The leaders of the United States, China and Russia will hold an encounter next week in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, taking advantage of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) summit. This is an unprecedented meeting among the three major nuclear powers, in which it is expected that they will mainly address the situation in Iran, although without including the conflict in Ukraine on the formal agenda.
The White House has confirmed that the central focus of the meeting will be nuclear nonproliferation, an issue on which U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested could lead to a new agreement among the countries with the largest nuclear arsenals in the world.
"The president has made clear that, among other topics, he will address the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world. President Trump believes that this proliferation is very dangerous," one of the White House spokespeople, Olivia Wales, said.
According to White House sources cited by the CNN network, the U.S. delegation "will push" its Russian and Chinese counterparts to address the war in Iran and the rise in fuel prices after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. However, these same sources consider it unlikely that the war in Ukraine will be included in the discussions.
The meeting will take place amid a context of significant legal uncertainty following the expiration, in February 2026, of the New START treaty, the latest major bilateral agreement still in force for the reduction of strategic arms between Washington and Moscow, whose implementation the Kremlin had already suspended in 2023. Added to this is Beijing’s resistance to participating in trilateral disarmament negotiations, while it continues to expand and modernize its own nuclear potential.