The 2026 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons opens in New York under conditions that would put it under a great test. While there is a fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran, strikes on various nuclear facilities operating under IAEA safeguards, and an intensifying mistrust between nuclear and non-nuclear states have placed the NPT regime under pressures it was not designed to absorb. The temptation, given this environment, is to lower expectations, which to treat the conference as a space for declaratory affirmation and to count a shared communique as success enough.
The NPT regime is not failing for want of principles. It is failing because its institutions have repeatedly stopped short of applying those principles where application is most needed. The 2026 Review Conference has neither the authority to impose settlements nor the power to compel disarmament overnight. But it does possess something underused and undervalued, which is the collective political weight of its membership, and a mandate broad enough to pursue a genuinely constructive agenda across variegated fronts simultaneously.
Establishing a Norm Against Attacking Safeguarded Facilities
The most urgent task before the conference is also the most concrete. The strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in summer 2025 and in early 2026 and represent a qualitative departure from previous patterns of conflict involving nuclear-adjacent infrastructure. Whatever one’s assessment of the strategic calculations involved, the targeting of facilities operating under IAEA safeguards sets a precedent with consequences that extend far beyond the immediate context. If states conclude that safeguards offer no protection against military force, the incentive to accept or maintain them is correspondingly weakened.
What it can do is act on Article VI’s spirit and the IAEA’s foundational mandate to affirm, in terms clear enough to carry normative weight, that safeguarded facilities are not legitimate military targets under any circumstances. It should be framed as a protection for all of them. A consensus statement to that effect, supported by the conference’s full membership, would constitute a genuine advance in international humanitarian and non-proliferation law, and would give future IAEA boards of governors firmer ground on which to act.
Demanding Measurable Disarmament Progress
The NPT’s foundational bargain has been eroding for years, and the erosion is not symmetrical. Non-nuclear-weapon states have, by and large, honoured their commitments. Nuclear-weapon states have not. Modernisation programmes in the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France are proceeding at considerable expense and ambition, while the arms control architecture that once gave those programmes some degree of external constraint has largely collapsed. The New START Treaty has lapsed without a successor. Multilateral disarmament negotiations have stalled. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty remains unratified by key states.
The Review Conference may not be able to compel disarmament. But it can, and should, adopt language that moves beyond the declaratory commitments that have satisfied nuclear-weapon states at past conferences while satisfying no one else. Specifically, the conference should call for a concrete timetable for resumed bilateral and multilateral arms control negotiations, define measurable benchmarks against which progress can be assessed before the next review cycle, and establish a reporting mechanism with enough transparency to hold nuclear states publicly accountable. In reality, these would not revolutionary acts. All of it is overdue. The credibility of the non-proliferation side of the bargain depends, in the long run, on the disarmament side being taken seriously.
Rebuilding Trust with Non-Aligned States
The politics of the current conference reflect a fracture that has been solidifying for over a decade. Many non-nuclear states, particularly those in the Non-Aligned Movement, no longer regard the NPT as an instrument of genuine security partnership. They see it as a regime that imposes obligations on the weak while shielding the strategic prerogatives of the strong. Iran’s election to a vice-presidential role at this conference, supported by a broad coalition of developing states, is not an anomaly. It is a protest of these states states against the NPT status quo that they are not trusting it anymore.
It is a sound signal. And it deserves to be read as one.
Rebuilding that trust requires the conference to take seriously the concerns that have produced this fracture. The inconsistency with which non-proliferation norms are applied and the gap between nuclear-weapon states’ declaratory commitments and their actual conduct are not rhetorical grievances. They are structural problems that undermine the regime’s authority among the states whose continued participation it most depends on. A Review Conference that acknowledges these asymmetries honestly, and proposes institutional mechanisms to address them, will have done more for the NPT’s long-term health than any number of consensus paragraphs that paper over the cracks.
What is the way forward?
None of this is easy, simply put. The diplomatic conditions are difficult, the great-power relationships that underpin the treaty are under strain, and the domestic politics of nuclear-weapon states are not, at this moment, particularly hospitable to arms control. A cynic would note that review conferences have faced comparable obstacles before and produced comparable disappointments.
But there are reasons, this time, to believe that the pressure for a more substantive outcome is harder to deflect than in previous cycles. The strikes on safeguarded facilities have concentrated minds in ways that years of abstract argumentation about disarmament timelines could not. The Non-Aligned Movement’s growing assertiveness has changed the internal politics of the conference in ways that make performative consensus more difficult to achieve. And the recognition, even among states traditionally resistant to stronger non-proliferation commitments, that the regime’s declining credibility ultimately serves no one’s interests, is more widespread than it was a decade ago.
Change in multilateral arms control is always slow, always partial, and always contested. The 2026 Review Conference will not transform the nuclear order. But if it succeeds in establishing a norm against attacking safeguarded facilities, in extracting credible disarmament commitments with genuine accountability attached, and in demonstrating to non-nuclear states that their concerns receive a hearing rather than a rebuff, it will have advanced the treaty’s authority in ways that matter. That is not a modest ambition dressed up in careful language. It is what a functioning Review Conference, meeting its mandate seriously, ought to accomplish.
Author: Moneeb Mir, Associate Research Officer, Center for International Strategic Studies, AJK.
