Three working days before the Eleventh Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is scheduled to conclude in New York, delegates are negotiating against a thirteen-page zero draft that the conference president, Ambassador Do Hung Viet of Vietnam, circulated on May 6. The draft is deliberately spare, written by his own account in an April Arms Control Today interview to clear the underbrush of inherited grievance so that core principles have somewhere to sit. The fight on the floor is not really about the language anymore. It is about whether a third consecutive failure to reach consensus, after 2015, after 2020/2022, after the 2025 PrepCom that could not agree even on recommendations, would mark the moment the treaty review system has stopped being a working forum. The U.S. consequence is direct: the NPT is the legal architecture that lets Washington police every nuclear question outside the P5, from Iran to South Korean and Saudi hedging to the rest of the export-control regime that American firms operate inside. If the review process collapses as a venue, the architecture does not collapse with it, but the diplomatic surface on which the United States has historically built its non-proliferation campaigns gets narrower.
What is in the room: a draft written to survive, not to lead
The zero draft, by the accounts of Libby Flatoff and Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association published May 11, is written in an economical style that avoids most of the named-and-shamed language earlier drafts at past conferences carried. Ambassador Do Hung Viet had previewed this design in his April interview with Arms Control Today, telling editors Daryl Kimball and Carol Giacomo, “I have tried my best to really be in a listening mode, to hear the concerns,” and adding, “To me, everyone is a friend.” The draft’s brevity is the strategy: a thirteen-page outcome that names no aggressor by country, makes no novel binding commitment, and forecloses no future negotiation is harder for any one delegation to veto. Whether that is enough is the open question of week four. Non-nuclear-weapon states, according to the Arms Control Association’s reporting from the floor, are pressing for stronger and more time-specific language on Article VI disarmament obligations. Several nuclear-armed states are pressing in the opposite direction, asking the text to acknowledge that the geopolitical environment makes near-term disarmament progress unrealistic.
The procedural innovation the president has reached for — circulating a draft early in the second week, rather than in the last 48 hours — is itself a response to the failure mode of the 2022 review conference, where a final text appeared with no time to negotiate it and Russia blocked consensus in the closing hours. Doing it earlier creates room to negotiate. It also creates room for objections to harden into red lines and remain there.
The P5 are not arguing as a P5
The five nuclear-weapon states recognized by the NPT (the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France) have not behaved as a coordinated bloc at this conference and have not been expected to. The European Union’s general statement, delivered on the conference’s opening day, called Russia’s nuclear rhetoric in its war against Ukraine “irresponsible, provocative, dangerous and escalatory” and called on Moscow to reverse its de-ratification of the test-ban treaty. The United States delegation, according to the Arms Control Association’s May 11 readout, has resisted test-ban-entry-into-force language and proposed instead a P5 working group on confidence-building measures around testing, a substitution the analysts described, in their own assessment, as “troubling and befuddling,” given that test-ban entry into force is a goal previous review conferences had reached consensus on. Russia has pushed back against the draft’s treatment of nuclear facility security threats in Ukraine, where European delegations have argued the text fails to identify Russia as responsible. China’s posture, communicated through statements at the 2025 PrepCom and at the Main Committees this round, has emphasized the peaceful-uses pillar: the third leg of the NPT bargain that Beijing has consistently framed as under-served by Western drafts.
The Tarja Cronberg analysis published by the European Leadership Network last July put the structural problem in terms the conference has not solved. The June 2025 U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, she argued, established a precedent that nuclear-armed states could intervene militarily against a non-nuclear NPT party on the basis of contested intent. That precedent, regardless of how anyone scores Iran’s own compliance, alters the bargain non-nuclear states signed in 1968. The draft does not adjudicate that precedent. It cannot. But the delegations sitting at the table know it is there.
The non-aligned and the humanitarian camps are pulling in different directions
The Non-Aligned Movement, which holds most of the conference’s vice-presidencies by regional allocation and which carries the operational majority of states parties, has organized this round around the Middle East file. Oman hosted the marquee side event on the Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction on May 1; Ambassador Omar Al Kathiri, Oman’s permanent representative and that conference’s president, called the zone a “pressing strategic priority” consistent with the NPT framework. Ambassador Maged Abdelaziz of the League of Arab States used the same event to put the question that the NPT process has never been able to answer aloud: how the zone process can advance when “one regional state, Israel, does not attend.” Egypt’s permanent representative, Ambassador Ihab Awad, was more direct still, arguing that the parallel UN conference process on the zone should “facilitate the NPT process, not replace it.”
Running alongside the non-aligned push is the humanitarian-disarmament camp (Austria, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the bulk of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons signatories), which has used its interventions to defend the zero draft’s language on “catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use” of nuclear weapons. The U.S. delegation, according to the Arms Control Association readout, suggested in committee that “not every potential use of nuclear weapons would lead to catastrophic humanitarian” consequences. That is a sentence Vienna, Mexico City, Dublin, and Pretoria all separately treat as a red line. The TPNW states are not at this conference to win a clause; they are at it to defend a normative perimeter built over a decade of humanitarian-impact conferences. The first TPNW review conference is scheduled at UN Headquarters for the week of November 30. The Austrian and Mexican delegations are negotiating in New York this month with that calendar already on the desk.
We may lose the credibility of the NPT itself, and the review process. — Ambassador Do Hung Viet, President of the Eleventh Review Conference, in his April 2026 Arms Control Today interview with Daryl Kimball and Carol Giacomo
The IAEA: institutional view from Vienna
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, used his April 29 press briefing on the conference, the recording of which is archived on UN Web TV, to underline an institutional fact that the political delegations have spent the conference trying to argue past. Iran’s nuclear program, Grossi said in the briefing, has made “exponential progress” over the past several years, with last-generation centrifuges and new facilities at Esfahan. He framed the bigger institutional problem in his own terms: the common denominator that historically allowed the P5 to converge on Iran “is no longer there,” he said, adding that it did not mean some degree of consensus could not be rebuilt, “but at the moment, unlike in the past, we don’t have it.” That assessment is the IAEA’s posture on the floor: the safeguards system can verify what Iran is doing, but the political consensus that historically underwrote enforcement is the thing that has gone missing. The agency does not have a draft to negotiate. It has a regime to inspect, and an institutional interest in the regime continuing to exist.
The U.S. consequence, named
For American policy, the regime question is the operational one. The NPT is the document that authorizes the IAEA’s safeguards system, that gives the United States the legal standing to press non-proliferation cases at the UN Security Council, and that frames every export-control conversation U.S. nuclear suppliers have with foreign partners. A failed outcome document does not vacate any of those legal mechanisms; they sit in the treaty itself, which has not been amended since 1970, and in subsidiary agreements that operate independently of the review process. What a third consecutive failed outcome would do is narrower and harder to quantify. It would mean the central diplomatic venue through which the United States historically organizes coalitions on non-proliferation has, for fifteen straight years, produced no agreed text. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, who has attended every review conference since 1995, has argued in the association’s April analysis that effective U.S. leadership at this round is “unlikely,” which means the political work of holding the regime together is being done — to the extent it is being done — by middle powers. Vietnam holds the gavel. Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, Austria, Mexico, Egypt, and Oman are carrying the floor. The U.S. delegation, led by John Zadrozny, chief of staff to Under Secretary of State Thomas DiNanno, is at the table without a Senate-confirmed ambassador in the chair, a structural choice by the State Department that Kimball flagged at the conference’s opening.
For American citizens, the chain runs through three concrete places. The first is Iran: a U.S. policy that has alternated between the JCPOA, withdrawal, sanctions, and direct strikes is held together at the legal level by the NPT itself; without the treaty, Iran’s NPT obligations dissolve, and the safeguards-violation case the United States brings to the Board of Governors loses its statutory predicate. The second is the South Korean and Saudi nuclear hedging debate, both of which exist precisely because the credibility of the U.S. extended-deterrence guarantee has frayed; both are containable inside an NPT regime that retains its political weight, and harder to contain outside one. The third is the export-control regime that determines what American nuclear technology firms can sell, and to whom. Its political authority is downstream of the NPT consensus that Washington has spent the past three review conferences failing to renew.
What three days does and does not change
A consensus outcome on Friday is achievable. Ambassador Do Hung Viet has told delegations he intends to keep the draft short enough to clear, and his April framing, that he expects “very practical steps” rather than “any major new commitment,” sets a low bar deliberately. A failure to reach consensus is also possible. The procedural alternatives the William Potter and Sarah Bidgood essay laid out in September, namely that voting remains permissible under existing rules and that a non-consensus outcome is not automatically a failure, have been discussed in delegation corridors but not invoked. What Friday will not change is the structural fact ELN’s Jana Baldus put cleanly in the network’s May 13 reflection on the conference: “Avoiding collapse should not be confused with progress.” The regime question — whether the NPT review process is still a place where the treaty is reviewed, or only a place where states parties demonstrate that they still come — is a question the text on the table this week cannot, on its own, answer. It is a question the next decade of safeguards inspections, Article VI negotiations, and Middle East zone consultations will answer instead.