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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 — 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.
The summit was first reported by The Post and later described to a broader group of reporters on a Friday evening call previewing Trump’s trip next week to Asia, which will feature an initial stop in the Philippines.
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, a topic that one US official said was unlikely to be raised in Shenzhen.
Trump hosted the Chinese leader at the White House in September, showing Xi a framed photo of himself on the West Wing’s wall and praising the strongman’s knowledge of stone after viewing Trump’s new granite helipad.
Trump, who will travel to China with SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has sought warm relationships with his authoritarian counterparts, arguing that it benefits US and world interests.
Since his first term, Trump has floated a grand pact to reduce nuclear stockpiles, saying it’s unnecessarily costly to maintain firepower sufficient to destroy the world many times over, but the concept hasn’t yet come to fruition.
“We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement. I would characterize this as the entry point, the first conversation,” an official told reporters.
China’s nuclear arsenal is “growing by far the fastest in the world,” he added, saying, “it’s time for China to sort of step up to the adult table, if you will, and have adult conversations about adult things.”
“The things that China is doing very opaquely with their nuclear arsenals are something that has impacts on the security of every human being in the world,” the official went on.
“Russia has a long, much longer history — going back to the Soviet Union — of engaging in arms control discussions, and I think they’re probably a bit more comfortable engaging in what the president is hoping to initiate here.”
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 and the president is not expected to raise the matter with Xi, an official said.
Trump is, however, expected to press China on its compliance with a trade detente reached last year, with an official saying that rare earth minerals, which China primarily refines, are not being exported “at the pace and at the level that we would like to be receiving them at.”
“This is part of the reason why, instead of having a six-month extension of the Busan agreement, we’ve had a two-month one. We really want to focus minds among our counterparts in China on compliance with this,” he added.
Although Ukraine is not an 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.
“China is not really a part of that track, so it doesn’t seem appropriate to have the Ukraine discussion,” an official said, also confirming there will be no bilateral meeting between Putin and Trump.
Trump previously floated convening 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.”
