The Shenzhen Summit Is Not Yalta — It's Three Weakened Powers Pretending Otherwise

Trump, Xi, and Putin may meet trilaterally at APEC, evoking Yalta. But unlike 1945, none commands a victorious army. The real story is three leaders seeking exits from self-inflicted crises, not three empires carving a world.

The expected trilateral meeting between Trump, Xi, and Putin on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen has triggered predictable Yalta comparisons — most loudly from Zelenskyy, who fears Ukraine will be traded away, and from Putin himself, who actively courts the analogy. Russia's chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky has explicitly called for "a new modern Yalta or Potsdam" to create a comprehensive European security system, while foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova framed the summit as "the start of a return from this slide into absolute chaos to stabilisation."

The historical parallel flatters all three participants and misleads everyone else. At the original Yalta in February 1945, Stalin commanded the army that had crushed Germany at Stalingrad and Kursk. FDR was enlisting Soviet support for a new international order and the war against Japan. Churchill, reduced to junior partner, watched Poland's independence evaporate despite it being Britain's original casus belli. The subsequent betrayal — millions consigned to communist captivity, as George Bush put it in Latvia in 2005 — accumulated into a bipartisan American shame that endured for sixty years. Trump has discarded that tradition entirely. His 2025 national security document lauded sphere-of-influence geopolitics, named the western hemisphere as America's domain, and remained deferential to Russian and Chinese spheres. But the document's logic was immediately undermined by Trump's own actions — specifically what the article describes as "disastrous imperial overreach" in Iran. The result is that both the US and Russia arrive at Shenzhen seeking China's help to extricate themselves from wars of choice that have wounded them. Xi is cast as the indispensable broker, not the junior partner. China's position is more complicated than either Washington or Moscow acknowledges. Prof Minghao Zhao of Fudan University offered the Chinese establishment view at the Emirates Policy Center conference in Abu Dhabi: "The Russia-Ukraine war is the strategic mistake made by the Russian president. The Iran war is the strategic mistake made by President Trump. China is managing the consequences of those conflicts." Even Dr Wang Huiyao, who advocated for the trilateral format, framed China's role through the Kindleberger trap — too little global leadership creating chaos — and saw stabilisation largely through the prism of developing the global economy, not redrawing political maps. The structural constraints on any grand bargain are severe. China sees Ukraine as a strictly European security issue and will not betray Putin or endorse a settlement reached without European agreement — particularly while repairing relations with Europe after its industrial overcapacity flooded European markets in 2025 and risked deindustrialisation. Embracing Putin's vision of a new European security architecture would infuriate Germany and the European Commission, undermining the economic relationship China needs. On Iran, China has commercial incentives to help — open waterways serve its insatiable oil demand — but providing security guarantees carries risks that exceed any benefit. The deeper analytical question is whether this format, if it recurs, becomes self-reinforcing. Putin envisions it as the first of a series of meetings in which great powers organise a new order on security-oriented principles where liberal values play little part. Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations concedes the logic: "We are now in a world in which the US and its democratic allies are no longer the preponderant coalition." He notes that China, India, Indonesia, and large countries of the global south are all playing the field, with closer economic ties to Beijing than to Washington. John Ikenberry, the theorist of liberal internationalism, sees the same data and draws the opposite conclusion — that a viable alliance of democracies still exists. What makes this dangerous is not the meeting itself — it may prove to be little more than abbreviated geopolitical theatre — but the precedent of normalising a format that structurally excludes the parties who bear the costs. Ukraine, eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Taiwan, and Iran all have reason to fear that their sponsors might abandon them in what Putin envisions and Trump seems to endorse. Russia's economy is seven times smaller than the EU's; its presence at this table is purchased entirely by nuclear weapons and willingness to wage war. The format rewards that calculus and invites imitation.