Trump, Xi and Putin will hold an unprecedented mini-summit next week in China

Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will meet privately next Thursday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which is being held in Shenzhen, China's technological center. Although it is brief, informal and is not expected to lead to any major decisions or agreements, it will be the first meeting of the heads of state of the three great nuclear powers on the planet and comes at a time of chaos, uncertainty and repositioning of international relations.

In mid-October, the Russian leader proposed to the American a kind of reissue of the Yalta Conference, the legendary meeting of 1945 in which Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt began to outline a map for the world after World War II. The Kremlin's suggestion, which aspired to settle the Ukrainian issue without the presence of Volodymyr Zelensky, was to imagine a division of the globe into something similar areas of influence, according to what The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. But the proposal did not catch on in either Washington or Beijing. Not directly at least.

The three-way formula, however, will take place, as confirmed this Friday by the White House. Ukraine will not be on the agenda, but the war in Iran and the aspiration for a possible, but very unlikely, trilateral agreement on its nuclear arsenals will be. The nuclear issue is one of Trump's great obsessions (and fears) since the 1980s. The last pact on the matter between Russia and the United States, New START, expired in February, effectively removing limits on the two largest atomic arsenals for the first time in more than half a century. Washington then rejected the Russian proposal to simply extend it for another year and announced that it would seek a "new, improved and modernized" agreement that included China.

According to White House sources, the Shenzhen meeting will not yield any results, the process is very far from something like that. But it could be a starting point. Beijing's arsenal, with more than 600 nuclear warheads, according to Pentagon estimates, is much smaller than the arsenals of the United States and Russia, each of which is estimated to have more than 5,000 warheads, according to AP. It is precisely because of this enormous imbalance that until now Beijing has had no interest in talks about a nuclear pact that involves a reduction in absolute or relative terms, and hopes to reach 1,000 heads before 2030.

During Trump's second term, the United States has left behind the more or less liberal leadership strategy on a global scale that had traditionally guided its foreign policy in favor of a model based on the distribution of areas of influence between the great powers. Trump is very comfortable with Putin, Xi, Erdogan or Modi, but not with the Europeans or the Canadian Mark Carney. He likes strong men, raw power. That is why it has adopted a policy of pressure and force, especially in the Western Hemisphere, where it resorts to threats and intimidation, especially of its neighbors and allies, while appearing willing to grant Russia and China greater room for maneuver in their respective zones of influence.

This shift is accelerating the configuration of a new tripolar international order, in which the strategic interests and ambitions of the great powers prevail over the rules, principles and institutions that sustained the international system that emerged after the Second World War. Few words sum it up better than those spoken on Friday night by the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, at a dinner organized by the main conservative legal association in the United States. Speaking of the International Criminal Court, and quoting Pompey, he said: "If they are so foolish as to try to impose their paper decrees on the Americans, our response will probably be the same as that of the Roman general when he told those who tried to invoke the charters of his city against his legions: 'Stop quoting laws to men with swords.'

That said, each party has different objectives heading into the meeting. For Trump it is an opportunity to continue trying to build a personal relationship with Xi (he will be the third face-to-face this year), one of the few on the entire planet who has stood up to him, does not give in to his threats and sanctions and keeps his distance. They will talk about rare earths and minerals. But to avoid friction, the White House assures that the president will not raise the issue of possible espionage on Jensen Huang, former CEO of Nvidia, by his mistress, whom the US intelligence services consider to be an agent of Beijing. Likewise, the Republican president has been maintaining for a decade that no one understands Putin better than him, and that they have a special and deep relationship of trust, so he will want to project the image of understanding and good harmony.

For Moscow, a scenario in which the rules of a global order are established and the EU is not present, nor does Ukraine have a voice, is unbeatable. Putin continues to court Trump while trying to destabilize his neighbors and break up the alliance that makes him most uncomfortable, NATO. Anything that involves creating new forums that weaken the architecture of the current international system favors it.

Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov has mocked the Yalta references, saying with admirable rennet that his vision is that of "a world order that no one tries to impose a particular vision of, and that it must be based entirely on mutual benefit and respect." All while the documents distributed this week by Russia during negotiations with Trump's envoys (one of them, his son-in-law) demand the withdrawal of NATO troops to the positions they occupied in 1997 or even play with the possibility of Finland leaving the Atlantic Alliance.

China, for its part, is at an intermediate and delicate point. Its commitment (especially for a very nuanced multilateralism) is more long-term, but it has now perhaps seen the opportunity to reinforce its global role a step beyond mediation. They do not want to be dragged by either party, nor antagonize those who buy their products from the rest of the planet. But he is not interested in remaining in the background indefinitely either.