Trump puts the US alliance system in Asia at risk

Donald Trump’s nuclear pantomime with Kim Jong-un is a tragic betrayal of South Korea — and may be disastrous for Australia.

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in embrace at their meeting in April. Picture: Getty Images

Yesterday Donald Trump imposed tariffs on $US34 billion ($45.8bn) worth of Chinese exports to the US, and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, arrived in North Korea to see if he can push along the so far substance-free process of denuclearisation of the hermit kingdom.

This is after US newspapers this week published confirmed satellite imagery showing that North Korea, far from embarking on immediate denuclearisation as Trump claimed it would at the Singapore summit three weeks ago, had actually been working to extend the facilities at its Yong­byon nuclear reactor and also had been working to complete a long-range missile construction facility.

Just another day in US-Asian diplomacy.

But this is really a story about South Korea, a nation you haven’t heard enough of in recent weeks, but which is the real centre of everything that has been going on in Asia in the past few months. The real contest on the Korean peninsula is not about North Korea but South Korea.

But first, let’s sketch some context, and try to keep in mind always Australia’s deepest national interests.

Three variables will determine Australia’s strategic future.

First, can Australia weather the pervasive crisis of governance and political legitimacy sweeping through the West, rendering its politics chaotic and paralysed, and sapping it of strategic will?

Second, what is the limit of Beijing’s strategic ambition and what is the limit of the means Beijing will use to pursue that ambition?

And third, will the US alliance system, especially in Asia, survive the Trump presidency?

We do not know the answer to these questions. We should be trying to influence the answers.

There is a great deal about the Trump presidency that Asia, except for Beijing, likes, and anything Asia likes about Trump is good for Australia.

Trump has secured a big increase in the US defence budget. That is good for Asian and Australian security. He presents as potentially more dangerous to US enemies than Barack Obama did. That’s also good.

Domestically, there’s a lot about Trump that a lot of Asia likes. His tax cuts have stimulated US economic activity. Even more important has been the deregulatory approach to business. A strong US economy is good for Asia and Australia.

Trump is appointing outstanding Supreme Court justices whose legal conservatism reflects Asian values much better than the ultra-liberal judges favoured by Obama.

But all of that — and it’s substantial — will count for nothing if Trump destroys or significantly erodes the US alliance system in Asia. The most acute case is South Korea. It, along with Japan, Australia, The Philippines and Thailand, is one of the US’s Asian treaty allies. Washington also has deep strategic relationships with Asian nations such as Singapore, Vietnam and India.

Australia benefits directly and enormously from its alliance with the US. But we also benefit from the way the US alliance system operates, with all the strength of a multilateral alliance system but with much greater flexibility.

The things that matter to us — such as territorial integrity, freedom of shipping, freedom from coercive hegemony by any Asian power, the avoidance of military conflict — not only enjoy US backing but also the weight of the US alliance system. And the ultimate guarantor of security, military deterrence, is vastly greater because it involves the alliance.

The most important US allies are Japan, South Korea and Australia. No real alliance is one-sided. As the great former US deputy secretary of state Rich Arm­itage has often told me: “A military alliance means I’ll fight and die for you, and you’ll fight and die for me.” There is something sacred about such a mutual commitment and it can be maintained only if both sides believe the word of the other.

Tragically, everything Trump has done with North Korea has undermined the US-South Korea alliance and affected the internal dynamics of South Korean politics to damage the alliance long term.

South Korea is not a mendicant state or a client state. Neither does it fail to pay its alliance dues militarily or financially. It embodies a proud, ancient and nationalistic culture, and is an almost unbelievably successful society. It has two problematic neighbours: the bizarre and paranoid North Korea, with a rubbish economy and 50 to 60 nuclear weapons; and China, an emerging superpower with a big nuclear arsenal.

South Korea certainly owes its independence to US intervention in the Korean war, when North Korea invaded the South. But that was 70 years ago and, while Seoul has been an exemplary US ally since, now, for the first time since the blessedly brief madness of Jimmy Carter, the US-South Korea alliance is under threat.

There is perhaps nobody in the world — not even, I think, Trump — who really believes North Korea will denuclearise. It may reduce its nuclear arsenal and refrain from further developing its longest range intercontinental ballistic missiles, the ones with which it could hit the US.

Kim Jong-un’s brazenness in continuing to expand above-ground, clearly visible nuclear and missile facilities, and the fact he hasn’t even yet returned as promised the remains of dead US servicemen from the Korean war, do not necessarily indicate he will do nothing under this agreement. But they do indicate he will take a very long time. Almost certainly he will do what his father and grandfather did: string the process out as long as possible while yielding nothing of great substance.

However, I don’t criticise Trump for likely getting only this outcome. It’s possibly the least worst option available and moves us away from the talk of pre-emptive military action. As Malcolm Davis, senior defence analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, argues, any pre-emptive attack on North Korea will almost certainly bring massive North Korean military reaction and massive loss of life. Trump himself in Singapore talked of tens of millions dead in such a scenario.

What Trump did not need to do was trash the US alliance with South Korea as he went through his pantomime with Kim. In unilaterally cancelling joint military exercises without consulting his South Korean allies first, Trump humiliated the South Korean government. This reinforces anti-American tendencies in the Left and the Right in South Korean politics.

When Trump called these exercises “war games” and described them as “provocative” and accepted the idea of a freeze in these exercises in exchange for a North Korean freeze in tests, and then talked of his desire to get US troops out of South Korea permanently, he was, astonishingly, using official Chinese talking points. Australian politicians and senior officials had heard all these points before when dealing with Chinese officials whose policy is to get the US to disengage from Asia.

Davis says: “The manner of Trump’s diplomatic engagement with North Korea to get a deal is undermining South Korean confidence, especially in the South Korean military, that the US will be there for them.

“Similarly Trump’s ordering the Pentagon to look at (possibly reducing) US force levels in Europe, even before his meeting with Vladimir Putin, has got to send a message to the South Koreans and the Japanese, irrespective of what the formal US national security strategy says.”

Davis fears that although Trump is not at present urging the South Koreans to get their own nuclear weapons, he seems to be reverting to his campaign rhetoric of 2016, which radically undervalued US alliances, and which he repudiated after his election.

One of the profound weaknesses with Trump, and with everything about his administration’s approach to strategic issues, is that nothing he says is guaranteed to last longer than a news cycle. This can disconcert enemies, but it is profoundly destabilising for allies, who make life-and- death decisions based on the stability and integrity of American commitments.

Takako Hikotani, a Japanese scholar at Columbia University, has written in Foreign Affairs about the sophisticated effort Japan’s Shinzo Abe has made to manage and mollify Trump, but she concludes: “Trump has proved even less predictable than expected; disarming him in one meeting offers only so much comfort, since he could reverse course afterwards.”

South Korean President Moon Jae-in leads a left-of-centre government which is inherently distrusting of Washington. South Korea, like all nations, has its appeasement party. I’m not accusing Moon of that. But one option for South Korea is effectively to abridge its own national independence, to do almost anything to seek a quiet life from North Korea and just go along with whatever Beijing wants in geo-strategic terms. The decision by Moon to cave in to Beijing’s pressure not to deploy any more missile defence systems, which give his people an outside chance of surviving a North Korean missile attack, is a symptom of this thinking.

Once, under great leaders such as Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean Centre Left was the most idealistically pro-American force in South Korea. (The CIA once saved Kim Dae-jung’s life when the South Korean military had planned to kill him.) Now Trump is losing the Centre Left at the same time he is losing credibility with the South Korean military.

Mike Green, who was the Asia director on the National Security Council under George W. Bush and is the deepest US thinker on northeast Asia, describes the confusion brought about by Trump in South Korean thinking: “The Moon Jae-in progressives secretly wanted Trump to agree to the Chinese freeze for freeze. The progressives are happy with where this is all going but very nervous that Trump might surprise them again, either by going back to fire and fury or by withdrawing US troops too fast.

“Conservatives are deeply worried that this is going to decouple the US from the Korean peninsula. The broader South Korean public is very confused. Their support for the US alliance is high. But they were very worried by Trump’s fire and fury rhetoric. Then they were relieved by the summit. Now they are very confused.”

Overall, Green believes, the episode indicates that “Trump does not understand why we have alliances and allies”.

Given that there will be no North Korean denuclearisation, there are three broad ways this can go. One, South Korea effectively accepts North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, makes a complete strategic accommodation with Beijing, and the US effectively withdraws from the US-South Korea alliance. That would be a disaster for Australia as it gravely undermines the US ­alliance system.

Two, we muddle along with increasing ambiguity, big doubts about the US commitment while Trump is president, but the forms of the alliance are maintained. That might be the least bad outcome for Australia.

And three, South Korea experiences a nationalist reaction and decides to provide for its own security through its own nuclear weapons, the outcome Trump favoured when he was a candidate. This would produce a massive Chinese reaction and a similar move from Japan. It would be bad for Australia because it would mean the end of the US alliance system and unleash a radical dynamic of nuclear proliferation.

In Asian diplomacy, nothing is more important than the US alliance system, and despite his administration’s other virtues, Trump is handling it very poorly.