White House Says Trump, Xi and Putin Will Meet in Shenzhen Next Week, With Officials Expecting No Agreement

Since Trump told ABC News on Oct. 19 that he would meet Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping when he visited China ("I would do that," he said), the idea has gone from a teaser to a schedule. On Friday, Nov. 13, White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales confirmed that Trump will hold a three-way meeting with the Russian and Chinese presidents on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen.

It would be the first time the three leaders have met together.

The schedule

Trump leaves Washington on Monday, Nov. 16, and lands in the Philippines on Tuesday for the ASEAN summit in Manila. He arrives in Shenzhen late Wednesday, Nov. 18. APEC's leaders' meeting runs Nov. 18-19 and covers 21 economies.

On Thursday, Nov. 19, Trump will have a bilateral working lunch and meeting with Xi. The trilateral with Putin follows. Officials said Trump and Putin will not meet one-on-one, and that no meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong Un is planned during the Asia trip.

That Xi meeting is Trump's third with the Chinese leader this year and, counting the October 2025 session in South Korea, his fourth since returning to office.

Nuclear weapons on the agenda

"The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous," Wales told reporters.

The U.S.-Russia New START treaty expired in February, leaving the two largest arsenals without a binding limit for the first time in decades. The United States and Russia each hold more than 5,000 warheads. China is estimated at about 620 and, according to the New York Times, is on track for 1,000 by 2030.

Trump rejected Russia's offer to extend New START and has said he wants a "new, improved and modernised" deal that includes Beijing. China is understood to be reluctant to join an agreement it had no hand in shaping, according to Al Jazeera.

The administration is not promising results. "We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement. I would characterize this as the entry point," a senior administration official said on the call with reporters.

What Beijing and Moscow want

The Chinese side is not sending encouraging signals. A Chinese official told the Los Angeles Times that the central government sees no benefit to a pause in its buildup. "It is a matter of survival," the official said. Chinese officials also told the paper that Xi wants to discuss neither nuclear limits nor Ukraine, and sees the summit as a chance to show China can help broker peace.

Putin, according to the same reporting, pressed for the meeting to cover his war in Ukraine. The U.S. side has said it will not go there. A senior official said Washington has a "whole other track" of negotiations with Kyiv and Moscow, and "China is not really part of that track, so it doesn't seem appropriate to have the Ukraine discussion there." U.S. envoys have spoken with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in recent days.

Iran is expected to come up instead, according to the officials. Simon Mabon, a professor of international politics at Lancaster University, told Al Jazeera to expect "pretty impressive photo-ops with a lot of really bombastic rhetoric from Trump," and added that the three leaders "are not able to bring about an end to the conflict in Iran or Ukraine" on their own.

The Kremlin angle carries baggage. Last month the administration struck a deal to import Russian diesel and suspended sanctions on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas, China among them. That heightened European worry about a softer U.S. line toward Moscow, the BBC reported.

Nvidia and Musk

The officials said the week's Nvidia upheaval should not shape the trip. Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO this week after reports of an affair with Alice Huang, who is not related to him. U.S. intelligence officials believe she is a Beijing asset, according to the New York Times. China has called the allegations baseless. She was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud company that is being looked at over whether it helped divert restricted Nvidia chips to China.

"The situation with Nvidia should not really have any bearing on the trip," one official said. Another said, "I don't expect the president to raise it: the Alice Huang issue." On export controls, an official said: "We do not negotiate American export controls... we don't expect it to figure at all in any of our conversations with the Chinese while we're there."

The focus with Xi on the economic side, the official said, will be implementing the existing trade agreement.

Elon Musk will travel with Trump to Shenzhen but will not sit in the trilateral. One official declined to speak for the president on why Musk is going, saying only that he has "tremendous business interests in the U.S.-China relationship" and could serve as an adviser. Other U.S. business leaders are expected at the APEC CEO Summit but are not part of the official delegation.

What to watch

China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Beijing looks forward to APEC and to "more practical results" on AI, trade and the digital economy. Beijing and Moscow had not publicly confirmed the trilateral as of the White House announcement. Whether Xi actually stays in the room for a nuclear conversation his own officials describe as a non-starter will be known Thursday, Nov. 19.