President Donald Trump said he will likely meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in a rare trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the APEC gathering in Shenzhen next week. Beijing said on Monday it was in communication with the relevant parties over the meeting, not ruling out the possibility as leaders gather for the APEC summit in southern China on November 18 and 19.
Why it matters
A meeting of the three leaders would be a first of its kind in years, and it would put the world three most powerful governments in one room at a moment of overlapping crises. The United States, China and Russia are divided over trade, over the war in Ukraine, and over the future of the Pacific, and each leader arrives with a different agenda. Trump has framed the gathering as a chance to talk directly, rather than through intermediaries and public statements.
The context is a week of fast moving diplomacy. American brokered talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations are expected in Abu Dhabi, Russian strikes on Ukraine energy network cut power to hundreds of thousands of people on Sunday, and Washington is weighing whether diplomacy or pressure will move Moscow. A trilateral in Shenzhen would sit above all of that, a leaders level conversation about the shape of the relationship between the three powers.
What happens next
China response was careful. Beijing said it was in communication with the relevant parties, language that neither confirms the meeting nor closes the door on it. That is how Beijing handles a proposal it has not yet accepted in public, and it leaves room for the meeting to be confirmed, reshaped, or quietly dropped in the days before the summit. The summit itself, on November 18 and 19, is the fixed point on the calendar.
What happens next will be decided in the days before Shenzhen. If the meeting goes ahead, it will be the most watched encounter of the year, and the first test of whether three leaders who disagree on almost everything can agree on anything at all. If it does not, the story will be why it fell apart, and which of the three governments decided it was not worth the risk.
