Unreliable allies

About 18 months ago, when Donald Trump’s reorientation of American foreign policy was still in its early stage, I said that the world should have been better prepared for it:

Many European leaders courageously opposed [George W Bush’s] policies. But evidently none of them drew the logical conclusion that the US was on the way to becoming a rogue state and therefore an unreliable ally, and that one day they might well be left in the lurch. Resources (both physical and moral) should have been put aside against the day when the democracies might have to fend for them­selves.

Although the problem has only become clearer – and the size of the stakes more apparent – with the passage of time, most leaders still cling to the hope that they can ride out the storm without having to rethink several decades of geopolitical strategy. One can hardly blame them for that, but hoping for the best can and should coexist with preparing for the worst.

And it’s not just Europe. In the last week South Korea and Canada, historically among the United States’ closest allies, have both been in the spotlight dealing with Trumpian tantrums. Or, on (to my mind) a much less plausible reading, dealing with Trump’s carefully worked out strategies. Today we’ll look at the Korean situation; we can come back to Canada at a later date, probably next week.

South Korea was apparently taken by surprise when Trump cut short its annual joint military exercises with the US, having criticised them for being a waste of money and “totally inappropriate and hostile” towards North Korea. President Lee Jae Myung had to make the best of it, praising Trump’s “deep consideration to achieve peace.” With a nuclear armed North Korea on his doorstep there’s not a lot else he can do, at least in the short term.

The fact that Trump, not surprisingly, relates more to mad North Korean autocrat Kim Jong Un than to sane democratic politicians like Lee puts the alliance in a strange place. It’s unlikely that Trump’s whim alone would tempt the North into an invasion, but it certainly undermines the deterrent effect of the presence of US troops in the South. In the longer term it’s likely to lead to the South developing its own nuclear weapons: no-one doubts that it has the capacity to do so at relatively short notice.

In Trump’s first term it seemed that his improbable double act with then South Korean president Moon Jae-in had genuinely improved the prospects for peace between the Koreas. But much has changed since then. Kim and the North lost interest during the interval of a right-wing South Korean leader in 2022-24, and went on to participate in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The South, on the other hand, refused Trump’s request to lend support to his war on Iran.

Trump in his second term is also less restrained by traditional niceties, and more focused on his trade war (or rather, anti-trade war) – which necessarily targets America’s friends more than its enemies, since that’s where most of its trade is. So as Michael Koziol explained the other day in the Channel Nine papers, the hit to defence co-operation with South Korea is in part a manoeuvre in continuing trade negotiations: “With Trump, it always pays to follow the money.”

That’s true, but it can be misleading if it makes us attribute to Trump a rationality that he does not in fact possess. As I’ve argued here before, Trump’s actions are fundamentally unpredictable. While there are certainly fixed points in his thinking (love of money and dislike of honest trade among them), the outcome on any given day is essentially random, as is the success or failure of any particular strategy for dealing with him.

And some of Koziol’s informants lean into that point, with one expert describing Trump as “long on atti­tude, short on strategy,” and another remarking that “It’s strange when you get people even from the admin­is­tra­tion who say: don’t neces­sar­ily believe the words that the com­mander-in-chief says.”

Which brings us back to the starting point: America’s rogue behavior didn’t start with Trump and won’t finish with him. Behind Trump stand normal Republican politicians pursuing their normal goals – trying to funnel money to American arms manufacturers, demanding new protections for American companies and their so-called intellectual “property” and undermining any thoughts of strategic independence by America’s allies, particularly those with left-of-centre leaders.

Sometimes those goals will harmonise with Trump’s enthusiasms; other times they will cut across them. But neither offers much comfort for the defence of democracy and the survival of a liberal world order.