WASHINGTON: United States President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping agreed during their virtual summit to work on organizing talks between nuclear armed countries on weapons control, a senior White House official said Tuesday.
Biden and XI met through a teleconference for more than three hours Monday night (early Tuesday in Beijing) in an effort to facilitate tensions between the two world’s top economies and major geopolitical rivals.
“President Biden did raise with President XI the need for a collection of strategic stability conversations,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at the conference, using expressions employed in a diplomatic circle to show weapons control.
“The two leaders agreed that we would begin to advance the discussion,” he added, in comments made at the Brookings Institution Think Tank in Washington.
Sullivan, A Top Aide to Biden, has been asked about the increasing Beijing military power.
The Pentagon recently confirmed that China in August conducted a nuclear hypersonic missile test which would be difficult to maintain, and have said that Beijing expanded its nuclear arsenal faster than anticipated.
While the United States and Russia have a formal strategic stability dialogue since the cold war period, produced several disarmament agreements, which did not occur between Washington and Beijing.
Biden Donald Trump’s predecessor repeatedly asked in vain that China was included in US-Russian talks.
Biden, who served in January, seems more interested in bilateral talks.
“It’s not the same as what we have in the Russian context with a formal strategic stability dialog that is much more mature, has a far deeper history for it,” Sullivan said.
“There is little maturity for it in the relationship of US-China, but the two leaders discuss these problems and now the obligation for us to think of the most productive way to bring it forward from here.”
Biden, XI agreed to plan weapons control talks: White House
