Three men, three agendas: Trump, Putin and Xi will meet in China

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The competing agendas could make the summit little more than a spectacle, yet still produce images that harken back to the famous Yalta conference of 1945.

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SEOUL — President Trump will get his wish for a historic meeting among the three most powerful men in the world — Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and himself — at a summit Thursday in southern China.

But Moscow, Beijing and Washington already know their leaders are arriving at the Shenzhen conference with disparate aims.

Trump hopes to focus the meeting on nuclear nonproliferation, urging the Russian and Chinese presidents to work with him to scale back the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles. Putin pressed for the meeting to discuss his ongoing war in Ukraine. And Xi wants to discuss neither, only embracing the idea of the summit to show the world China can help broker peace on the international stage, Chinese officials told The Times.

“That’ll be interesting,” Trump said earlier this week, teasing the trilateral summit before the White House formally confirmed the meeting Friday.

“We’re talking a lot of things, including denuclearization,” he added, “but we’ll be talking a lot of things.”

U.S. officials have acknowledged they do not expect the meeting to result in a breakthrough on arms control. China is openly racing to build up its nuclear capacity — a nonnegotiable policy in Beijing, which sees its arsenal dwarfed by an American stockpile nearly 10 times the size.

“We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement. I would characterize this as the entry point,” one senior Trump administration official said. “This is the beginning of hopefully a conversation that can be productive going forward.”

Trump’s break from long-standing tradition in U.S.-Russia relations was real, but it should not have been entirely surprising.

Inicio del artículo, extracto de Los Angeles Times. Para leer el resto, abra el artículo en el sitio del medio.