Cost-sharing talks with South Korea and nuclear negotiations with the North both come due on Dec. 31. Then what?
Under the rubric of “America first,” the Donald Trump administration has pioneered a radical departure in US foreign policy from that of all its Democratic and Republican predecessors since the second world war. Mr Trump’s approach to international relations breaks with tradition by being willing to fawn over and coddle autocratic adversaries while taking a harsh, even bullying attitude towards traditional, democratic allies.
The downsides of both seem to be coalescing in the Korean Peninsula.
Mr Trump has generated an unprecedented crisis in relations with South Korea. And his vacillation between thundering threats and sentimental overtures towards North Korea appears similarly headed towards a potentially catastrophic meltdown.
The crisis with South Korea is particularly perplexing. South Korean President Moon Jae-in shares Mr Trump’s enthusiasm for improved relations with North Korea and he has showered effusive praise on the US president for facilitating greatly increased dialogue between Washington and Seoul with Pyongyang.
Moreover, recently Mr Moon and Mr Trump have been able to work together to avoid a looming meltdown in relations between Seoul and Tokyo, a crucial element in the tripartite alliance.
South Korea had been threatening to withdraw from the 2016 General Security of Military Information Agreement which provides for close intelligence sharing with Japan because of a burgeoning trade dispute. Under US pressure, Seoul also dropped a formal complaint against Japanese trade restrictions at the World Trade Organization, at least for now.
Continued tensions, some of which date back to the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea before and during the second world war, are likely and a trade war remains possible. Japan’s increasing uncertainty about US reliability and anxiety about North Korea are prompting new levels of re-armament and regional assertion that can only feed South Korean suspicions.
However, Mr Moon wisely placed national interests above his political interests and nationalistic sentiment in South Korea to drop the trade complaint, salvage the intelligence agreement and preserve the three-way alliance with the United States.
Rather than building on this significant achievement, Mr Trump is demanding that Seoul pay vastly more to support the US military presence in its country. Two years ago, South Korea agreed to pay just under $1 billion annually, about 20% of the US cost.
This year Mr Trump is demanding more than five times that. This isn’t just belligerent, unreasonable or designed to be humiliating, although it is all of those. It seems intentionally designed to be practically and, especially, politically impossible.
No matter how much he treasures the alliance with Washington, Mr Moon cannot accede to such a radical increase, especially when South Korea just paid 90% of the $11 billion cost for a new US military base at its largest overseas installation, Camp Humphreys.
To rub salt in the wound, the US delegation summarily walked out of the last set of negotiations, apparently in a theatrical huff representing Mr Trump’s pique at Seoul’s inevitable balking at what looks and feels like a protection racket shakedown.
Underlying all of this, of course, is Mr Trump’s long history of insisting that US troops ought to be entirely withdrawn from South Korea. That is the most obvious explanation for why he might make impossible demands on what is otherwise regarded as an old, crucial and trusted ally. (Similar extortionate demands for vastly increased funding of overseas US forces are being made of Japan, among others.)
South Korea is so alarmed by all this that earlier this month it signed a far-reaching defense agreement with China, an obvious act of considerable desperation.
The main beneficiary of any US military drawdown, let alone withdrawal, from South Korea – and even these tensions between Seoul and both Washington and Tokyo – is, of course, North Korea. The raison d’être of the Pyongyang regime is the expulsion of US forces from the Korean Peninsula and its reunification under the Kim dynasty.
Yet if South Korea is one of the prime examples of how Mr Trump’s bullying approach to traditional allies is leading to disaster, his love-hate relationship with Kim Jong-un is a textbook illustration of the pitfalls of his equally unorthodox approach to adversaries.
Mr Trump likes to claim that, had he had not been elected in 2016, the US would have soon been in a nuclear war with North Korea. That is absurd hyperbole, but he did inherit a tense situation from Barack Obama, who pointedly told him that Pyongyang would be his biggest international problem.
Mr Trump’s response to the ongoing conundrum of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile development and testing, was to threaten “fire and fury such as the world has never seen.” But then he initiated an affectionate dialogue with Mr Kim, even saying more than once that the two had “fallen in love,” and melodramatic but content-free summit meetings in Singapore, Vietnam and the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas.
All Mr Trump has been able to extract from Mr Kim were some human remains, possibly of US soldiers killed in the Korean War, and a few hostages. There has been no agreement by North Korea to nuclear disarmament, and not even an inventory of its nuclear assets.
Mr Kim is increasingly showing every indication of running out of patience waiting for sanctions relief. North Korea recently tested new rockets and has shown signs of activity at several nuclear weapons centers. It appears Mr Kim is ready to return to a policy of provocations if he remains frustrated, and he does seem to be in a position to squeeze Mr Trump, his “beautiful letters” notwithstanding.
Bullying allies for extortion payments creates senseless crises. Alternately threatening and cajoling adversaries, and relying on Mr Trump’s personality and television imagery, does nothing to extract concessions from hostile tyrants.
Both burden-sharing negotiations with the South and nuclear talks with the North expire on December 31. Mr Trump doesn’t seem to have an alternative plan in either case.
The wrongheaded ineffectiveness of trying to coerce friends while seducing enemies is becoming readily apparent in both halves of the Korean Peninsula.