A China Summit With Trump and Putin Could Put Xi in an Awkward Position
Hosting Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin could raise Xi Jinping’s international standing, but a three-way summit would also force China into talks it has long preferred to keep at arm’s length: Ukraine’s future and limits on nuclear weapons. A gathering of that kind would advertise Beijing as a venue where the world’s most powerful leaders still seek an audience, and it could bolster Xi’s stature as a convener rather than a bystander. The same agenda, however, would put China in an awkward position. Discussions about how the war in Ukraine might end would press Beijing to take a clearer line than its usual posture of calling for peace while maintaining close ties with Moscow. Talks on nuclear-weapons limits would likewise confront China with choices it has treated as uncomfortable, because any framework that constrains arsenals would sit uneasily with Beijing’s own nuclear modernization and with its reluctance to be locked into rules written around the United States and Russia. The tension at the heart of the story is therefore not whether a Trump–Putin visit would look like a diplomatic prize for Xi, but whether the substance of those meetings would require China to choose among prestige, partnership with Russia, and the costs of being drawn into Ukraine and arms-control bargaining.
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