- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
U.S. President Donald Trump said he wants to open denuclearization talks with Russia and China, revisiting an issue he previously raised as he also seeks to restart stalled diplomacy with North Korea.
“One of the things we’re trying to do with Russia and with China is denuclearization, and it’s very important,” Trump told reporters ahead of his meeting on Monday with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at the White House.
“I think the denuclearization is a very — it’s a big aim, but Russia is willing to do it, and I think China is going to be willing to do it too. We can’t let nuclear weapons proliferate. We have to stop nuclear weapons. The power is too great,” Trump said.
At a separate White House event earlier on Monday, Trump said he had raised the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He did not share specific details on when the conversation took place.
“We’re talking about limiting nuclear weapons. We’ll get China into that,” Trump said.
“China is way behind, but they’ll catch us in five years. We would like to denuclearize. It’s too much power, and we talked about that also,” Trump added.
The U.S. president’s comments come as he expressed his desire to meet with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un this year.
Kim has ignored Trump’s repeated calls since the Republican president took office in January to revive the direct diplomacy
I’m pretty sure that’s because the US dropped their end of the bargain. Can anyone find the direct press release from the DPRK?
Trump pursued during his 2017–2021 term in office, which produced no deal to halt North Korea’s nuclear program. Trump had first laid out his intention to pursue nuclear arms control efforts in February, saying he wanted to begin discussions with both Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping about imposing limits on their arsenals.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office at the time, Trump said denuclearization would be a goal of his second term and that he hoped to get started in the “not too distant future”.
The renewed focus on nuclear arms control comes as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, is set to expire on February 5, 2026. The treaty, signed in 2010, is the last remaining nuclear arms agreement between the U.S. and Russia and limits the number of strategic warheads and delivery systems each side can deploy.
Russia warned earlier this year that prospects for renewing the treaty appeared dim. Under Trump’s predecessor, then-President Joe Biden, the U.S. had pushed China to engage in formal nuclear arms talks, but made little progress.
Again, I’d like to see what Russia and China said.
I doubt he has enough control over the national security state to pull it off, but critical support nonetheless.
Really the only thing these talks are for. Such an obvious ulterior motive.
That and to cast Russia/China as intransigent, suspicious, untrustworthy and hostile if they don’t agree in order to pave the way for justifications to expand our own and/or the golden dome by saying we tried peace but now the only choice is spending $5 trillion dollars on re-vitalizing the nukes, building more, and building the massive interceptor system in space, land, sea, etc.
What worries me is they may have already made a decision to use nukes and consider it a given that Russia/China won’t agree and just want some plausible cover to build up this system, to act like they’re just being oh irrational belligerent America again doing a thing when this time they’re serious about using it, then count on launching a surprise nuclear attack on China and/or Russia, limit their own nuclear response by catching them by surprise and use this system to they believe blunt enough of the retaliation that does get launched to be winners (in the words of that general from Dr Strangelove “minimal and acceptable casualties therefore making us the winners, uh 10-20 million tops depending on the breaks”). Whether this system works or not is not the problem so much as if the planners believe it does and launch the attack.
The alarming thing of course being how much MAD is disregarded these days and how determinedly the US is moving forward with first strike/decapitating strike capabilities along with extensive early warning, monitoring nets over air and sea to say nothing of extensive land monitoring via their satellite network. One side and it is the US unfortunately has a massive advantage for early detection and even tracking movement of these assets compared to the others and it’s one that has grown with partnerships in the Pacific and the expansion of NATO eastward.
Their determination to break MAD should be reason enough for the Chinese and Russians to dismiss such talks until such time the US takes down the level of its unfair advantage against both Russia and China first as a good faith move. The US encircles both of them not the other way around. Its talk of “mad north korean threat of rogue suicidal nuke strikes” is enough for the gallery of rubes in the audience but is not a fitting explanation on the international stage at the highest diplomatic level for its efforts in this field.
We were at a basic stalemate with a meaningful US advantage at the end of the cold war and rather than leave that status quo of MAD in place the US went out of its way to expand its advantage and continues to press that leading Russians to need to talk of bizarre and perhaps impractical at scale undersea hypersonic nuclear powered defense evading weapons and more recently more practical nuclear powered long-flying fire and wait for up to a year nuclear-powered nuclear tipped cruise missiles.
The need is not to get rid of nukes as that’s not going to happen, it’s for the US to stop pressing aggressively to diminish the utility of the nukes that exist and pushing Russia and China into an arms race that requires these dangerous new launch and forget perhaps autonomous even nuclear weapons that circle and circle and wait for the go order. And the US is unwilling to negotiate on that or even bring it up, it chafes at the very notion that it doesn’t have a given right to hegemony and a first mover advantage in detection and first strike time compared to its enemies as well as increasingly a right to interception systems greater than those of adversary peer powers.