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The last remaining U.S.–Russia nuclear arms–control treaty, New START, expires on Feb. 5—and, with less than 48 hours to go, President Donald Trump hasn’t done anything about it.

Asked about the impending deadline in his New York Times interview last month, Trump replied, “If it expires, it expires. We’ll do a better agreement,” maybe one that brings in China—which has a growing nuclear arsenal—as a participant.

If past is precedent, a new treaty would take at least a year to negotiate; if China takes part, something that has never happened before, it would take many years.

In the meantime, we may well see the renewal of a nuclear arms race, reversing a trend of the past half-century. The stunning thing is that, by all accounts, Trump and his advisers haven’t so much as held a conversation about the possibility or its implications for U.S. policy or the safety of the world.

It’s worth recalling that when Trump scuttled the Iran nuclear deal back during his first term as president, he said that he—master of the “art of the deal”—would goad Tehran into accepting a “better” deal. This never happened. There is no reason to believe, especially given Washington’s tense relations with both Moscow and Beijing, that he’ll bring about a superior substitute for New START either.

New START—the acronym stands for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—was signed by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in February 2011, as a follow-on to previous accords, START and START II, which George H.W. Bush had signed with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, respectively. The Obama–Medvedev treaty went further than the earlier accords, forcing each side to cut its long-range nuclear arsenals to 1,550 warheads—a 30 percent reduction from START II’s limits, a 75 percent cut from START’s. It also allowed very intrusive on-site inspections of each side’s arsenals to verify that they were in compliance.

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New START was set to expire after 10 years. Obama envisioned negotiating, well before then, a follow-on accord that would make still deeper cuts, including short- and medium-range missiles. But it never happened. The U.S. had long ago dismantled almost all of those weapons, for good reason, while Russia retained about 2,000, which it wanted to keep to counter NATO’s superiority in conventional armies (just as, during much of the Cold War, the U.S. and NATO kept thousands of nukes in Western Europe to counter the Soviet Union’s conventional edge). Plus, after Putin returned as Russia’s president and started rattling sabers in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere,........

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