President Trump is jetting to Asia on Monday for high-level meetings in the Philippines and China that will conclude with a major trilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The meeting among the world’s most powerful leaders will focus on Iran and ways to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons, “which President Trump believes is very dangerous,” said Assistant White House Press Secretary Olivia Wales.
Senior administration officials said the meeting will be an “entry point” to reducing the number of nuclear weapons, not an opportunity to strike a deal.
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Notably, officials said they do not expect Mr. Trump to raise the Ukraine war in the trilateral meeting, because those negotiations are operating on a separate track. Some critics had lambasted Mr. Trump over plans for a trilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Also, Mr. Trump is expected to meet with Mr. Xi for a bilateral meeting and working lunch Thursday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Shenzhen, China.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has business interests in China and major businesses in the U.S., is expected to accompany Mr. Trump on the China portion of the trip, though he will not partake in the trilateral meeting or the Xi-Trump meeting, officials said.
Arguably the world’s most powerful figures, Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi are likely to discuss an ongoing truce on trade, ways to wind down the Iran war and the best way to manage their competition on AI technology.
Mr. Trump has said he is looking forward to the meeting with his rival superpowers.
“One of the meetings, I think, will be with President Putin and President Xi, and that’ll be interesting,” Mr. Trump told reporters earlier this month.
Before the Shenzhen summit, Mr. Trump will attend the 49th ASEAN Summit and Related Summits in Manila, Philippines.
Mr. Trump is expected to announce a trade deal with Thailand and promote the Pax Silica program to ensure stable supply chains for critical minerals among friendly nations. He will also prod nations to use American-made AI products under the AI Spark program.
Mr. Trump is expected to meet with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on the sidelines of the two-day summit to discuss maritime security in the South China Sea.
As of now, there are no plans to engage with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un while Mr. Trump is in Asia, according to senior officials.
Late-breaking drama around Nvidia, a central player in the AI industry, will loom over the visit.
Revelations about former CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy, are sparking tensions with China and causing a rift within the Trump administration. Mr. Huang resigned from the company on Thursday.
Ms. Huang is a major shareholder in a Singapore-based artificial intelligence company, Megaspeed, so lawmakers want to know if she used the company to divert Nvidia products to China.
“The story has been thus far on Jensen Huang’s personal foibles,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Friday. “The real story here should be: Did Nvidia know their client, and was there a robust effort at Nvidia to make sure that there was no leakage and that they were selling to what were obviously pass-through shell companies?”
If that occurred, he said, “it’s important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that.”
Most notably, Mr. Bessent offered a not-so-subtle jab at Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and his reported reluctance to impose export controls on Nvidia.
He said Mr. Trump and others in the administration are worried about advanced chips leaking to Chinese markets. However, the Commerce Department oversees that, he said, and “you will have to ask them about their internal processes.”
A senior administration official on Friday said Nvidia is a national security matter, and the U.S. side does not expect it to feature in direct talks with China.
However, senior administration officials said the visit will feature discussions about export controls on semiconductors and ways to ensure that smuggling does not occur.
China brushed off allegations of spying and said it looks forward to a spirit of cooperation when Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump meet.
“The U.S. should stop fabricating the ’Chinese spy’ narratives as a pretext for imposing technology restrictions,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Thursday. “We are ready to work with the U.S. side to deliver on the important common understandings reached between the two presidents and jointly build a constructive relationship of strategic stability on the basis of respect, fairness and reciprocity.”
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