The leaders of the United States, China and Russia will sit down together next week in Shenzhen for the first three-way meeting between the heads of the world's three largest nuclear powers, with slashing global atomic stockpiles at the top of the agenda.
The session closes out President Donald Trump's visit to China on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and no breakthrough deal is expected. It is designed as an opening conversation, an entry point meant to drag Beijing to the negotiating table on nuclear weapons after years of refusing to engage.
The math is the reason Washington wants China there. Beijing holds roughly 600 warheads, while the United States and Russia each maintain more than 5,000. The New START treaty that capped those two far larger arsenals expired in February, lifting limits on the biggest atomic stockpiles in the world for the first time in more than half a century. Trump rejected Moscow's offer to extend the pact for a year and instead demanded a new and modernized agreement that brings China in.
Iran is also on the table. Ukraine is not, carved out as a separate diplomatic track that China has no role in, even as Kyiv worries the meeting could become a venue for bargaining over its future without it in the room.
Each leader has a reason to show up. For Xi Jinping, hosting signals that China now belongs among the powers setting the terms of the global order. For Vladimir Putin, sharing a table with Washington and Beijing as an equal is the superpower status the war in Ukraine has cost him. And the choreography itself carries weight: Xi and Putin have met more than 40 times, while Trump has faced each of them repeatedly, most recently Putin in Alaska in August 2025.
The three-way meeting threatens to swallow an APEC summit that draws 21 economies to China's showcase tech megacity, a gathering built to project Chinese leadership on free trade and multilateralism. Sharing the stage with the Kremlin on war and arms control cuts against that message.