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 developing an ambitious nuclear arms control pact.
It will be the first-ever trilateral meeting between leaders of the three countries.
A White House official told The Post that discussions in the Chinese boomtown near Hong Kong also could touch on the war in Iran and North Korea.
Trump hasn’t met with Putin in person since a summit last August in Alaska focused on his efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, which is another potential topic of conversation. He hosted Xi at the White House in September.
Trump has sought warm personal relationships with his authoritarian counterparts, arguing that it benefits US and world interests to try to work with the historically adversarial nations.
Since his first term, Trump has floated a pact to reduce nuclear stockpiles, arguing it’s unnecessarily costly to maintain caches powerful enough to destroy the world many times over, but the concept hasn’t yet come to fruition.
The summit comes at an awkward time for US-China relations after one of America’s most powerful tech titans, Jensen Huang of artificial intelligence giant Nvidia, was forced to resign after the exposure of his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy.
Huang accompanied Trump on his most recent visit to China in May.
Trump warmly hosted Xi less than two months ago at the White House, showing Xi a framed photo of himself on the West Wing’s wall and praising the strongman’s knowledge of stone after a viewing of Trump’s new granite helipad.
Although Ukraine is not a top agenda item, the summit will follow Trump’s continuing efforts to broker a peace deal.
US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have met with Putin repeatedly this year attempting to make progress toward ending Putin’s nearly five-year conflict with Kyiv — with their most recent Kremlin sit-down occurring Thursday.
Trump already all-but confirmed plans for the summit among the three nations that control most of the world’s nuclear weapons.
“One of the meetings, I think, will be with President Putin and President Xi, and that’ll be interesting,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “We’ll talk a lot of things, including denuclearization, but we’ll be talking a lot of things. We’re trying to end the war in Iran, and we’re doing well.”
