Last month, following his meeting with President Xi Jinping of China, President Donald Trump said he had “advocated for trilateral arms control negotiations between the United States, Russia, and China.” Last week, in an interview with Newsmax Trump claimed he is holding talks with Russia and China on “denuclearization.”
On Friday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said “It is neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”
Today, in response to reports that Trump is open to a meeting proposed by Putin and Xi to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine at the upcoming APEC summit, Trump said the talks were “not so much on Ukraine because Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine, they haven’t been doing much, and the same with China…. We would have it to talk about weapons and denuclearization.”
Talks on ending Russia’s war on Ukraine must involve Ukraine. The United States should advocate and support an outcome that ends Russia’s attack and secures Russia’s withdrawal from Ukrainian territory.
At the same time, it is appropriate and necessary that the United States should discuss with China and Russia bilaterally or multilaterally meaningful restraints that can halt and reverse the costly, three-way arms race that each of the three states are pursuing.
All five of the nuclear-armed states who are party to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are legally obligated to engage in good faith negotiations to end the arms race and on nuclear disarmament, but there has been no progress on nuclear disarmament diplomacy for more than a decade.
In 2013, former President Barack Obama proposed talks with Russia on a further one-third reduction in U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear stockpiles but Putin rejected the offer. Since then, the United States and Russia have failed to negotiate a successor to the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which limited them no more than 1,550 deployed warheads each. In recent years, China increased the size of its smaller but still deadly arsenal to ensure it retains a survivable nuclear retaliatory force.
In his first term Trump proposed and failed to get “trilateral” arms control talks underway and refused to extend the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, leaving it to Biden and Putin to do so in 2021. Late last year, as New START was due to expire again, Russia proposed, and Trump ignored, that the U.S. and Russia agree not to increase their strategic nuclear weapons deployments while they negotiate a new framework agreement. Now, there are no agreed limits on the arsenals of the world’s major nuclear-armed states.
If Trump is serious and wants to succeed on “denuclearization,” it will take more than statements and wishful thinking. He and his team will need to develop more realistic, balanced, and pragmatic proposals. To date, he and his team have not done so. He and the other leaders must also recognize that one meeting on the margins of the APEC summit may, at best, just be the start of a process that leads to sustained, formal bilateral or multilateral negotiations.
As the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear summit in Reykjavik forty years ago shows, progress requires serious preparation, plus bold and balanced win-win proposals that are verifiable and that advance the interests of all sides.
To jump-start serious disarmament diplomacy, all five NPT nuclear-armed states could agree to indefinitely freeze deployment of additional strategic launchers while the United States and Russia renew talks on further reductions of their massive strategic and non-strategic weapons stockpiles. As of now, Russia and the United States each have fewer than 800 total strategic launchers; China has an estimated 550; and France and the United Kingdom have a combined total of about 96.
A freeze at these levels would not affect any country’s ability to deter nuclear attack (and inflict catastrophic harm), could be confidently verified through national means of intelligence, would reduce tensions, and would create a better environment for bilateral or multilateral nuclear arms reduction talks.
If China is not prepared to engage in multilateral talks, Trump should pursue bilateral talks with Russia and continue to try to engage bilaterally with China. Earlier this month, Putin said the Kremlin is ready to resume a nuclear arms control dialogue with the White House.
Trump, Xi, and Putin could also reaffirm their commitments to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and agree on new voluntary technical measures to ensure no state is conducting clandestine low-yield nuclear explosions. They could also begin negotiations on a binding declaration on maintaining effective human control over nuclear weapons and operational best practices to mitigate the risks of AI integration in nuclear and military systems.