President Donald Trump is heading to China next week with an ambitious item on his agenda: getting Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to talk about cutting nuclear weapons. In the same room. At the same time. It is an unprecedented three-way setup, and the White House is already managing expectations down to the floor.
Trump will raise nuclear disarmament during his meeting with Putin and Xi on Thursday in Shenzhen, China, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said Friday, Reuters reported.
"He will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous," Wales told reporters.
The Republican president has repeatedly highlighted nuclear arms reduction as a priority for the meeting, even though China is hosting the summit primarily to talk trade and commerce. So there is a bit of a mismatch between the host's agenda and the guest's.
A senior Trump administration official acknowledged that reaching an agreement would be unlikely, describing the issue as a "difficult topic for China to address."
"We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement," the official said.
That is about as blunt as pre-summit briefings get. Still, the official said Washington wants Beijing to "step up" and participate in discussions involving the world's largest nuclear powers.
The White House did not immediately respond to MarketDash's request for comment.
Why China Keeps Saying No to the Table
Beijing has historically rejected direct nuclear negotiations with Washington, arguing that the U.S. and Russia should first address their substantially larger nuclear arsenals. It is a fair point on the numbers: according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia possesses the world's largest nuclear warhead stockpile, followed by the U.S. and China.
So China's position, essentially, is: you two go first. Trump's position is: everyone sit down. Those two things can coexist in the same meeting without producing a deal, which is exactly what the White House is signaling.
The timing adds some urgency. The discussions come after the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which governed nuclear arms limitations between Washington and Moscow, expired in February this year. With that framework gone, there is no binding cap on the two biggest arsenals, which is part of why the White House keeps talking about the issue even while predicting no breakthrough.
Iran Is on the List. Ukraine Is Not.
Trump will also bring up the war against Iran but is not expected to address Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine, the administration official said.
The president is also unlikely to meet Putin separately or discuss Ukraine's access to Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s (SPCX) satellite communications service, Starlink.
Elon Musk is accompanying Trump on his four-day Asia trip but will not attend the meeting with Putin and Xi, as per the report.
Trump is also not expected to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the visit, which begins Monday and includes a stop in the Philippines.
So the headline event is a nuclear conversation that almost nobody in the room expects to end in a signed document. Sometimes the point of raising a topic is just to put it on the table for the next round. Whether Beijing sees it that way is the question Shenzhen will answer.
