The November 2026 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Shenzhen, which US President Donald Trump has indicated he will attend, marks a critical juncture in the ongoing restructuring of the global system. Given the timing and context, and the exclusion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the prospect of an agreement coming from a trilateral summit between Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin may represent a temporary, tactical stabilisation of an increasingly fractured interstate system. But, it may also sideline important alliance structures in Europe and Asia, mark the revival of traditional balance of power logic and great power diplomacy, and present a stark reality for peripheral states like Ukraine.

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The fractures emerging within NATO over this impending Sino-American-Russian dialogue underscore an already existing structural decoupling between Washington’s geopolitical calculations and the deeply entrenched security anxieties within Europe. The UK has opposed unilateral bilateralism under the Trump administration, most notably the recent US-Russia diesel procurement accord. Characterising this transaction as a fundamental transgression of collective security frameworks, British Defence Secretary Wes Streeting argued that the transatlantic alliance must use its economic levers against the Russian Federation to fortify Ukrainian sovereignty rather than dilute the existing sanctions regime. Similarly, European allies interpret the proposed summit as a meeting that could sideline Europe and embolden Russia’s war strategy. Some commentary even draws comparisons to the 1945 Yalta Conference where great powers negotiated the fate of smaller nations.

Media discourse surrounding Ukraine still remains trapped within a reductive, binary, paradigm that positions diplomatic concessions of territory against absolute military victory. This fails to grasp the structural material realities of contemporary geopolitics and the shifting correlation of forces within the global system. From a systemic perspective, it is evident that achieving a total military defeat of the Russian Federation on the battlefield is implausible without unprecedented, long-term escalation of Euro-Atlantic material support. While so-called red lines set by the Kremlin have been continually crossed by Western military aid and weapons systems, the ever-present structural risk of escalation (nuclear or conventional) imposes a deliberate, systemic brake on Western tactical velocity. Consequently, the primary Euro-Atlantic objective is the containment of Moscow’s revisionist capabilities, managed carefully to avoid driving the Kremlin into a regional nuclear option born of systemic........

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