US President Donald Trump is meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing at a moment when the global arms control architecture is in tatters. The Eleventh Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in New York is heading toward its third consecutive failure to produce a consensus document. New START expired in February, leaving the United States and Russia without binding limits on their strategic arsenals for the first time since the 1970s. Every permanent member of the UN Security Council (P5) is expanding its nuclear capabilities, and artificial intelligence is compressing decision-making time in targeting and surveillance systems.
Yet the picture is not entirely bleak, provided the focus shifts from multilateral initiatives to bilateral nuclear agreements. An understanding between Washington and Beijing—even a modest one—could deliver more nuclear stability in this decade than the UN process has produced in 15 years. The question is what a new Sino-American understanding of strategic stability looks like in practice, and this week's summit can begin to answer it.
China's Record on Arms Control
Beijing's contribution to nuclear restraint deserves more recognition than Western capitals typically grant. For six decades, China has been the only P5 member to maintain a doctrinal no-first-use commitment. While Western analysts have repeatedly doubted its operational reality, as a matter of declaratory policy, it has held. China's standing offer to negotiate a mutual no-first-use commitment among the P5, tabled at successive NPT preparatory committees, is the most concrete proposal on the table for reducing nuclear-use risk between major powers.
Beijing has also consistently argued that strategic stability cannot be discussed in isolation from conventional weapons. Long-range conventional precision-strike systems can now destroy hardened targets that previously only nuclear weapons could reliably hit. From Beijing's perspective—and increasingly from Russian and Western technical analysts—a sufficiently capable conventional first strike against silo fields and mobile launchers, followed by missile-defense interception of surviving retaliatory forces, could in principle leave a targeted state without effective retaliation. Whether such a scenario is operationally realistic is debated, but it is taken seriously in Chinese planning.
This dynamic fuels the current security dilemma between the US and China. American observers see new Chinese silo construction across three desert fields, expanding submarine patrols, and new warhead-related infrastructure. Chinese observers see US conventional long-range strike, expanded missile defense, and the designation of China as the principal strategic competitor, concluding that Washington is preparing the same. Each side reads the other through its worst-case lens—a dangerous spiral that is easier to fall into than to climb out of.
Practical Steps Without a Treaty
A meaningful US-China conversation on strategic stability can begin without a treaty. Confidence-building steps agreed at the political level in Beijing are within reach. A pre-launch missile notification regime, similar to what Washington and Moscow maintained for decades even at the height of the Cold War, is the most obvious place to start. A robust crisis communication channel—beyond the existing military hotline used sparingly—would be the second. A mutual understanding not to interfere with the other side's nuclear command-and-control infrastructure, even by non-nuclear means, would address the most plausible cause of unintended escalation in a regional crisis.
None of these requires numerical ceilings or waiting for progress at the UN in New York. These tangible efforts would reduce the risk that peacetime competition escalates into war through mere misperception. A reciprocal framework on regional-range nuclear forces would be the most consequential subsequent step: clarity on Chinese short-range nuclear forces in exchange for clarity on America's forward-deployed nuclear posture in the Asia-Pacific. This would address the most acute first-use anxieties from both sides without reducing either country's overall arsenal.
Ultimately, this week's conversation does not need to produce a joint commitment to be vital. An honest discussion of what each side would need to make pledges credible would mark the start of a bilateral process that could reshape strategic stability in the Indo-Pacific. For a region watching closely—from Seoul to New Delhi to Jakarta—the outcome in Beijing could determine whether the next decade sees arms control revival or further erosion. As managing US-China rivalry without war becomes ever more urgent, the stakes could not be higher.
