Trump to have first trilateral meeting with Putin, Xi

Washington: Donald Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, the White House said, a high-stakes gathering of three geopolitical superpowers as the American president reels from election losses at home and an espionage scandal threatens to deepen tensions with China.

The leaders would meet on the sidelines of a regional summit in Shenzhen, in southern China, White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said on Friday (Washington time), on a call with reporters previewing Trump’s Asia trip.

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, said no separate meeting between Trump and Putin was planned.

The discussion would be the first trilateral meeting between the leaders, though all three attended the larger G20 meeting in 2019.

Trump has expressed interest in discussing nuclear arms control with Xi and Putin; Putin has sought talks on the war in Ukraine without Ukraine at the table. The Kremlin said Putin would raise efforts to end the war with Trump in Shenzhen, though Xi’s role was unclear. Putin said on Thursday he was sticking to Russia’s territorial demands and ruled out foreign peacekeepers.

The prospect of a breakthrough on nuclear arms control was slim, said Victor Shih, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of California at San Diego, in part because China’s nuclear arsenal remained smaller than those of the United States and Russia.

“China has made it very clear that it wants to expand its nuclear arsenal,” Shih said.

Shih also questioned whether the gathering would deliver much political benefit for Trump after a midterm election that turned in part on voters’ frustrations over the economy.

For Trump, the trilateral “is purely to score incremental political points”, Shih said. “But of course, in the aftermath of the midterm election where voters clearly have shown that their main interest is with domestic economic issues, something like nuclear disarmament is really not going to have much effect for his support.”

The meeting also comes as Trump is managing an intelligence controversy involving China and Nvidia, one of America’s most important technology companies.

It was unclear whether Trump would raise with Xi allegations involving Jensen Huang, who resigned on Thursday as Nvidia’s chief executive. The New York Times reported that US intelligence officials determined that Alice Huang, a business executive with whom he had a relationship, was passing information to Beijing.

Washington has sought to restrict China’s access to advanced AI chips made by companies including Nvidia, placing the allegations at the centre of an increasingly fraught competition between the two countries that could shape their economic and military futures.