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Trump Says U.S. Is Open to Nuclear Talks
March 2025
By Xiaodon Liang
U.S. President Donald Trump signaled interest in “denuclearization” with Russia and China, but efforts to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and differences over the scope of potential arms control negotiations present challenges to talks.
Responding by video to a reporter’s question about the U.S.-China relationship at the World Economic Forum Jan. 23 at Davos, Trump said “we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” He reiterated this position later that day during an interview at the White House with Fox News.
“I want to say: Let’s cut our military budget in half,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 14, on the prospect of a trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons; we already have so many,” he added, Associated Press reported.
In his remarks to the Davos meeting, Trump said he spoke during his first presidential term with Putin about “denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along.” Although the United States attempted to engage Beijing in arms control talks in 2020, U.S. officials were unable to convince China to attend a trilateral summit with Russia or commit to negotiations (see ACT, July/ August 2020).
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Trump Jan. 24, saying, “there is something to talk about, we need to talk. Time has been lost in many respects,” according to Reuters.
The Russia-United States New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) will expire Feb. 5, 2026, leaving the nuclear peers without limits on their deployed strategic forces.
The U.S. Department of State indicated in a Jan. 17 report on Russian compliance with New START that, although Russia “may have exceeded the deployed warhead limit by a small number during portions of 2024,” the “United States assesses with high confidence that Russia did not engage in any large-scale activity above the Treaty limits.”
During the Biden administration, Russia maintained that talks on nuclear arms control would not proceed until the United States dropped its support for Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. Moscow also suspended its participation in New START in February 2023 to protest Washington’s support for Kyiv (see ACT, March 2023).
Now, Moscow will insist that the nuclear arsenals of France and the United Kingdom be included in the scope of a new round of negotiations, Peskov said.
At a Feb. 10 briefing, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov sounded a note of pessimism. “The U.S. is proposing a three-way talks format, and we want a five-way format. We are going round in circles,” he told Reuters.
Four days later at a press conference in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun reiterated China’s traditional position that Russia and the United States should “further make drastic and substantive cuts to their nuclear arsenals, and create necessary conditions for other nuclear-weapon states to join in the nuclear disarmament process.”
Since the change of U.S. administrations, high-level contact between Russian and U.S. officials has accelerated, focused primarily on resolution of the Ukraine war. Trump and Putin held a 90-minute phone call on Feb. 12 on several bilateral issues, according to a social media post by the U.S. president. The call was preceded by a meeting between Putin and Trump’s special envoy for talks on Ukraine, the Middle East, and hostage negotiations, Steve Witkoff, CNN reported.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other officials in Saudi Arabia Feb. 18. According to a State Department press release, the two sides agreed on steps to normalize relations and hold talks resolving the Ukraine conflict, “in a way that is enduring, sustainable, and acceptable to all sides.”
Growing concern over the prospect of a Russia-United States agreement at the expense of Ukraine prompted an emergency summit of European leaders Feb. 17 in Paris. Speaking in a Feb. 4 online interview to the UK commentator Piers Morgan, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeated a previous call for allies to provide nuclear weapons to Ukraine to deter Russia. “Give us back nuclear arms. Give us missile systems,” Zelenskyy said.