US President Donald Trump is meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, with the arms control architecture, global and bilateral alike, in collapse. The Eleventh Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, now underway in New York, is sliding toward a third successive failure to produce a consensus document.

New START expired on February 5, leaving the US and Russia without binding limits on their strategic arsenals for the first time since the 1970s. The global arms control system is on life support at a time of unprecedented global nuclear risks.

Every permanent member of the Security Council (P5) is now expanding their nuclear capabilities. Artificial intelligence is entering the targeting, surveillance, and decision-support systems that surround nuclear forces, compressing the time leaders have to think before they act.

And yet the moment is not as bleak as it appears, provided the focus shifts from global initiatives to bilateral nuclear agreements. An understanding between China and the US —even a modest one — would deliver more nuclear stability this decade than the multilateral process at the UN has produced in 15 years.

Strategic stability in the Cold War between the US and Russia rested on a logic  whereby two roughly symmetrical arsenals, mutual assured destruction, and verification regimes gave each side confidence in the other’s posture. None of those conditions describes the current Sino-American nuclear relations.

China’s arsenal is the third-largest and growing, but remains well below American and Russian totals. Verification of Chinese forces does not exist in any binding form. And the most destabilizing developments today, particularly long-range conventional precision strike, AI-enabled wide-area surveillance, and hypersonic systems that blur the line between conventional and nuclear payload, are not included in contemporary arms control initiatives.

What a new Sino-American understanding of strategic stability looks like in practice is the question this week’s summit can begin to answer.

Beijing’s record on arms control

Against this backdrop, China’s contribution to nuclear restraint deserves more recognition than Western capitals typically accord it. For six decades, Beijing has been the only P5 member to maintain a doctrinal no-first-use commitment. That commitment has been repeatedly doubted by Western analysts, but, as a matter of declaratory policy, it has held to this day.

China’s standing offer to negotiate a mutual no-first-use commitment among the P5, tabled in working papers at successive NPT preparatory committees, is not merely rhetorical. It may be the single most concrete proposal on the table for reducing nuclear-use risk between the major powers.

The objection that doctrine and operational reality may diverge is one to make in principle, but it risks shifting the goalposts. Public doctrine is the foundation of any country’s nuclear policy, and a P5 no-first-use understanding would constrain Washington and Moscow in ways their current postures do not.

Beijing has been similarly consistent in arguing that strategic stability cannot be discussed in isolation from conventional weapons. Long-range conventional precision-strike weapons can now destroy the hardened targets that previously only nuclear weapons could reliably destroy.

From Beijing’s perspective—and increasingly from the perspectives of Russian and Western technical analysts—a sufficiently capable conventional first strike against silo fields and mobile launchers, followed by missile-defense interception of whatever retaliatory force survives, could, in principle, leave the targeted state without effective retaliation. Whether such a scenario is operationally realistic is debated.

Nonetheless, it is taken seriously in Chinese planning. This is, in a sense, the engine of the present security dilemma between the US and China. American observers see new Chinese silo construction across three large 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 and conclude that Washington is preparing the same. Each side reads the other through its worst-case lens; this is inherently dangerous, as this security dilemma is easier to fall into than to climb out of.

Vital summit

A meaningful US-China conversation on strategic stability can begin without a treaty. It requires confidence-building steps that can be agreed upon at the political level in Beijing. A pre-launch missile notification regime, of the kind 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 that has been 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 either side to accept numerical ceilings, nor to wait for progress at the UN in New York. These tangible efforts would reduce the risk that peacetime competition could escalate into war through mere misperception.

Moreover, 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, 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 both pledges credible would mark the start of a bilateral dialogue that has been missing for 50 years. Such conversations took place at the height of the Cold War. The door is open in Beijing this week.

Dan Plesch is professor of diplomacy and strategy at SOAS University of London. He is the founder of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in Washington, D.C., a former senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) in London, and a ‘door tenant’ at the legal chambers of 9 Bedford Row.

Manuel Galileo is a chartered civil engineer and a foreign affairs, AI, public policy, and military analyst. He is an associate tutor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a research fellow at SOAS University of London.