WASHINGTON — President Trump will hold a historic summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin next Thursday on the sidelines of the annual APEC conference in Shenzhen, The Post has learned — with the discussion expected to focus largely on crafting an ambitious nuclear arms control pact.
This will be the first ever trilateral meeting between the leaders of the three countries.
A White House official told the Post that discussions in the booming Chinese city near Hong Kong could also touch on the war in Iran and North Korea.
Trump has not met with Putin in person since a summit last August in Alaska focused on his efforts to end the war in Ukraine, which is another potential topic of conversation. He welcomed Xi to the White House in September.
Trump has sought warm personal relationships with his authoritarian counterparts, arguing that it is in the interests of the United States and the world to try to work with historically antagonistic nations.
Since his first term, Trump has proposed a pact to reduce nuclear stockpiles, arguing that it was unnecessarily costly to maintain caches powerful enough to destroy the world repeatedly, but the concept has yet to come to fruition.
The summit comes at a delicate time for U.S.-China relations after one of America’s most powerful tech titans, Jensen Huang of artificial intelligence giant Nvidia, was forced to resign after his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy was revealed.
Huang accompanied Trump on his last visit to China in May.
Trump warmly welcomed Xi less than two months ago to the White House, showing him a framed photo of himself on the West Wing wall and praising the strongman’s knowledge of stone after touring Trump’s new granite helipad.
Although Ukraine is not a priority item on the agenda, the summit will follow Trump’s continued efforts to broker a peace deal.
U.S. special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have met with Putin several times this year to try to make progress toward ending Putin’s nearly five-year conflict with kyiv – with their latest meeting with the Kremlin taking place on Thursday.
Trump has already all but confirmed plans for a summit between the three countries that control most of the world’s nuclear weapons.
“One of the meetings, I think, will be with President Putin and President Xi, and it will be interesting,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “We’ll talk about a lot of things, including denuclearization, but we’ll talk about a lot of things. We’re trying to end the war in Iran and we’re doing well.”
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