United States President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he thinks he will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the APEC leaders summit in China next week and discuss ending the war in Iran and denuclearisation. Trump said he will travel to China for the summit, set for November 18 and 19 in Shenzhen, the southern tech hub.
What Trump said about the meeting
Trump told reporters before flying back to Washington from Florida that one of the meetings at the summit would bring the three leaders together. He said the talks would cover a lot of subjects, including denuclearisation, and that ending the war in Iran would be part of the discussion. His words were: "One of the meetings, I think, will be with President Putin and President Xi, and that'll be interesting. We're talking a lot of things, including denuclearisation, but we'll be talking a lot of things. We're trying to end the war in Iran." The remark puts a possible three-way meeting on the table at a moment when the United States is dealing with both the Iran war and the long running war in Ukraine. Trump has spoken before about bringing the three countries into one conversation on arms control, and this is the first time he has pointed to a specific summit for it.
Denuclearisation and the October signal
Trump said in October that he was open to three-way arms control talks with Xi and Putin, which he said would focus on denuclearisation. The idea is that the three countries, which hold the largest nuclear arsenals, could talk together about limiting weapons rather than in separate pairs. No agenda has been published for the proposed meeting, and neither China nor Russia has confirmed that a three-way session will take place. The APEC summit itself is a gathering of Pacific economies, and a meeting of the three leaders on its sidelines would be separate from the main summit programme.
Ukraine could also be on the table
The Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has pitched using a trilateral meeting to discuss an end to Russia's long running war in Ukraine. That would widen the meeting beyond Iran and nuclear weapons to the other major conflict involving all three countries. Trump also said in an interview with the 60 Minutes programme that he believed a deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war was very close, and that it would result in a Ukraine of a little bit different shape, without offering specifics. The comment shows that Ukraine remains part of his thinking about what a meeting with Putin could achieve.
What happens next
The APEC summit runs on November 18 and 19 in Shenzhen. If the three-way meeting goes ahead, it would be the first time Trump, Xi and Putin have sat together in this format. Until the leaders confirm it, the meeting remains a proposal from Trump rather than a settled plan, and the subjects he named, Iran, denuclearisation and possibly Ukraine, are the ones to watch.
