Nuclear weapons top the agenda nine months after New START expired
The White House said Friday that President Trump will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping next week for an unprecedented three-way summit in Shenzhen, China. The meeting, set for Thursday, forms part of a presidential trip that will also take Trump to the Philippines.
Trump will travel to Asia on Monday and is scheduled to stop in Manila on Tuesday to meet with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. He will then travel on to Shenzhen, China’s tech hub, for a meeting with Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders. The trilateral meeting takes place Thursday, on the sidelines of the president’s visit.
“The president has made it clear that among other topics he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said of the meeting.
A senior U.S. official said the Trump administration does not expect to reach any kind of agreement at the trilateral meeting, and characterized the leaders’ gathering as the first conversation on how to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. The official said China has the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal of the three powers and that it was time for China to step up about the issue.
The meeting will bring together the leaders of the world’s three largest nuclear powers nine months after the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the last treaty limiting the American and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals. Trump has called to replace the agreement with a broader pact that includes Beijing, which has resisted joining arms-control negotiations.
Trump also intends to discuss the continuing war in Iran with Xi and Putin, the senior U.S. official said. The official did not provide details of what the three leaders intend to accomplish on that subject.
The summit plan traces to a proposal Putin floated in a phone call with Trump last month, according to earlier reporting. Trump publicly indicated he was open to the meeting but said he wanted to discuss denuclearization. After the president’s summit with Xi in September, the White House said in a statement that Trump had called for “trilateral arms control negotiations” — language China made no mention of in its official readout of that summit.
Trump will also participate in a bilateral meeting with Xi, Wales said. It will be the fourth time Trump has met with the Chinese leader in just over a year, and Trump has said the two would meet again at the G-20 gathering of major advanced and emerging economies in Miami next month.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, will accompany Trump for parts of the China visit, according to the U.S. official, and is not expected to join the trilateral meeting. Musk flew with Trump to China on Air Force One during the president’s visit to China earlier this year.
The senior U.S. official said Trump is not expected to discuss Ukraine at the trilateral meeting, despite Putin’s original proposal to use the event to discuss plans to end the conflict. The prospect of the three leaders meeting to negotiate Ukraine’s future without the country’s leadership at the table had alarmed officials in Kyiv.
“Inviting Putin to such a meeting would feed his appetite for self-aggrandizement and give him a stature he does not deserve,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said last month, adding that such a meeting would only “encourage Putin to continue this war.”
No bilateral meeting between Trump and Putin is scheduled, the U.S. official said.