The lapse of the New START treaty has done more than remove numerical ceilings on the nuclear weapons arsenals of Russia and the United States. The treaty’s demise has dismantled a system of shared knowledge — inspections, data exchanges and notification regimes — that made credible commitments possible.

This outcome reflects more than a discrete policy failure. It reflects Trump’s worldview — call it a dealmaker’s epistemology. In this view, durable institutional knowledge is not an asset but a constraint. Negotiations are not cumulative processes through which states learn about one another over time, but discrete transactions in which leverage matters more than memory.

Hence Trump’s confidence in dispatching amateur envoys like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — unburdened by knowledge of prior negotiations — to resolve immensely complex conflicts. Inexperience is not a handicap in this view; it is a qualification.

© The Japan Times