President Trump will hold a joint meeting with Xi Jinping and Vladimir V. Putin during APEC in China next week, a first trilateral session for the three leaders. Olivia Wales, the White House spokeswoman, told reporters by telephone that Mr. Trump would discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, including the threat of nuclear proliferation.
Mr. Trump will first travel to Manila and then to Shenzhen for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. He will meet Xi in Shenzhen before sitting down with Xi and Putin together, making the encounter his third in-person meeting with Xi this year. The trip places the APEC talks at the center of a tightly sequenced diplomatic tour.
Shenzhen and the trilateral format
The White House said the meeting would focus in part on nuclear proliferation, a subject U.S. officials have raised as China expands its arsenal. China is on track to have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, a scale that gives the discussion a narrower and more technical shape than a broad summit declaration would suggest. Elon Musk will also be in Shenzhen, but Elon Musk will not be part of the trilateral meeting.
The format itself is unusual. Mr. Trump will meet Xi and Putin together after separate contact with Xi, turning a bilateral stop into a three-way session that brings the United States, China and Russia into one room on a single security issue.
February treaty deadline
The backdrop includes the expiration in February of a U.S. nuclear arms control treaty with Russia. That expiration leaves arms control as part of the setting even as Mr. Trump is not expected to raise Russia’s war in Ukraine at the meeting. Olivia Wales said, “The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous,” giving the talks a defined agenda without promising a broader deal.
Mr. Trump also said this week that he had no plans to discuss the scandal involving Jensen Huang with Xi. Katie Rogers has described the Shenzhen stop as part of the White House’s travel sequence, but the operative question for the APEC meeting is simpler: whether the three leaders can move from a symbolic first encounter to any concrete language on nuclear weapons, after administration officials said they did not expect any agreements on proliferation.
