President Trump is set to sit down with Xi Jinping and Vladimir V. Putin in China next week, a first-ever trilateral meeting that folds the leaders of the United States, China and Russia into one conversation. The talks come as Trump is expected to raise nuclear proliferation and, officials say, skip Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The meeting will happen during a summit in China, and it will be the third time Trump has met Xi in person this year. That alone gives the talks unusual weight: one leader from a country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, one from a country whose buildup Washington has been watching closely, and one who is trying to keep the agenda narrow enough to avoid a broader confrontation.
Olivia Wales said Trump would also address the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, echoing the administration’s concern that the spread of atomic arms is becoming more dangerous. In the same remarks, Wales said Trump believes proliferation is very dangerous. That warning lands against a hard deadline already behind the United States and Russia: a nuclear arms control treaty between them expired in February.
Officials say the White House wants the talks focused on nuclear proliferation rather than the war in Ukraine, and they do not expect any agreement to emerge from the discussion. One official said Trump was prepared to discuss Beijing’s nuclear arsenal with Xi, while U.S. officials have pointed to a steady buildup in China’s arsenal in recent years and to estimates that China is on track to have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030.
Trump’s schedule next week underscores how tightly packed the diplomatic travel is. Two senior administration officials said he will travel to Manila for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and then on to Shenzhen for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, where he will meet Xi and then both Xi and Putin in Shenzhen. The officials said Elon Musk will also be in Shenzhen but will not be part of the trilateral meeting.
The path to the talks has its own limits. Trump said this week he had no plans to discuss with Xi the scandal that had engulfed Jensen Huang, signaling that he intends to keep the meeting tightly controlled. That makes the unanswered question less whether the leaders will talk about nuclear weapons than whether a first meeting of this kind can produce anything more than a carefully managed exchange.
