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Donald Trump said he wants Bagram air base in Afghanistan to be returned to US control, in a move that would restore American involvement in the country it withdrew from four years ago.
Flanked by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the US president made his most high-profile pitch yet for a plan he had floated before but appears to be increasingly at the front of his mind.
“We want that base back,” Trump said during the joint press conference, citing its strategic location. “It’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.”
Trump’s comment comes a day before he is expected to speak to China’s President Xi Jinping as Washington and Beijing continue trade negotiations that could pave a way for a meeting between the two leaders in October.
While Trump has pursued a trade war with China, his administration has shied away from taking the tough actions against Beijing experts say are necessary to tackle the growing security it poses to the US.
China has been rapidly expanding its nuclear forces in recent years, raising alarms in Washington that the US would soon face a second nuclear peer in addition to Russia. The Pentagon last year said the People’s Liberation Army had grown its nuclear warhead stockpile to 600 by mid 2024, a 20 per cent annual rise.
The US estimates that China will build 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2020 and grow its arsenal to 1,500 by 2035. If the projections are correct, China would have built roughly as many nuclear warheads by the middle of the next decade as the US and Russia have deployed under the New Start arms control treaty.
A return of Bagram to US control would require negotiations with the Taliban government that has ruled the country since America fully withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021.
Adam Boehler, Trump’s hostage affairs envoy, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the US’s top negotiator with the Taliban from 2018 to 2021, have made multiple trips to Kabul in recent months.
This week they travelled to the Afghan capital for talks with Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Mutaqi to negotiate a prisoner swap with the Islamist group.
The Taliban’s foreign ministry said discussions also covered “investment opportunities and other prospects in Afghanistan”, adding that “now a good opportunity has been provided to restore relations to their normal state”.
Back in Washington, however, one Senate Democratic aide said discussions over such a plan did not appear to be advanced.
“We’ve been hearing rumours about this since the spring but nothing serious. No one in the [defence] department seems familiar with the idea, and certainly no briefings have been given to Congress” on the matter, the aide added.
The Pentagon referred questions about the plan to the White House, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Dennis Wilder, a former top CIA expert on the Chinese military who is now at Georgetown University, said the facility in China that Trump was almost certainly referring to is Beijing’s long-standing nuclear test range Lop Nur, in the desert of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
“The flight distance from Lop Nur to Bagram is 2,000km and a modern Chinese jet fighter could cover that distance in one hour,” he said.
However, Wilder noted that the People’s Liberation Army has never manufactured nuclear weapons in western China but has its weapons production facilities in the centre of the country.
During the first cabinet meeting of his second term in February, Trump said his first-term plan for a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan had included retaining control of Bagram and stationing a small force there.
“We’re going to have Bagram Air Base, one of the biggest air bases in the world,” Trump said then, adding that it has “one of the biggest runways, one of the most powerful runways in the sense that it was very heavy concrete and steel”.
Trump had reached an agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan during his first term but then-president Joe Biden took over the plans in 2021. The military pullout was particularly chaotic because the Afghan government collapsed after Taliban forces advanced more rapidly than expected and took control of the capital, Kabul.
A terrorist attack at Kabul airport that killed 13 US troops during the evacuation led to Biden being criticised for mismanaging the plan.
Additional reporting by Humza Jilani in Islamabad
