MARK ALMOND: I fear Trump's summit with Putin and Xi next week will be like Yalta in 1945 when three leaders carved up the world

Résumé détaillé

This year's event in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen next week is being heralded as a pow-wow on a par with the Yalta conference.

Published: 23:00 GMT, 11 November 2026 | Updated: 23:00 GMT, 11 November 2026

The annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit normally passes largely unnoticed by the mainstream Western media.

While it gathers representatives of 21 countries, including the US, China and Russia, most attendees are relative minnows, such as Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Peru.

But this year’s event in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen next week is being heralded as a pow-wow on a par with the Yalta conference, the epoch-making meeting between Winston Churchill, US president Franklin D Roosevelt and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that took place in Crimea in February 1945.

Because it emerged this week that Donald Trump will have a potentially historic encounter on the sidelines of the conference with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Just as the negotiations at Yalta laid down the guidelines for the carve-up of the globe by the world’s great powers following the defeat of the Nazis, so many reckon decisions could be taken in Shenzhen that will have devastating consequences.

The bad news for America’s allies is that Trump will enter the negotiating chamber in an unprecedentedly weak position after the US’s midterm elections saw him lose Republican majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Donald Trump greets Vladimir Putin on the tarmac after they arrived in Alaska last year

The President, who once said he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, will be desperate for a face-saving win to bolster his beleaguered position at home – and that will send a shiver down the spine of the government in Kyiv.

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