By Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes, World BEYOND War, November 15, 2026

Presidents Jinping, Putin, and Trump should pursue a diplomatic breakthrough in China, with an eye on a nuclear weapons-free world.

Excitement abounds around the possible, perhaps likely, upcoming tripartite meeting in Shenzen, China among Presidents Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump at the November 18-19 meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Some are calling it Yalta 2.0. We’d rather think of it as Reykjavik 2.0., while also welcoming some of the broader diplomatic breakthroughs and global reordering achieved at Yalta almost 82 years ago.

Dmitry Trenin, former longtime director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and current President of the Russian International Affairs Council, wrote encouragingly, “The US president has mentioned that an unprecedented trilateral meeting…would make sense if it were focused on denuclearization.” Trenin wrote this in Al Jazeera in the context of explaining why Russia could play a helpful role in negotiating a new nuclear agreement between its Iranian ally and the United States. While anything that might help end the dangerous, destructive, and potentially apocalyptic conflagration in Southwest Asia would be more than welcome, we think the leaders can and should reach even higher. Why not rekindle the spirit of the 1986 meeting between Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, at which they came within a hairsbreadth, arguably one word, of eliminating not only all ballistic missiles as Reagan originally proposed but all nuclear weapons as Gorbachev countered. Reagan replied, “Yes, all” and Secretary of State George Shultz agreed. “Let’s do it,” he said. The chance to achieve the most extraordinary diplomatic breakthrough in history slipped through Reagan’s grasp when he insisted on unlimited testing of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) fantasy rather than limiting SDI to the laboratory for ten years. The world’s hopes were dashed and we have not come even close ever since.

Sure, we’re up against obstacles and the odds against this are long. Donald Trump has responded to the midterm shellacking by appointing Stephen Miller as Chief of Staff—in effect giving the middle finger to those who didn’t support the Republicans, which is not a hopeful sign. Putin knows that much of Russian power comes not from its economic prowess or its conventional military but from possessing the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. And Xi Jinping has made it clear that China won’t engage in arms control talks until it achieves rough nuclear parity with the U.S. and Russia; it has been rapidly increasing the size of its arsenal as a result.

That said, there are good reasons why all three could support this proposal. After Tuesday’s humiliating trouncing, Trump, probably the most recalcitrant of the three, may be desperate for an achievement that could cement at least a piece of a positive legacy—and in this case a very big piece, a resounding piece. And he has been all over the map on the nuclear issue. In February 2025, he said, “There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many. You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.” He also said, “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive.” This is apparently something he’s been contemplating for many years. In 2016, he told the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and David Sanger: “I personally think it’s the biggest problem the world has, nuclear capability. I think it’s the single biggest problem….Power of weaponry today is beyond anything ever thought of, or even, you know, it’s unthinkable, the power….And to me, it’s the single biggest, it’s the single biggest problem.” He credits his “very brilliant” MIT physicist uncle John Trump with making him aware of this danger.

In 1986, he sought the advice of Nobel laureate and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War founder Dr. Bernard Lown on negotiating nuclear disarmament with Gorbachev. He told Lown that he would get Reagan to send him to Moscow and he would secure disarmament and end the Cold War in one hour.” Lown commented, “I sat there dumbfounded. ‘Who is this self-inflated individual? Is he sane or what?’”

On January 23, 2025, he told the World Economic Forum in Davos: “And I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of — of cutting way back on nuclear.  And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow.  And China would have come along too.  China also liked it. Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it.  It’s too depressing. So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.  And I can tell you that President Putin wanted to do it.  He and I wanted to do it.  We had a good conversation with China.  They would have been involved, and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet.”

Whether or not Trump is sane is even more heatedly debated today than it was 40 years ago, but that Trump may be iconoclastic enough to take a dramatic step that reverses the course of history should not be. The question is whether he’s capable of taking such a step in favor of humanity rather than against it.

Similarly with Putin. Putin told a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi in 2017, “Should you ask me if nuclear disarmament is possible, I will tell you ‘yes, it is possible. Does Russia wish to achieve universal nuclear disarmament or not? The answer is in the affirmative, too. Yes, it does, and it will be working for it.” Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, the leaders of the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the United jointly declared:

“We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought… we remain committed to our Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, including our Article VI obligation to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Skeptics will rightly point out that this was before the invasion of Ukraine and a series of slightly veiled nuclear threats that Putin issued. But it at least offers a glimmer of hope, especially in the context of a security agreement that promises peaceful coexistence for all participants.

In 2017, in a speech at the United Nations Office in Geneva, Xi Jinping said clearly, “Nuclear weapons, the Sword of Damocles that hangs over humankind, should be completely prohibited and ultimately destroyed over time to make the world free of nuclear weapons.” While not disavowing this sentiment, Xi has more recently indicated that China would not participate in arms control discussions until it had achieved rough parity with largest nuclear powers–the United States and Russia. Fine. To most people, that means China increasing the size of its arsenal to the 5,000 plus weapons that both Russia and the United States possess. We have a different proposal. How about if the U.S. and Russia reduce their arsenals down to the 600 or so that China now possesses?

We see this being done in three four-year stages, much as Reagan and Gorbachev envisioned 40 years ago. In the first stage, the U.S. and Russia pare down their arsenals while China forgoes its expansion. During this trust-building stage, the wars in Iran and Ukraine would need to end quickly, alongside a recommitment to the UN Charter and peaceful development by not just China, Russia, and the U.S., but all nuclear armed states. The second four-year stage, would be more complex, as it would involve bilateral, trilateral, and multi-lateral negotiations among all nine nuclear armed states to address the specific reasons why each of the states possesses nuclear weapons, and to find ways that those incentives could be reduced or eliminated. Intense diplomacy would be required during this period, resulting in all nine nuclear powers joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW would give all nine states a ten-year timeline to eliminate their arsenals. However, they could accomplish this in four years, given that the starting point would be arsenals of no more than 600 nuclear warheads. This last four-year stage would involve reductions, verification, and eventual elimination of arsenals. It could be done in plenty of time for the centennial celebration of the United Nations, and the centennial commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear age should end well before it turns 100.

If Reagan and Gorbachev could come so close 40 years ago, we should not rule out the possibility that Putin, Xi, and Trump could do so today. As John Kennedy said in his great American University Commencement Address in 1963, “Our problems are man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”

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