In 1984, a young, suave Donald Trump, rising to prominence as a New York real estate magnate, was profiled by the Washington Post. Though the glittering Trump Tower, his model wife, and his growing name recognition all garnered column inches, he told the reporter over lunch that he had a grand new obsession: negotiating a new set of nuclear arms control treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union, ushering in a golden era of cooperation. “Nothing,” he told another reporter in 1985, “matters as much to me now” as the nuclear question.

That story would be a fitting bookend to a career in which President Trump, now in his 70s, finally ushered in a new, modern era of arms control. Instead, both in his first administration and his current term in office, the president has presided over the slow, lingering decay of the last remnants of Cold War and post-Cold War arms control, culminating last week with the effective death of the New START deal with Russia.

In 1984, a young, suave Donald Trump, rising to prominence as a New York real estate magnate, was profiled by the Washington Post. Though the glittering Trump Tower, his model wife, and his growing name recognition all garnered column inches, he told the reporter over lunch that he had a grand new obsession: negotiating a new set of nuclear arms control treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union, ushering in a golden era of cooperation. “Nothing,” he told another reporter in 1985, “matters as much to me now” as the nuclear question.

That story would be a fitting bookend to a career in which President Trump, now in his 70s, finally ushered in a new, modern era of arms control. Instead, both in his first administration and his current term in office, the president has presided over the slow, lingering decay of the last remnants of Cold War and post-Cold War arms control, culminating last week with the effective death of the New START deal with Russia.

Contrary to some of the heated rhetoric, it’s not necessarily the end of the world that classic, Cold War-style arms control is going away. As we move into a more multipolar world—particularly given the rise of China and the proliferation of new, more exotic weapons systems—bilateral treaties between the United States and Russia based on numeric caps are limited in their utility.

Yet Trump was right, even back in the 1980s. A world with no arms control is a terrifying prospect: a more dangerous, volatile world prone to arms racing and brinkmanship.

Fortunately, the death of........

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