WASHINGTON

US President Donald Trump said Thursday that he wants to hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin to propose that all three countries cut their military budgets in half.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said he would wait for global tensions to "calm down" before meeting with his Chinese and Russian counterparts.

"When I left, we had no Middle East problem. We had no Russia going into Ukraine. They never would have done it. Putin never would have done it. And I came back and we got like the whole world is blowing up," he said.

“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia, and I wanna say: ‘Let's cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that," he added.

Trump wants denuclearization talks

Trump also said he is going to have China and Russia spend a lot less money on defense, adding that "I know they're going to do it. They agreed to it."

He said he is also talking about denuclearization, noting that Putin and he "agreed that we were going to do it in a very big way. There's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons."

"We already have so many. You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over, and here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they're building nuclear weapons, and China's building nuclear weapons, and China's trying to catch up," he added.

He said China, within five or six years, will be “even” with the US and Russia.

"And we're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually hopefully much more productive. Hopefully there'll never be a time where we need those weapons. If there's ever a time when we need nuclear weapons, like the kind of weapons that we're building, and that Russia has and that China has, to a lesser extent, but will have, that's gonna be a very sad day. That's gonna be probably oblivion,” he added.