Photo: The White House / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
President Donald Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping next week in China, the White House confirmed on Friday, in the first trilateral meeting of the leaders of the world’s three largest nuclear powers.
The meeting will take place on Thursday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales told reporters on a call previewing Trump’s trip to Asia. Trump will use the session to discuss reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals and to raise the war in Iran with both leaders. The war in Ukraine is not expected to be discussed in that forum, a senior US official said.
“The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world. This proliferation, President Trump believes, is very dangerous,” Wales said.
A First for the World’s Three Nuclear Powers
The three leaders have never sat down together in a three-way meeting. All three attended the larger Group of 20 summit in 2019, but a dedicated trilateral session has never taken place. The meeting will come toward the end of Trump’s visit to China, after his scheduled bilateral meeting and working lunch with Xi on Thursday afternoon. There will be no separate bilateral meeting between Trump and Putin, a White House official said.
The APEC summit brings together 21 economies in the southern Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen, but analysts say the three-way meeting could overshadow the gathering itself. Expectations for concrete results are low: a senior US official who briefed reporters said the administration does not expect the first meeting to produce an agreement of any kind.
“We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement. I would characterize this as the entry point, the first conversation,” the official said.
Nuclear Arms Control After New START Expired
Nuclear arms control is the most pressing item on the agenda. The last nuclear arms pact between Russia and the United States, known as New START, expired in February, leaving the two largest atomic arsenals without limits for the first time in more than half a century. Trump turned down a Russian request to extend the deal for a year.
The United States and Russia each hold more than 5,000 nuclear warheads, according to Pentagon estimates, while China holds more than 600 — an arsenal US officials say is growing by far the fastest in the world. Trump has floated the idea of a grand three-way pact to reduce stockpiles since his first term, arguing that it is unnecessarily costly to maintain firepower sufficient to destroy the world many times over, but the concept has never come to fruition.
Analysts cautioned that the Shenzhen meeting is likely to carry more symbolic weight than substance. One expert said he would be shocked if the meeting produced any joint statement on denuclearization.
Iran on the Agenda, Ukraine Off It
A senior US official confirmed that Trump intends to raise the war in Iran with both Xi and Putin, but does not plan to discuss the war in Ukraine in the same forum. The war in Iran, which began in February when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, remains deadlocked, and Trump said this week that the conflict “militarily is effectively over” and that a deal with Tehran is no longer needed.
Trump last met Putin in person at a summit in Alaska, and he hosted Xi at the White House in September. The trilateral announcement comes as the White House manages the fallout from the resignation of Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who stepped down after the disclosure of an affair with a woman suspected by US intelligence of being a Chinese agent.
Trump’s Asia trip begins with a stop in the Philippines before he travels on to China for the APEC summit. The White House has not specified the exact time of the trilateral meeting.
Sources: Reuters; Associated Press via Arab News