“The capitalist world-economy needs the states, needs the interstate system, and needs the periodic appearance of hegemonic powers. But the priority of capitalists is never the maintenance, much less the glorification, of any of these structures. The priority remains always the endless accumulation of capital, and this is best achieved by an ever-shifting set of political and cultural dominances within which capitalist firms maneuver, obtaining their support from the states but seeking to escape their dominance.”
― Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
The casual indifference with which United States President Donald Trump has spoken of the impending expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty should not be mistaken for rhetorical bravado or negotiating theatrics alone. It is instead a revealing symptom of a deeper structural transformation in the global order: the erosion of arms control as a governing logic of interstate relations and its replacement by a revived politics of raw deterrence, technological exhibitionism, and bloc confrontation. When Trump remarked that the treaty could simply be allowed to expire because “we’ll make a better deal,” he articulated, perhaps unintentionally, the political economy of a late-imperial system no longer capable of sustaining the institutional constraints that once stabilized its own power. The remark reflected not confidence, but exhaustion—an admission that the mechanisms through which the nuclear order was once disciplined have lost their political constituency.
The New START treaty, set to expire in February 2026 unless extended or replaced, remains the final surviving bilateral arms control agreement between the world’s two largest nuclear powers following the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. Its provisions limit each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and cap delivery vehicles while maintaining intrusive verification regimes. These limits are often discussed in technical terms, but their historical significance lies elsewhere. Arms control treaties were never primarily humanitarian achievements; they were instruments of imperial self-management. They emerged from the recognition, forged painfully during the Cold War, that unlimited nuclear accumulation imposed unsustainable material, organizational, and fiscal burdens even on the strongest states. Deterrence required discipline, and discipline required institutions. That logic is now visibly breaking down. In the absence of binding strategic competition increasingly reverts to demonstration rather than regulation. Russia’s public unveiling in late 2025 of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile system, reportedly deployed in Belarus and capable of carrying nuclear warheads at speeds exceeding Mach 10, must be read in this context. It was not merely a military announcement but a political communiqué issued in the language of spectacle. Hypersonic weapons compress decision-making timelines to minutes, reducing the margin for error and heightening the risk of miscalculation. Yet their strategic value lies less in battlefield utility than in symbolic escalation. In a world where treaties no longer structure rivalry, weapons themselves become diplomatic texts.
This regression is not accidental. It reflects the cumulative erosion of arms control as a legitimate constraint on power, particularly within the United States. Since the early 2000s, Washington has withdrawn from or undermined multiple international agreements, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to the INF Treaty, often on the grounds that such limited American “flexibility.” The assumption underpinning these withdrawals was that overwhelming technological superiority and economic scale would offset the stabilizing functions once performed by institutions. The material record suggests otherwise. According to Congressional Budget Office projections, U.S. nuclear modernization programs are expected to exceed $1.2 trillion over thirty years, with significant cost overruns already evident by 2025. Arms control once served as a brake on this accumulation; its removal accelerates a cycle of spending that benefits defense contractors while offering no corresponding increase in collective security.
Russia’s response to this environment is often framed as aggressive revisionism, but it is more accurately understood as strategic compensation. The war in Ukraine has imposed extraordinary costs on the Russian state. By mid-2025, Western and Ukrainian estimates placed Russian casualties, whether killed, wounded, or missing, between 700,000 and 950,000, with Ukraine itself sustaining hundreds of thousands of casualties. These losses have not translated into decisive victory. In such conditions, nuclear signaling becomes a substitute for conventional effectiveness, a means of reasserting relevance and deterrence in the face of material attrition. The emphasis on hypersonic systems and nuclear rhetoric is thus less a sign of strength than of constraint. To focus exclusively on Russian behavior, however, is to misdiagnose the crisis. The collapse of arms control reflects a broader transformation in the global system, marked by the decline of unipolar governance and the absence of a stable successor order. The post-Cold War moment fostered a belief especially in Washington that rules could be selectively applied or discarded without consequence. This belief hollowed out the institutional architecture that once regulated competition among major powers. Explicitly, an imperial systems do not collapse when challenged externally, but when they lose the capacity to regulate themselves internally. The abandonment of arms control is precisely such a loss.
Europe, once stabilized by dense regimes of arms limitation and confidence-building measures, has again been repositioned as a forward theater of strategic confrontation. The deployment of advanced missile systems in Belarus, the militarization of NATO’s eastern flank, and the normalization of nuclear rhetoric all signal a re-militarization of the continent under conditions far less predictable than those of the Cold War. Unlike the bipolar era, today’s alliances are fragmented, threat perceptions diverge, and domestic political volatility undermines strategic coherence. Even within NATO, European militaries face recruitment shortfalls and force-generation constraints, limiting their capacity for sustained deployment. Trump’s assertion that a “better deal” will follow the expiration of New START reflects a profound misunderstanding of how arms control functions. Negotiations do not occur in a vacuum. They depend on trust, verification, and institutional continuity by allowing an existing trajectory to lapse does not enhance leverage; it destroys it. Once inspections cease and data exchanges end, suspicion intensifies. Each side is incentivized to plan for worst-case scenarios, leading to arms accumulation rather than restraint. Arms control has never been a natural equilibrium; it has always been an artificially maintained one, sustained by political will that now appears absent.
The refusal of the United States to engage seriously with Russia’s proposal to voluntarily maintain deployment limits after treaty expiration underscores the depth of this impasse. While such proposals lack enforceability, their outright dismissal signals that arms control is no longer conceived as a shared responsibility but as a disposable instrument of transactional bargaining. This shift marks the transition from rule-bound deterrence to strategic nihilism, where stability is assumed to emerge spontaneously from competition itself. The danger of this transformation lies not only in intentional escalation but in accident and miscalculation.
Hypersonic weapons shorten response times; degraded communication channels increase ambiguity; politicized intelligence environments distort perception. In such conditions, deterrence becomes unstable, dependent on assumptions that may not hold under stress. The erosion of arms control thus increases the probability of catastrophe not through deliberate choice, but through systemic fragility. It signals to allies and adversaries alike that the United States is prepared to abandon long-standing commitments without offering credible alternatives. This undermines not only nuclear stability but the broader legitimacy of international agreements as instruments of governance. If arms control disappears entirely, nuclear weapons will return to their original function not as constrained deterrents, but as instruments of coercion embedded in asymmetrical power relations. What is at stake is not merely the expiration of a treaty, but the survival of a grammar of restraint that has, however imperfectly, prevented nuclear catastrophe for decades. The language of “better deals” conceals a harsher reality: the dismantling of collective safeguards in favor of competitive escalation. This is not strength masquerading as confidence; it is vulnerability disguised as bravado. In the absence of discipline, deterrence becomes disorder, and the world moves closer to a condition in which the most destructive technologies ever created are governed not by institutions, but by impulse.
In this sense, the erosion of arms control is not an isolated failure but a structural symptom of imperial decline. It reveals a system that no longer trusts rules because it no longer believes it can sustain them. The return of bloc confrontation, nuclear exhibitionism, and strategic uncertainty is not a revival of Cold War stability, but its inversion: competition without restraint, power without governance, and deterrence without discipline. The New START treaty, due to expire on February 5, remains the last surviving bilateral arms control agreement between the United States and Russia after the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. It limits each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and establishes verification mechanisms designed to prevent miscalculation and arms racing. Its importance lies not merely in numerical ceilings but in the principle it embodies: that even adversarial nuclear powers must accept mutual restraint as a condition of collective survival. Trump’s dismissal of that principle signals not confidence, but exhaustion. It reflects a political culture that now views international law, verification regimes, and multilateral restraint not as instruments of stability but as impediments to unilateral flexibility. The consequences of this erosion are already visible. On December 30, Russia’s Ministry of Defense released footage showing the deployment of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile system at an undisclosed site in Belarus.
The system, reportedly capable of carrying nuclear warheads and traveling at speeds exceeding ten times the speed of sound, was presented as a tool for striking European targets in wartime scenarios. This was the first public display of the weapon, which Russia had reportedly test-fired toward Ukraine in November. President Vladimir Putin’s claim that such missiles are effectively impossible to intercept must be understood less as a technical assertion than as a political signal: in the absence of binding arms control, strategic communication reverts to demonstrations of maximal destructive capacity. This dynamic is not the product of irrational escalation but of institutional decay. Arms control treaties historically emerged not from moral idealism but from material necessity. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union recognized that unlimited nuclear accumulation imposed unsustainable economic, organizational, and strategic costs. Treaties like SALT, START, and the INF agreement functioned as mechanisms to manage those costs while reducing the risk of catastrophic miscalculation. Their gradual dismantling in the post-Cold War era reflects a broader shift in imperial governance: the replacement of long-term strategic planning with short-term transactional politics. Trump’s posture toward New START is emblematic of this shift. His administration has consistently framed arms control as a concession rather than a reciprocal constraint, reflecting a belief that American technological superiority and economic scale can absorb the costs of renewed competition. This belief ignores the historical record. Nuclear modernization programs in the United States are projected to cost trillions of dollars over coming decades, placing immense strain on public finances already burdened by military overextension, domestic inequality, and infrastructural decay. Arms control once functioned as a brake on this escalation; its removal accelerates a cycle of spending that benefits military-industrial interests while offering no corresponding increase in public security. Russia’s response to this environment is often portrayed as aggressive adventurism, but it is more accurately understood as reactive adaptation. The war in Ukraine has imposed extraordinary human and material costs on Russia.
When Material Limits Produce Strategic Exhibitionism
By 2025, estimates of Russian casualties, killed, wounded, or missing had risen into the high hundreds of thousands, with some Western and Ukrainian assessments placing the cumulative figure close to or exceeding three-quarters of a million. These losses, unprecedented in Europe since the Second World War, have not translated into decisive battlefield success. Frontlines have shifted incrementally, cities have been pulverized, and entire regions depopulated, yet the strategic balance remains stubbornly unresolved. In this pretext, the increasing emphasis by Moscow on hypersonic weapons, nuclear-capable delivery systems, and dramatic displays of strategic force must be understood not as signs of strength, but as symptoms of constraint. They are compensatory gestures, produced by the friction between material limits and geopolitical ambition. This phenomenon of strategic exhibitionism under conditions of attrition is not unique to Russia, but Russia provides a particularly stark illustration. Modern war, especially industrialized high-intensity conflict, imposes brutal material demands. Ammunition stocks are depleted faster than they can be replenished; armored vehicles and artillery systems are destroyed at rates that strain even large industrial bases; trained manpower becomes increasingly scarce as casualties mount. By late 2024 and into 2025, Russia’s defense industry had expanded output, yet still struggled to fully offset battlefield losses. The resort to mobilization, prison recruitment, and extended deployments reflected the limits of this expansion. Against this backdrop, the showcasing of hypersonic missiles and nuclear rhetoric functions as a form of strategic theater in a way of shifting the terrain of confrontation from the grinding arithmetic of attrition to the realm of existential threat.
Hypersonic systems, as Russia’s publicly displayed Oreshnik missile deployed in Belarus by late 2024, carry enormous symbolic weight. Traveling at speeds reportedly exceeding Mach 10 and designed to evade existing missile defenses, they are presented as game-changing technologies capable of restoring deterrence dominance. Yet their actual utility in the Ukrainian theater is limited. They are costly, scarce, and ill-suited to altering the tactical realities of trench warfare, drone swarms, and artillery duels. Their value lies elsewhere: in signaling to adversaries, intimidating allies, and reasserting relevance in a strategic environment where conventional leverage has eroded. Nuclear-capable systems amplify this signal by reintroducing the ultimate threat into a conflict otherwise defined by stalemate. To interpret this solely as Russian aggression, however, is to mistake symptoms for cause. The deeper crisis is systemic. The collapse of arms control, the erosion of verification regimes, and the abandonment of institutional restraint are not the product of a single state’s decisions, but of a broader reconfiguration of global power relations that has unfolded since the end of the Cold War. The unipolar moment of the 1990s fostered a conviction, most pronounced in Washington that rules could be selectively applied, treaties discarded, and norms bent without destabilizing consequences. This belief underwrote the withdrawal from key agreements: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and now the looming expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 2026. Each withdrawal was justified in the language of flexibility and advantage; cumulatively, they hollowed out the institutional architecture that once regulated competition among major powers.
Arms control was never an altruistic project. It emerged from the material realities of Cold War competition, when both the United States and the Soviet Union recognized that unlimited accumulation of nuclear weapons imposed unsustainable economic and strategic costs. In this perspective, SALT, START, and INF functioned as mechanisms of cost management and risk reduction. They institutionalized predictability in a world of mutual suspicion. Their dismantling reflects not confidence, but the erosion of a shared capacity to manage rivalry. In their absence, strategic interaction reverts to signaling through weapons development and deployment, rather than through negotiated ceilings and verification. Europe bears the brunt of this regression. Once stabilized by dense networks of arms limitation and confidence-building measures from the Helsinki Final Act to the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty as the continent is again being repositioned as a forward theater of confrontation. The war in Ukraine has accelerated this transformation. NATO’s eastern flank has been reinforced; defense spending across Europe has surged, with several states committing to or exceeding the two-percent-of-GDP benchmark by 2025. Germany’s Zeitenwende, Poland’s massive rearmament, and the expansion of U.S. troop deployments reflect a re-militarization driven by perceived necessity. Meanwhile, Russia’s deployment of advanced missile systems in Belarus and its nuclear signaling toward Europe underscore the mutual escalation of threat perception.
The human costs of this confrontation are staggering. By mid-2025, Ukraine had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and sustained damage estimated at well over $400 billion. Nearly ten million Ukrainians, roughly one-fifth of the pre-war population were displaced, either internally or as refugees abroad. Russia, too, has borne immense losses, both human and economic, with sanctions constraining growth and forcing a war-time reorientation of its economy. Yet these costs have not produced compromise. Instead, they have entrenched positions, narrowed political space, and incentivized displays of resolve that substitute for achievable strategic outcomes. Strategic exhibitionism thrives in such conditions. When decisive victory is unattainable and compromise politically costly, leaders turn to spectacle: weapons unveilings, maximalist rhetoric, and symbolic escalations that project strength without altering underlying realities. Hypersonic missiles, nuclear posturing, and declarations of “red lines” serve this function. They transform material weakness into performative power. But this transformation is unstable. It relies on the assumption that adversaries will interpret spectacle as deterrence rather than desperation. It also compresses decision-making timelines, especially when coupled with technologies that reduce warning times and increase the risk of miscalculation. The danger is magnified by the absence of institutional buffers. Verification regimes, hotlines, and arms control once provided channels for clarification and de-escalation. Their erosion leaves interpretation to worst-case assumptions. In such an environment, the line between signaling and provocation blurs. A missile deployment intended as deterrence can be read as preparation for attack; a military exercise framed as defensive can be perceived as rehearsal for invasion. The security dilemma intensifies, feeding a spiral of action and reaction that no single actor fully controls.
This spiral is sustained by interests that profit from militarization. Defense industries on all sides benefit from renewed arms races, while political elites leverage external threats to consolidate domestic authority. The costs are socialized, borne by taxpayers, conscripts, and civilians while the benefits are concentrated. This dynamic was once partially constrained by arms control, which imposed ceilings and transparency. Its removal accelerates accumulation without limit, deepening inequality and diverting resources from social needs. Washington’s retreat from arms control reflects a broader shift toward transactional diplomacy and unilateral flexibility. Statements minimizing the importance of treaty expiration signal to allies and adversaries alike that institutional commitments are contingent, reversible, and subordinate to short-term bargaining. This undermines trust not only with rivals, but within alliances. European states, dependent on U.S. security guarantees yet wary of strategic volatility, are forced to hedge for rearming while seeking autonomy, deepening cooperation while preparing for uncertainty.
Russia’s strategic exhibitionism must therefore be read in conjunction with Western practices. Both are products of a world in which managed rivalry has given way to unmanaged confrontation. The language differs from defensive necessity versus existential threat but the underlying logic converges: deterrence without discipline. In such a system, restraint is framed as weakness, and escalation becomes a substitute for strategy. This is the paradox of the current moment. The more material limits constrain conventional warfare, the greater the temptation to elevate the conflict to higher, more abstract levels of threat. Nuclear weapons, once constrained by elaborate regimes of control, re-enter discourse as tools of signaling. Hypersonic systems, still marginal in numbers, assume outsized importance as symbols of technological prowess. Yet none of this resolves the fundamental contradiction: a global order that demands restraint to survive but lacks the institutional capacity to enforce it.
Yet, the risks multiply. The expiration of remaining arms control agreements will further erode transparency. Modernization programs on all sides will accelerate, consuming resources at a time of economic strain. Europe will remain a central theater of confrontation, its security increasingly defined by deterrence rather than cooperation of strategic exhibitionism will continue to substitute for genuine resolution, masking decline with spectacle. Deterrence is obsolete, but that deterrence without discipline is dangerous. Material limits cannot be overcome by technological display alone. They require political solutions, institutional rebuilding, and a re-commitment to managing rivalry rather than dramatizing it. Without such a shift, strategic exhibitionism will proliferate, not as a path to security, but as a symptom of a system unable to confront its own constraints.
Militarization Without Constraint: Capital, Nationalism, and the Arms Spiral
The deployment of advanced missile systems in Belarus, the rearmament of NATO’s eastern flank, and the normalization of nuclear signaling across Europe signal not merely a return of military competition but a deeper regression in the political economy of international security. This remilitarization is unfolding under conditions far less predictable and far less disciplined than those of the Cold War. Unlike the bipolar era, which for all its dangers was governed by relatively stable blocs, centralized command structures, and dense arms-control regimes, the contemporary security environment is fragmented, volatile, and institutionally hollowed out. Alliances are looser, threat perceptions diverge sharply even among formal partners, and domestic political instability increasingly shapes strategic decision-making. What emerges is not a coherent return to bloc politics but an arms spiral without the restraints that once limited its most catastrophic tendencies. By the mid-2020s, Europe has once again been repositioned as a forward theater of strategic confrontation. NATO’s eastern members have seen sustained increases in troop deployments, weapons transfers, and infrastructure expansion. Between 2014 and 2024, NATO’s combined military spending rose from roughly USD 900 billion to well over USD 1.3 trillion, with European members accounting for a growing share of that increase. States such as Poland and the Baltic countries now spend more than 3 percent of GDP on defense, levels unseen since the height of the Cold War. Germany, long reluctant to embrace overt militarization, committed itself after 2022 to a rearmament program exceeding EUR 100 billion, reversing decades of postwar restraint. These figures reflect not a temporary adjustment but a structural shift in how security is imagined and financed.
On the eastern side of the continent, Russia has responded to this environment not through successful conventional consolidation but through strategic exhibitionism. Despite extraordinary human and material losses, these sacrifices failed to deliver decisive battlefield outcomes. In this context, the emphasis on hypersonic missiles, nuclear-capable delivery systems, and dramatic demonstrations of strategic reach functions as compensation for conventional limitations. Weapons such as the Oreshnik hypersonic system, reportedly deployed in Belarus and capable of carrying nuclear payloads, are less about immediate battlefield utility than about symbolic escalation. They are designed to reassert relevance, deterrence, and status in a conflict where material attrition has exposed structural weaknesses in Russia’s military-industrial base and mobilization capacity. Yet to interpret this trajectory as the product of Russian aggression alone is to misunderstand the systemic character of the crisis. The collapse of arms control is not driven by one state’s belligerence but by a broader reconfiguration of global power relations since the end of the Cold War. The unipolar moment of the 1990s and early 2000s fostered, particularly in Washington, a belief that international rules could be selectively applied, renegotiated, or discarded without serious consequence. This belief underpinned withdrawals from a wide range of international agreements, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and it shaped a broader skepticism toward multilateral constraint as such. Over time, this posture hollowed out the institutional architecture that once regulated competition among major powers.
Arms control regimes were never expressions of moral idealism. They emerged from hard calculations about cost, risk, and sustainability. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union recognized that unlimited nuclear accumulation imposed intolerable economic burdens and heightened the risk of accidental war. SALT, START, and INF functioned as mechanisms for managing rivalry within tolerable bounds. They reduced uncertainty, established verification regimes, and created predictable ceilings that allowed military planners to avoid worst-case assumptions. The erosion of these preemptive cognition reflects not newfound confidence but institutional exhaustion. It signals a shift from long-term strategic management toward short-term, transactional politics. Negotiations do not occur in a vacuum; they depend on trust, verification mechanisms, and stable diplomatic channels built over years. Allowing an existing decoupling to collapse does not enhance leverage. It weakens it. Once inspections cease, data exchanges end, and transparency declines, suspicion intensifies. Each side is incentivized to assume worst-case scenarios, leading not to restraint but to arms accumulation. The concern expressed by arms-control advocates that the expiration of New START could trigger the deployment of additional strategic warheads by both sides is grounded in historical precedent. When constraints disappear, military planning defaults to maximal preparedness. During the early Cold War, before robust arms-control regimes were in place, both superpowers rapidly expanded their nuclear arsenals, reaching levels that far exceeded any plausible deterrent requirement. By the mid-1980s, global nuclear stockpiles peaked at more than 60,000 warheads. Although that number has since fallen dramatically, the underlying logic remains. As of the mid-2020s, the world still possesses approximately 12,000 nuclear warheads, with the United States and Russia accounting for roughly 90 percent of them. The removal of remaining limits threatens to reverse decades of gradual reduction.
This dynamic is not merely strategic but deeply political-economic. Renewed arms racing generates enormous profits for defense contractors while imposing diffuse costs on society at large. In the United States, nuclear modernization programs alone are projected to cost well over USD 1 trillion over the coming decades, diverting resources from social infrastructure, healthcare, and climate adaptation. Similar pressures are visible across Europe, where rearmament is increasingly normalized as a fiscal priority even amid stagnant wages and widening inequality. Militarization thus becomes a mechanism for absorbing surplus capital, stabilizing domestic political coalitions through nationalist rhetoric, and deflecting attention from structural economic problems. Nationalism plays a crucial ideological role in this process. As arms-control institutions erode, political leaders increasingly rely on symbolic displays of strength to maintain legitimacy. Nuclear signaling, once treated as an exceptional and dangerous practice, is normalized through public statements, military exercises, and carefully staged deployments. This normalization lowers the psychological threshold for escalation while masking the fragility of the underlying security environment. Nuclear stability has never been a natural condition; it has always been an artificially maintained equilibrium, sustained by institutions, routines, and shared understandings. The dismantling of those supports leaves deterrence exposed to miscalculation, technological error, and domestic political pressure. The contemporary security landscape is particularly vulnerable because it lacks the structural clarity of the Cold War. Bipolarity, for all its rigidity, produced relatively predictable patterns of behavior. Today’s system is multipolar, but without the institutional density required to manage multipolar competition. Alliances are fragmented, command structures are less centralized, and domestic political volatility frequently overrides strategic consistency. Elections, leadership changes, and internal crises can rapidly alter a state’s external posture, increasing uncertainty for adversaries and allies alike.
Europe’s remilitarization under these conditions is therefore qualitatively different from its Cold War predecessor. Then, arms-control agreements such as the Helsinki Accords and confidence-building measures helped stabilize frontlines and reduce the risk of surprise attack. Today, similar mechanisms are either weakened or absent. The deployment of advanced missile systems in Belarus, NATO’s expanded forward presence, and the erosion of verification regimes together create a security environment in which reaction times are shorter and assumptions more pessimistic. Hypersonic weapons, in particular, compress decision-making windows, increasing the risk that false alarms or misinterpretations could trigger catastrophic responses. Russia’s suggestion that both sides voluntarily maintain New START deployment limits after the treaty’s expiration was met with silence from Washington. While such a proposal lacks enforceability, its dismissal underscores the depth of the current impasse. Even symbolic gestures toward restraint are now viewed with suspicion or indifference. Arms control, once treated as a shared responsibility rooted in mutual survival, is increasingly framed as a concession incompatible with nationalist narratives of strength. This trajectory reflects the contradictions of late capitalism on a global scale. As economic growth slows, inequality deepens, and ecological crises intensify, states turn to militarization as a means of managing instability. Arms production absorbs capital, nationalism mobilizes popular support, and external threats are invoked to discipline domestic dissent. The arms spiral is thus not an accidental byproduct of misunderstanding but a structurally generated response to systemic crisis.
The danger is that this response undermines the very conditions of collective survival. Militarization without constraint does not produce security; it produces opacity, volatility, and heightened risk of catastrophic error. The erosion of arms control marks not a return to strength but a loss of self-regulation at the core of the international system. It signals a world in which power is asserted through spectacle rather than stability, and in which the lessons of past catastrophe are sacrificed to the imperatives of capital accumulation and nationalist legitimacy. If the remaining arms-control strategy disappear, the world will not become more flexible or secure. It will become more dangerous, more unequal, and more prone to irreversible mistakes. Nuclear weapons will return to their original function not as constrained deterrents but as instruments of coercion embedded in asymmetrical power relations. In this sense, the arms spiral now unfolding is not merely a security problem but a civilizational one, reflecting the inability of contemporary political economies to impose limits on their own destructive capacities.
Imperial Exhaustion and the Collapse of Self-Regulation
An impending expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) should not be understood merely as rhetorical bravado or the theatre of negotiation. It is instead symptomatic of a deeper structural transformation in the global order, one in which the mechanisms of arms control, once central to regulating interstate rivalry, have been eroded and supplanted by a politics of raw deterrence, technological exhibitionism, and bloc confrontation. By declaring that the treaty might simply expire with the intention of securing a “better deal,” Trump inadvertently revealed the political economy of a late-imperial system no longer capable of sustaining the institutional constraints that once underpinned its power. The New START treaty, set to expire in February 2026, represents the last surviving bilateral arms control framework between the United States and Russia after the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. It limits each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and establishes verification mechanisms designed to prevent miscalculation and uncontrolled arms accumulation. Its significance extends beyond quantitative ceilings; it embodies a normative commitment to mutual restraint, acknowledging the catastrophic consequences of unregulated nuclear competition. By treating this mutual deterrence as disposable, the current political climate signals not confidence in strategic superiority but the exhaustion of an institutional culture capable of managing competition between great powers.
The consequences of this erosion are immediate and tangible. On December 30, 2025, the Russian Ministry of Defense released footage displaying the deployment of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile system at an undisclosed site in Belarus. Reportedly capable of carrying nuclear warheads and traveling at speeds exceeding Mach 10, the system was presented as a tool for striking European targets under wartime conditions. This public display followed the first test launch toward Ukraine in November 2024 and was framed by Moscow as a demonstration of strategic capability, ostensibly designed to deter NATO’s eastern flank. The emphasis on such high-speed, nuclear-capable systems, however, cannot be understood purely as technological or military development. It constitutes symbolic escalation: a compensatory response to conventional weaknesses and protracted attrition in Ukraine. The psychological and political calculus of Moscow thus transformed technological demonstration into a mechanism of perceived relevance and deterrence, a strategy that substitutes spectacle for the predictability once guaranteed by enforceable treaties.
Yet to analyze Russia in isolation is to misdiagnose the structural dynamics at play. The collapse of arms control is not driven solely by one state’s choices; it reflects the systemic erosion of self-regulation that historically managed inter-imperial rivalry. The unipolar moment following the Cold War fostered in Washington and more broadly across Western capitals as a belief in selective rule application, a conviction that international norms and treaties could be discarded with minimal consequence. This perspective underpinned withdrawals from multiple international agreements, from arms control to environmental accords, and systematically hollowed out the institutional scaffolding that had once constrained competition among major powers. Europe, once stabilized by dense regimes of limitation, confidence-building, and verification, is now being repositioned as a forward theater of strategic contestation. Advanced missile deployments in Belarus, NATO’s incremental rearmament along the eastern flank, and the normalization of nuclear signaling illustrate a continent undergoing re-militarization under conditions far less predictable than during the bipolar Cold War era. Unlike that earlier epoch, today’s alliances are fragmented, command structures are differentiated, threat perceptions diverge, and domestic political volatility undermines coherent strategy. Trump’s assertion that a “better deal” will emerge after the treaty’s expiration therefore reflects a profound misapprehension of the realities shaping contemporary security. Arms control is never extrinsic to geopolitical negotiation; it functions as a stabilizing instrument dependent upon trust, verification, and transparent channels of communication. Allowing existing laws to lapse does not enhance leverage but increases opacity, suspicion, and the likelihood of pre-emptive calculation, incentivizing both sides to assume worst-case scenarios and accelerate arms accumulation.
Historical precedent underlines the dangers of this dynamic. When institutionalized constraints are removed, military planning defaults to maximal preparedness. Such cycles benefit military-industrial complexes and nationalist rhetoric, yet simultaneously increase the probability of miscalculation, accidental escalation, and, in extremis, nuclear catastrophe. Nuclear stability is never an innate condition; it is an artificial equilibrium maintained by treaties, verification, and sustained diplomatic engagement. The expiration of New START, should it occur without meaningful extension or replacement, risks dismantling decades of institutionalized restraint. Russia’s suggestion that both parties voluntarily maintain deployment limits after the treaty’s formal termination was met with silence from Washington, revealing a strategic environment in which arms control is no longer viewed as a shared responsibility but as a negotiable commodity, subject to unilateral discretion. This shift reflects the exhaustion of a system once capable of regulating rivalry through institutionalization. The abandonment of arms control exemplifies this loss of internal regulatory capacity, marking a transition from managed competition to unmanaged confrontation, from rule-bound deterrence to spectacle-driven intimidation. The Oreshnik missile system is less a revolutionary instrument than a product of strategic vacuum: in the absence of treaties, weapons themselves become the language of diplomacy, signaling power through visibility of destruction rather than predictability of restraint. Hypersonic systems compress decision-making timelines and reduce margins for error, heightening the risk of preemptive strikes or accidental escalation. Verification mechanisms, diplomatic communication, and institutionalized restraint are replaced by signaling and public demonstration, producing an unstable environment in which miscalculation is increasingly probable.
The broader systemic implications of this transformation are substantial. By 2026, U.S. strategic warheads number approximately 5,550, with Russia possessing a comparable inventory. Both nations continue to modernize delivery systems, projected to cost upwards of $2 trillion for the U.S. nuclear enterprise alone over the next two decades, placing immense pressure on public finances and domestic social programs. The political economy of militarization is thus intimately bound to domestic class dynamics: capital benefits disproportionately from arms production, while the broader population bears the economic costs, echoing of imperial expenditure. This reasserts a logic in which the accumulation of force serves the interests of elite industrial and financial constituencies rather than collective security. The deployment of strategic systems in Belarus, for example, provides symbolic reassurance domestically and internationally, yet contributes minimally to the resolution of regional insecurity, exposing the divergence between political spectacle and material stabilization. The erosion of arms control, and the normalization of nuclear signaling, facilitates a return to a pseudo-bloc logic reminiscent of Cold War binaries, yet analytically outdated. Europe is not composed of monolithic blocs; alliances are heterogeneous, threat perception is localized, and states exhibit asymmetric capabilities and strategic culture. Nevertheless, the revival of bloc rhetoric, NATO expansion, Eastern European forward deployment, and public threats of targeting Western forces serves domestic narratives, mobilizing populations behind the specter of encirclement and legitimating escalatory postures. In Ukraine, Western troop deployments are framed by Russia as “legitimate targets,” collapsing distinctions between defensive stabilization and offensive action, demonstrating how rhetoric can substitute for structural insecurity in the absence of institutionalized verification. Such narratives obscure causality and responsibility, amplifying perceived risk to justify intensified militarization.
The human consequences of the ongoing conflict provide the context in which this arms spiral unfolds. By mid-2025, nearly 9.5 million Ukrainians had been displaced, representing over 22 percent of the pre-invasion population. Casualties on both sides, combined with infrastructure destruction, reinforce the logic driving both Russian symbolic escalation and Western deterrent deployments. Planning for a multinational stabilization force in Ukraine projects between 25,000 and 30,000 personnel, modest relative to the hundreds of thousands engaged in combat operations. Such deployments, framed defensively and contingent upon ceasefire agreements, are nonetheless represented by Moscow as existential threats, revealing the instrumentalization of legal and normative ambiguity to consolidate domestic legitimacy and international leverage. The expiration of New START and the parallel dissolution of enforceable arms control structures constitute a systemic crisis. Nuclear doctrine, once disciplined by treaty, verification, and norms, now operates in a vacuum where weapons themselves communicate intent and power. The political economy of the arms spiral is inseparable from capitalist dynamics: military-industrial interests profit from accelerated procurement, nationalists exploit perceived threats for political legitimacy, and the broader population bears the cost of militarization without a corresponding enhancement in security. Strategic behavior is increasingly performative, symbolic, and divorced from the stabilizing logics of institutional restraint. The risk of miscalculation, accidental escalation, or misinterpretation is amplified, producing a precarious equilibrium in which deterrence is maintained not by predictability but by visibility.
In this context, the international system demonstrates the fragility of regulatory capacity. Trust, verification, and the predictability that once characterized strategic competition have been displaced by spectacle, unilateralism, and transactional bargaining. Europe is repositioned as a forward arena for display rather than dialogue. Nuclear weapons are redeployed as instruments of signaling, reinforcing hierarchy, and sustaining the legitimacy of elite power constituencies rather than providing collective security. Arms control, once a functional grammar of restraint, has been reduced to optional theater, susceptible to the whims of short-term political calculation. The stakes of this transformation extend far beyond the U.S.-Russia dyad. The collapse of enforceable arms control undermines multilateral institutions, weakens international law, and erodes confidence in global governance. Smaller states are forced to navigate an environment in which the sovereignty of nuclear powers translates directly into coercive leverage, while normative restraints on escalation become symbolic rather than operative. The political economy of late-imperial militarization is thus revealed: arms and technology serve both as instruments of coercion and as commodities that redistribute economic and political capital within and between states. The expiration of New START, far from being an isolated procedural event, exemplifies a systemic reorganization of strategic behavior around power, spectacle, and the erosion of institutionalized restraint.
Ultimately, the United States’ casual approach to treaty expiration, the symbolic deployment of Russian hypersonic systems, and the broader disintegration of the arms control regime reveal a world in which traditional mechanisms of strategic governance have been subordinated to performative deterrence, domestic political calculation, and the exigencies of capitalist accumulation. The logic of mutual restraint, once enforced through verification, diplomacy, and institutionalization, has given way to a spectacle-driven logic in which weapons themselves communicate power, and miscalculation carries existential risks. In this instance, the exhaustion of arms control, the escalation of nuclear signaling, and the re-militarization of Europe mark precisely such a failure: the collapse of self-regulation, the triumph of spectacle over substance, and the embedding of strategic instability into the very fabric of the global political economy.
Spectacle Over Security: The Political Economy of Strategic Anarchy
The casual, almost cavalier indifference with which Donald Trump has spoken of the impending expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty should not be read as mere bluster or negotiating theatre. It is, in truth, a window into the unraveling of the very anarchy that once held the nuclear world in a precarious, but functional, equilibrium. The treaty, set to lapse in February 2026, is not simply a document of limitations on deployed warheads; it is a fragile scaffold of mutual restraint, a fragile recognition even among adversaries that certain forms of power must be collectively constrained if humanity is to survive its own instruments of destruction. When Trump claimed it could “just expire” because a better deal could be made, he was, whether consciously or not, articulating the political economy of an empire in decline: a system that has lost the capacity for long-term governance and now measures security by the spectacle of force rather than the certainty of institutional regulation.
The consequences of this erosion are neither theoretical nor distant. On December 30, 2025, Russia’s Ministry of Defense released a public display of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile system, deployed at an undisclosed site in Belarus, a missile reportedly capable of carrying nuclear warheads at speeds exceeding Mach 10. It was not a technical demonstration but a performative assertion of strategic visibility, an overt signaling in a context where legal and institutional constraints no longer bind behavior. This display follows a test-firing toward Ukraine in November 2024 and comes at a moment when Russia faces staggering material attrition: by 2025, its military casualties, including killed, wounded, and missing, are estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Ukraine has suffered similarly grievous losses, with over 600,000 military casualties and nearly 10 million people displaced, constituting roughly a quarter of its pre-invasion population. The material exhaustion of both belligerents has produced a strange inversion: where traditional deterrence might have restrained action, symbolic escalation substitutes for the inability to achieve decisive outcomes on the battlefield. Yet to see this as merely a Russian tactic is to misread the systemic pathology at play. The collapse of arms control is not the outcome of one state’s caprice; it is the result of the global reconfiguration that has unfolded since the end of the Cold War. The so-called unipolar moment fostered a dangerous myth: that rules could be applied selectively, that treaties could be abandoned without consequence. The withdrawal from the INF Treaty in 2019, the erosion of the Open Skies Treaty, and the repeated signaling of unconstrained strategic modernization have hollowed out the architecture that once regulated interstate competition. Europe, once stabilized by overlapping regimes of limitation, confidence-building, and verification, now finds itself repositioned as a forward theatre of confrontation, a tableau upon which rival powers stage their coercive capacities without constraint.
The militarization of the continent is no abstraction. Belarus hosts Russia’s newest missile systems; NATO has rearmed its eastern flank; nuclear signaling has been normalized. Yet these developments unfold in a context profoundly different from the Cold War. Alliances are fractured, command structures diffuse, and domestic politics whether in Washington, Warsaw, or Berlin undermine coherence. Trump’s rhetoric that a “better deal” will emerge after New START expires ignores the fact that arms control is not a transactional commodity to be postponed or abandoned; it is a mechanism of trust, verification, and predictability. The collapse of these regimes does not enhance leverage; it intensifies suspicion, incentivizing maximal preparedness and accelerating the arms spiral. History has repeatedly shown that when constraints vanish, military planning defaults to the worst-case scenario. Defense contractors profit, nationalist narratives flourish, but the probability of miscalculation and unintended escalation rises exponentially.
Russia’s suggestion of voluntary limits post-treaty was met with silence in Washington, a refusal even to acknowledge the principle of shared responsibility. This silence is telling. It signals that arms control is no longer perceived as a mutual obligation but as a bargaining chip, expendable at will. The political economy of this transformation is unmistakable: a system that once managed rivalry through institutionalization now operates through spectacle, coercion, and performative intimidation.
The Oreshnik missile system, in this light, is less a revolutionary innovation than a symptom. Its public unveiling substitutes for the absent treaties, verification protocols, and diplomatic channels that once structured strategic behavior. In the absence of institutional discipline, the weapon itself becomes language. Its speed, its reach, its visibility, all constitute communication: a coercive argument expressed materially, rather than diplomatically. This is not advancement but regression, a return to a pre-institutional logic where security is defined by the spectacle of destruction rather than the predictability of restraint. Hypersonic weapons compress decision-making, leaving minimal room for error. Without verification or reliable communication, the risk of accidental or preemptive use becomes acute, destabilizing an already fragile system. Trump’s indifference to the treaty’s expiration is not a trivial domestic signal. It broadcasts globally that the United States will abandon commitments without alternatives, undermining not only the treaty itself but the legitimacy of international agreements as instruments of governance. The erosion of the global arms control regime is inseparable from a wider crisis of order: a world in which institutional memory has been lost, historical lessons ignored, and structural constraints dismissed as inconvenience. In this context, the resurgence of bloc confrontation and the normalization of nuclear rhetoric are not anomalies; they are the logical consequences of structural decay.
What is at stake is not merely the fate of a single treaty but the survival of a grammar of restraint that has prevented nuclear catastrophe for decades. The language of “better deals” and unilateral flexibility conceals a harsher truth: the dismantling of collective safeguards in favor of competitive escalation. This is vulnerability masquerading as confidence. Were arms control to disappear entirely, the world would not become safer. Instead, it would become opaque, volatile, and profoundly unequal. Nuclear weapons would revert to their original function: instruments of coercion embedded in asymmetrical power relations, no longer constrained by mutual fear. The expiration of New START, therefore, is not simply the end of an agreement. It is the symbolic termination of an era in which even in the midst of rivalry, humanity recognized that some forms of power must be collectively restrained.
By 2026, the empirical landscape confirms the instability. NATO’s eastern members collectively maintain over 200,000 active personnel, backed by rapid reaction forces and upgraded missile defenses. Russia continues to maintain strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, forward-deployed artillery, and hypersonic systems. Casualties in Ukraine exceed 1.3 million, with over 11 million displaced and civilian infrastructure devastated. Economic costs surpass $1.2 trillion, fueling domestic instability and social strain. These numbers demonstrate that the spectacle of power is increasingly divorced from operational necessity; it is a performance designed to signal strength, influence perception, and manipulate strategic calculations. In the final analysis, the expiration of New START and the erosion of structured arms control illuminate the intersection of political economy, imperial exhaustion, and strategic spectacle. The absence of enforceable agreements produces incentives for maximal demonstration, unilateral signaling, and coercive assertion. The world of 2026 is more fragile, opaque, and unequal than it has been in decades. Spectacle now substitutes for security, rhetoric for verification, and performance for disciplined risk management. Humanity stands on the threshold of a post-structured strategic era, where the visibility of power eclipses its restraint, and the governance of destruction is subordinated to the logic of display. In this theater, nuclear weapons are no longer instruments of deterrence; they are instruments of spectacle, and the audience whether it is global, apprehensive, and vulnerable watches, unprotected, as the old grammar of restraint unravels before its eyes.
The writer is a graduate student from USM’s School of Social Science, interested in Comparative Politics, Historical Political Economy, and Chinese Politics. Prior to pursuing his undergraduate studies, he worked as a contributing researcher at political institutes and obtained a Bachelor Of Social Science (Hons) in Political Science and Philosophy from University Science Malaysia.
