Trump Putin Xi Meeting: Can They Agree Nuclear Cuts?

U.S. President Donald Trump is set to sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping on November 19 in Shenzhen, on the sidelines of the APEC summit, in what will be the first meeting ever held between the leaders of the world’s three largest nuclear weapons powers. The White House confirmed the plan on November 13, with senior U.S. officials stating that reducing nuclear arsenals would be the focus, that Iran would also be discussed, and that the war in Ukraine would not. Officials stressed that no agreement is expected and described the session as only an initial conversation on the subject. The meeting highlights how far strategic arms control has fallen since February, when the last treaty capping the American and Russian arsenals expired with nothing to replace it.

The New START treaty, signed in Prague in April 2010 and extended for five years in 2021, limited each side to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers, although Russia suspended its participation in February 2023 and on-site inspections had been halted since 2020. Its expiry in February left the two largest arsenals without any legal ceiling for the first time in more than half a century, with Trump having rejected a Russian offer to keep to the treaty’s central limits for one more year and called instead for “a new, improved and modernized” agreement that brings in China. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described a meeting of the three leaders as “extremely significant”, while dismissing comparisons with the 1945 Yalta conference and noting that decisions reached in Shenzhen could not be imposed on other states.

China is the main reason Washington insists on a three-way format, and also the party least inclined to accept one. U.S. Department of Defense estimates put China’s stockpile at more than 600 operational warheads, against more than 5,000 each held by the United States and Russia, with the Pentagon having projected that the Chinese total will pass 1,000 by 2030 as the country fills three new missile silo fields in its north and west and deploys more DF-41 road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles. Beijing has repeatedly refused to join arms reduction talks on the grounds that its arsenal is a fraction of those of the other two, with its foreign ministry having called trilateral disarmament negotiations neither reasonable nor realistic, although the ministry said on November 4 that it was in contact with Washington and Moscow over a meeting of the three presidents at APEC.

The talks will open while all three powers are replacing their strategic forces, which considerably narrows the room for agreed reductions. The United States is building the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, the Columbia class ballistic missile submarine and the B-21 Raider bomber, which released its first weapon in a test announced by the U.S. Air Force on November 13, while Russia has deployed the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle and has spent years testing the RS-28 Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile. Trump will hold a bilateral meeting and working lunch with Xi before the three-way session, which is scheduled as the final event of an Asian tour that begins in Manila, and no separate meeting with Putin is planned, the two having last met at their summit in Alaska in August 2025.