, in 2015 and again in 2022, collapsed without producing a consensus final document.
The architecture of nuclear restraint, painstakingly built over half a century, is cracking. To understand why, we have to look at what has been driving it.
Arms control amnesia
UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it plainly at the opening session. “Today, a state of collective amnesia has taken hold,” he said. “Nuclear sabers rattle once more. Mistrust rules the day. Hard-won norms are eroding. Arms control is dying.” He called on states-parties to keep their promises “without caveats, without conditions, without delays, without excuses.” The fact that such an appeal needs to be made at all says much about the current status.
The NPT was built on a grand bargain. Non-nuclear states agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons. In exchange, the five recognized nuclear-weapon states—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—committed under Article VI to pursue nuclear disarmament in good faith. It is the only legally binding obligation in any international treaty requiring nuclear-armed states to disarm.
Fifty-seven years later, none of them has done so. Instead, all five are modernizing their arsenals and increasing spending on nuclear weapons. Many analysts say that the nuclear-armed states have transformed a disarmament treaty into a permanent license for their own weapons.
While the current escalation does not have a single author, it has a primary driver: U.S. imperialism.
Pledges and threats
When the USSR was dissolved,the U.S. gave the new Russian leadership assurances that NATO would not expand eastward into the former Warsaw Pact states. Those assurances were broken, repeatedly and methodically. NATO expanded through Eastern Europe, absorbing state after state, pushing alliance infrastructure and military assets toward Russia’s borders.
The consequences are now being paid in blood in Ukraine and in the collapse of whatever remained of the U.S.-Russia arms control architecture, including the New START treaty—the last major agreement constraining the two largest nuclear arsenals—which expired without renewal or replacement.
U.S. policy toward Iran tells the same story from a different angle. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was a functioning, verified agreement that placed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. International inspectors confirmed Iran’s compliance.
Then, in 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew, reimposed crushing sanctions, and called it “maximum pressure.” The result was predictable—Iran accelerated its nuclear activities, and the diplomatic architecture collapsed.
Today, the United States and Israel are waging an illegal war against Iran, using the country’s nuclear program (the same program that was under strict international supervision until Washington pulled the plug) as the pretext.
On the Korean Peninsula, the pattern repeats. The United States has maintained an overwhelming military presence in South Korea for over seven decades, conducting large-scale military exercises that North Korea reads as rehearsals for invasion or regime change.
Every diplomatic opening—and there have been several—has ultimately foundered on Washington’s insistence on complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament as a precondition for any meaningful security guarantees, rather than as the outcome of a process that actually addresses the DPRK’s legitimate security concerns.
The government in Pyongyang saw what happened to Libya after Gaddafi gave up his weapons program and also watched Iraq be invaded on charges that it possessed and was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. The lesson they took from observing U.S. policy was that nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent against regime change, though it is a costly lesson in terms of the economic burden it imposes.
The U.S.’ militaristic posture toward China, meanwhile, has motivated that country toward a larger arsena. For decades, China maintained a small number of nuclear weapons explicitly premised on deterrence and a no-first-use doctrine. That posture is changing, and successive administrations in Washington point to the shift as evidence of Chinese aggression.
But what has U.S. policy actually looked like from Beijing? The “pivot to Asia,” announced over a decade ago during the Obama presidency, was explicitly framed as military reorientation toward “containing” China.
A sprawling network of U.S. bases encircling China has been assembled across the Pacific, in Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines, and Australia. AUKUS, the nuclear submarine agreement between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S., has extended the reach of nuclear-capable platforms into China’s near seas. And routine Chinese military and economic activity are characterized as existential threats requiring military responses.
Added to the U.S.’ refusal to rule out a first-use nuclear weapons policy has prompted China into a position to adopt a position of expand its nuclear weapons program.
Nuclear normalization
The consequences of this decades-long posture are now arriving all at once. Russia has deployed nuclear threats as a tool of coercion in Ukraine. Trump has threatened to “end an entire civilization” in Iran. The New START treaty is dead. West Asia stands at the precipice of a nuclear arms raise. The NPT is meeting in crisis conditions that U.S. foreign policy did more than any other single factor to create.
The U.S. and its nuclear-armed allies have spent decades offering excuses for non-compliance with the NPT while demanding that everyone else observe restraint. That contradiction is no longer sustainable.
As Florian Eblenkamp of ICAN, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said at the conference: “The NPT is not a mechanism for five countries to permanently manage nuclear weapons. It is a legally binding instrument requiring their elimination.”
Jeffrey Lewis, Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, described the broader shift. “We are just generally seeing a greater emphasis on nuclear weapons,” he said. “We’re seeing countries use nuclear threats more and more to get their way in the world.”
Vietnam as peace broker
Into this difficult situation steps Vietnam.
The country is chairing the conference through its Ambassador to the UN, Do Hung Viet, the President of the Review Conference. It is an unusual role for a rising middle-power, non-nuclear state. But Vietnam’s foreign policy, strongly grounded in a doctrine of independence, self-reliance, and friendship with all nations, has positioned it as one of the few countries capable of sitting across from every major player without being seen as a proxy for any of them.
Vietnam holds Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships with the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom, all five recognized nuclear-weapon states. That is not a coincidence but rather the result of decades of deliberate diplomatic cultivation, rooted in the hard lessons of a country that knows exactly what war and great-power competition cost.
Vietnam prepared seriously for this role. Ambassador Do Hung Viet chaired three rounds of regional pre-conference consultations: with Asia-Pacific countries in Hanoi, with African nations in Addis Ababa, and with Middle East and North African states in Amman in January—bringing together representatives from governments, international organizations, and research institutions. These exchanges on positions, priorities, and concrete proposals were co-organized with the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs and the European Union.
Eblenkamp, whose organization has closely tracked Vietnam’s record, pointed out that Vietnam joined the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2018, making it among the first countries to do so. So, when Vietnam speaks about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, it does so with credibility that the nuclear-armed states have forfeited.
“Small and middle powers have something that nuclear weapon states simply cannot buy,” Eblenkamp said, “and that is credibility.”
Vietnamese Deputy Foreign Minister Le Thi Thu Hang put the country’s position plainly: “Vietnam remains steadfast in our commitment to nonproliferation and the complete, verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, while upholding the inalienable right of all states to peaceful use of nuclear energy.”
At the opening session Monday, Ambassador Do Hung Viet said: “This is not just another review conference. The success or failure of this conference will have implications way beyond these halls and way beyond these next five years. The prospects of a new nuclear arms race are looming over us, the scale of which we are yet to fathom.”
The benchmark for success at this conference has been set deliberately low, given recent failures. Even a joint statement by all states-parties reaffirming their commitment to the NPT—short of a full consensus outcome document—would signal that the treaty retains some collective legitimacy. That is a measure of how far things have deteriorated.
But the deeper question of the NPT’s continued relevance cannot be avoided. The nuclear-armed states have treated their disarmament obligations as optional for over half-a-century. No amount of diplomatic skill on Vietnam’s part can fix that if the nuclear powers refuse to be held accountable. It cannot create a substitute for political will that does not exist.
The world has 13,000 nuclear weapons. The goal of eliminating them stretches back to the very first resolution of the UN General Assembly, in 1946. Eighty years later, the trajectory has reversed. The amnesia that Guterres described is sustained because it is profitable for the weapons manufacturers and the governments that fund them.
“Disarmament,” Guterres said, is not the reward for peace. It is the foundation of peace.” Vietnam knows that. The question is whether the nuclear-armed states—and above all the one that has done the most to bring us to this moment—will finally rise to the occasion.
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