Speaking at a foreign policy forum in Moscow, the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the global security system was “eroding.” Russia’s claim that nuclear weapons remain the only real barrier against global war is designed to sound blunt, even pragmatic. In one sense, it reflects an old strategic truth: for decades, the fear of mutual destruction has acted as a brake on direct confrontation between the world’s most powerful states. But in 2026, the more important question is not whether nuclear deterrence still matters. It is what it says about the state of international politics that the world has once again returned to it as its primary language of security.
The timing of the Kremlin’s remarks is significant. The expiry of New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, has removed the final formal cap on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. At the same time, tensions in the Middle East, including the direct confrontation between the United States and Iran, have pushed the nuclear question back into everyday geopolitical debate. Add to that the war in Ukraine, intensifying US-China rivalry, and renewed military spending across Europe and Asia, and it becomes clear that nuclear deterrence is no longer a Cold War relic. It is once again central to how major powers think about leverage, risk and survival.
For much of the post-Cold War era, there was at least a nominal belief that the world was moving, however unevenly, toward stronger multilateral institutions, arms control frameworks and diplomatic conflict management. That optimism has largely evaporated. In its place is a harder, more transactional world in which power is measured not only by economic influence or diplomatic reach, but by military credibility and escalation capacity. In that environment, nuclear weapons are not just tools of defence; they become political instruments, symbols of status, and in some cases insurance policies against regime change or foreign intervention.
This is partly why the Iran question has become so consequential. The concern is not simply whether Tehran seeks a nuclear weapons capability. It is that the broader global environment increasingly rewards states that can deter external coercion. For countries watching the selective application of international law, the lesson is uncomfortable but obvious: states without strategic deterrence are often more vulnerable to intervention than those with it. That does not justify proliferation, but it does explain why nuclear politics cannot be understood purely in moral or legal terms, divorced from the realities of power.
The challenge, then, is that the world is entering a period where deterrence is expanding at the very moment arms control is shrinking. The old architecture that once managed nuclear rivalry is weakening, but no serious replacement has emerged. Washington wants future agreements to include China; Beijing sees no reason to accept parity with arsenals far larger than its own; Moscow insists that Britain and France must also be part of the equation. The result is stalemate. Everyone agrees the strategic environment is changing, but no one agrees on the rules that should govern it.
For the Global South, this matters in ways that go far beyond abstract security theory. Many developing states do not possess nuclear weapons, are not part of extended deterrence arrangements, and have little influence over the strategic decisions of the major powers. Yet they are often the first to absorb the consequences of geopolitical breakdown: disrupted energy markets, food price shocks, militarised shipping routes, sanctions spillovers, and growing pressure to align with one bloc or another. In other words, while nuclear deterrence may be discussed in Washington, Moscow or Beijing as a stabilising doctrine, its broader consequences are often exported outward.
That is why the current debate should not be reduced to a simple choice between deterrence and disarmament. Nuclear weapons have undeniably shaped strategic restraint among major powers, but they have also entrenched a deeply unequal global order in which a handful of states reserve for themselves the right to define security for everyone else. The real danger today is not only the existence of nuclear arsenals; it is the normalisation of a world in which diplomacy is increasingly secondary to military signalling, and in which strategic credibility is valued more highly than political imagination.
If Russia is right that nuclear deterrence remains one of the key barriers against direct great-power war, that should not be read as a vindication of the current order. It should be read as an indictment of it. A stable international system cannot rest indefinitely on the assumption that rational actors will always stop short of catastrophe. Nor can the world afford to treat the collapse of arms control as a technical issue rather than a political one.
The question facing the international community is not whether deterrence still works in the narrowest strategic sense. It is whether a world that increasingly depends on it is becoming safer, or simply more accustomed to living with permanent insecurity.
Written by:
*Dr Iqbal Survé
Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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