The State Department says the two agreed on the value of leader-level talks, including any three-way meeting with Russia; China’s account of the call did not mention it, and Beijing has said joining trilateral disarmament talks now would be unrealistic.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, agreed in a phone call on the importance of leader-level talks to advance peace and denuclearization, including at any three-way meeting with Russia, the State Department said, as the Trump administration works to arrange a summit of President Trump, President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin in Shenzhen next week.
The call covered Mr. Trump’s travel to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen on Nov. 18 and 19 and Mr. Xi’s planned visit to Florida for the Group of 20 summit in December, according to the department’s readout, posted on X and reported by Reuters. The two recalled their leaders’ “commitment to a constructive relationship of strategic stability on the basis of respect, fairness, and reciprocity,” the readout said, and “agreed on the importance of meaningful leader-level conversations to advance goals such as peace and denuclearisation, including at any potential trilateral leaders’ meeting with Russia.”
What the administration wants
Mr. Trump has made reducing nuclear arsenals a stated goal of his diplomacy with both Moscow and Beijing. He said in October that he was open to three-way arms control talks focused on nuclear weapons. Speaking to reporters on Sunday, he described the coming trip this way, as quoted by Lianhe Zaobao: “Well, I’m going to be going to China, and 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.”
Mr. Rubio said on Tuesday that work was underway to arrange the trilateral meeting on the summit’s sidelines, Reuters reported. The Kremlin has confirmed that preparations are underway, according to Lianhe Zaobao, and The Wall Street Journal has reported that Mr. Putin wants to use such a meeting to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.
Beijing’s version
China’s account of the call, carried by the state news agency Xinhua, made no mention of denuclearization or a meeting with Russia. Xinhua described the conversation as “positive and constructive” and quoted Mr. Wang as saying that the current stability in relations had not come easily and was “a rational choice made by the two major countries based on respective and shared interests.”
Beijing has been cool to three-way arms talks. Its foreign ministry said last month that China’s “nuclear strength is by no means at the same level with that of the US and Russia,” and that it would be “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”
The gap between the two readouts reflects a real difference in approach, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said in an email to The Inquirer: Washington favors a three-way format, while Beijing prefers bilateral talks or discussions among the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Mr. Kimball said it was unclear what the administration hoped to get from a trilateral meeting and that Mr. Rubio should be asked what the United States is proposing. He noted that the major nuclear powers are not now engaged in any high-level arms control talks, and that all of them have an obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to pursue disarmament. Achievable steps, he suggested, could include a reaffirmation of the ban on nuclear test explosions, a commitment to keep humans, not artificial intelligence, in control of decisions to use nuclear weapons, and a freeze on the number of strategic launchers.
How far China would go
Hans M. Kristensen, who directs the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said in an email to The Inquirer that he was very skeptical China would agree to numerical limits on its forces. The federation estimated at the start of the year that China had more than 620 nuclear warheads, and it has built three missile silo fields with about 320 silos, compared with about 18 silos before 2018, he said. China is also expanding road-mobile missile bases, its DF-26 intermediate-range missiles, the nuclear mission of its H-6 bombers and its ballistic-missile submarine fleet, along with production of fissile material.
Softer measures, such as agreed rules of behavior, are more likely than formal limits, Mr. Kristensen said, and a trilateral arrangement is hard to imagine; Russia and China would probably insist that France and Britain be included.
The California stakes
The meeting in Shenzhen, the tech manufacturing center across the border from Hong Kong, matters to California on several fronts. The state’s ports and farm exporters have a stake in the trade truce, which Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi extended in September, Reuters reported, and which now runs to January, according to the Brookings Institution. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that the two sides would advance new talks on artificial intelligence, a field led by Bay Area companies, while cautioning against illusions about their differences. Brookings scholars expect the leaders to endorse a bilateral A.I. dialogue and an incident-reporting channel, but few major deliverables.
The nuclear question has a California dimension as well: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the East Bay is one of the two laboratories that design the nation’s nuclear warheads, and Vandenberg Space Force Base on the Central Coast is where the Air Force test-launches its intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Inquirer examined the summit’s stakes for California on Monday. Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi have already met twice this year. Whether Mr. Putin joins them next week, and whether China is willing to discuss its arsenal at all, will be the first test of how far the administration’s denuclearization push can go.
Nasrin Haidari covers foreign affairs and geopolitics, including diplomacy, trade disputes and conflicts, and their ties to California and the Pacific. More from Nasrin Haidari
