Donald Trump has instructed his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to ‘substantially reduce’ joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea. The two countries have had a bilateral defence agreement since 1953, and it was in defence of the government in Seoul that 36,500 American service personnel gave their lives during the Korean War. (It is worth noting that, despite the signing of an armistice at Panmunjom in July 1953, the conflict is technically ongoing.)
Trump’s hazardous decision to downgrade military co-operation with and support for South Korea has come as a surprise. When his rhetoric is examined, however, the depressing truth is that it is a combination of several of Trump’s worst habits, instincts and prejudices when it comes to making foreign policy: familiar elements put together in a new way.
Firstly, it relies on a self-aggrandising and false view of the President’s own personal genius. The view peddled by some that Trump plays some kind of Jedi-style four-dimensional chess that mere mortals cannot understand has taken some knocks. His grandiose plan for Gaza stubbornly refuses to materialise and the war with Iran drags on at increasing expense but with an elusive and nebulous endgame.
None of this makes sense, but it was never going to
Trump is unhappy about military exercises with South Korea ‘based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un, of North Korea’. Cooperation with Seoul sends a ‘totally inappropriate and hostile’ message to a country that, ‘as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful’. To reinforce his point, Trump rather oddly posted a photograph of himself and Kim, both dour and unsmiling, on social media.
If you tell a narcissist he has done well, he is likely to believe you. But what has the ‘very good relationship’ with the North Korean dictator gained America? Pyongyang has condemned the AUKUS security partnership and test-fired cruise missiles to demonstrate its capabilities. As for being ‘unthreatening’, North Korea claims it now possesses ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental United States, an assertion which cannot be dismissed by American intelligence and presents a potentially appalling risk to the country’s national security.
Trump’s decision also rests on his usual assumption that all other countries are preoccupied with cheating or bilking the United States in some way. Noting the cost of joint exercises, he added ‘much of these costs [are] paid for by the United States of America (as usual!)’. The Mutual Defence Treaty between the US and South Korea is certainly not cost-free – no partnership can or should be – but it does mean, for example, that in the event of conflict, Korea’s armed forces would be placed under United States command. 450,000 active personnel and 3.1 million reservists make for quite an additional capability if the worst were to come to the worst.
More broadly, the cancellation of future joint exercises represents a strategic incoherence typical of the current Trump administration. In another self-pitying jab, the President ended his social media post saying that he had asked Korea ‘if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”’. The implication is that this is ingratitude, some kind of failure to redeem the privilege of enjoying American protection for 75 years.
It is peculiar that Trump will seek to punish almost any country which will not help his attempts to stop Iran from seeking to gain a nuclear weapons capability. At the same time, however, he is happy to celebrate his ‘very good relationship’ with the leader of a rogue nation which already possesses such a capability. Iranian nukes bad, North Korean nukes good? Clearly the President’s view is shaped by his amour propre and the level of flattery directed at him.
The United States not so long ago sent a message to its Nato allies in Europe that they must do more for their own defence needs, while Washington’s focus moved to the Indo-Pacific and to China particularly. This represented a logical strategic direction by the US.
Since then, Trump’s insistent nickel-and-dime complaints about America ‘paying’ for everything have put strain on its regional partnerships with Japan, the Philippines and now South Korea. Japan has been told it will have to wait for new supplies of Tomahawk cruise missiles while American stocks, vastly depleted in strikes against Iran, are replenished. The aircraft carrier the USS George Washington is being redeployed from the Pacific to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf, meaning there will be no US carrier in the Pacific at all, at least temporarily.
None of this makes sense, but it was never going to. With Marco Rubio filling two roles – Secretary of State and National Security Advisor – and doing both quite badly, and the conduct of key foreign policy issues through people like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, there is no challenge to Trump. So his every twitch and emotional spasm is transformed into policy on the hoof. Worrying? Yes, deeply. Disastrous? Potentially. Surprising? Only if you were lying to yourself for a long time.
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