The 11th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) concluded on May 22. Held every five years, the conference offers an opportunity to evaluate the treaty’s implementation, respond to technological and geopolitical developments, and reinforce states’ commitment to the treaty. For the third time in a row, the conference failed to reach consensus on a final document.We asked five experts for their perspectives on what the conference achieved — or failed to achieve.Read more below.Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Host of War on the Rocks’ Thinking the Unthinkable PodcastWhile the latest NPT review conference concluded without a consensus outcome document, the treaty itself is not broken, but bent. Anyone with a realistic appraisal of where matters stand in the global nuclear order — amid great power rivalries, illegal wars of choice in Ukraine and Iran, and growing proliferation pressures — should be unsurprised at the lack of consensus, despite the best efforts of multilateral diplomats and Do Hung Viet, the president of the review conference. The bigger problem is that every consecutive review conference since 2015 has reached this outcome, suggesting a longer-term process of fragmentation, driven primarily by growing discord among the nuclear-weapon states — chiefly Russia, the United States, and China. By one measure, the fact that, 16 years on since the last consensus document, the treaty’s members continue to view the treaty as the essential load-bearing column of the global nuclear order should be reassuring. But, on the current trajectory, the treaty’s long-term health cannot be taken for granted.Kingston Reif Senior International and Defense Researcher at RANDThe review conference failed to reach consensus on an outcome document — the third consecutive such failure. The proximate cause was reportedly an inability to reconcile Washington’s insistence on singling out Iran’s noncompliance with its
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