Donald Trump

The South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) has released a serious study by John Stremlau of the African response thus far to the presidency of Donald Trump. Stremlau, an American, is a SAIIA fellow and a visiting professor at the prestigious University of the Witswatersrand (“Wits”) in Johannesburg. He served for years as the vice president for peace programs at the Carter Center in Atlanta (a non-governmental organization established by former President Jimmy Carter). Though he now lives in Johannesburg, Stremlau is looking at the Trump presidency from the perspective of a ‘Democrat’ in the United States and of a ‘democrat’ in Africa, working for democracy and the rule of law. He is well placed to understand the political dynamics both in the United States and in Africa. That he has a clear perspective does not invalidate what he is saying. The study, more than forty pages in length, is as much about the U.S. president and his administration as it is about Africa. It is a thoughtful and devastating critique. The report contains in one place a great deal of information, ranging from the impact of proposed budget cuts at the State Department on Africa to cataloguing public statements about Africa made by the president (almost none), the secretary of state (also almost none), and Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the UN (a significant number). He also shows how remarkably little interaction there has been between the president and the secretary of state and African leaders. Drawing on polling data from the Pew Research Center, Stremlau charts the dramatic decline in African confidence in the U.S. president “doing the right thing,” country by country. For Africans, the president’s economic nationalism, hostility to multilateralism, rejection of the Paris accords on climate change, and what many Africans see as discomfort with democratic values, make him an unattractive, even hostile, figure. Stremlau also identifies characteristics of the Trump administration as seen by its critics that will give aid and comfort to the dwindling number of African “big men,” including “the political art of lying,” “opinion over fact,” and “crony capitalism.” Stremlau also talks about the elephant in the living room: the racism of many of the president’s supporters, and the views of many Africans that the president himself is racist. The latter point is longstanding: it dates from the negative African reaction to the president’s view that former President Obama was born in Africa and therefore not qualified to be president of the United States. (Stremlau notes the enduring popularity of President George W. Bush and Barack Obama in Africa.) The study sees the Trump administration as having silver linings for African countries, including incentive to greater self-reliance and to building stronger relationships with non-African countries. He also considers that assaults can often strengthen democratic institutions and the rule of law. For those Americans concerned with advancing the U.S. relationship with Africa, Stremlau’s study shows where we are now and provides a benchmark for going forward. SAIIR has done a service by making the study available to a wide audience.   

Throughout his first ten months in office, President Trump has portrayed himself not only as a champion for workers—a debatable claim—but also an important friend to American business. He has stacked his cabinet with former executives. Perhaps most important, Trump now has made corporate tax reform a top priority. And indeed, despite CEO resignations from various Trump consultative councils, as CEOs balked at being associated with some of Trump’s comments on cultural issues, the business community still has high hopes for his administration. But in the long run, Trump could actually do significant damage to U.S. business—and many corporations are not fully cognizant of the dangers he poses. Dangers lie just over the horizon—and can be seen by studying how other, Trump-like populists around the world have seized control of and damaged their economies over time. For more on how Trump resembles other populists, and how his populism could ultimately affect business, see my new piece for the Globalist.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s first visit to Beijing was an exhibition of mutual flattery. China rolled out the red carpet for what it termed a 'state visit plus,' replete with unprecedented pomp and circumstance for an American leader.  Trump returned the favor with incessant fawning over Chinese President Xi Jinping, supplemented by extravagant admiration for China. 'Nothing you can see is so beautiful,' he said of a full-dress Chinese military parade he witnessed in Beijing. The mood contrasted sharply with Trump’s heated campaign rhetoric (recall his declaration 'We can't continue to allow China to rape our country'), eliciting a flood of analyses in the Western press that he had reversed course toward a softer approach to Beijing. China’s state-run media was all too happy to reinforce this message, billing the summit as locking in a positive path for the U.S.-China relationship. Don’t count on it. Happy veneer aside, three factors at home are likely to drive the U.S. toward a harder line on China in the months and years ahead. Call it the 'Three Ps'. First, people. Trump is slowly, but surely, filling out his Asia team at the National Security Council, State Department, and Defense Department. Not by accident, there’s a near consensus among these political appointees — shared throughout the administration — on the need for a more competitive strategy toward China. That will begin to show. Second, policy development. The Trump administration is finally beginning to get its national security policymaking process up and running. With two big official strategy documents — the National Defense Strategy and the National Security Strategy — likely to drop in the coming months, expect to see a portrayal of China as first and foremost a strategic competitor. This doesn’t mean the Trump administration will demonstrate perfect coherence or competence on foreign policy, but these frames will drive and inform day-to-day decisions on Asia. When, as anticipated, the administration gets around to focusing on other regional issues beyond North Korea (with Taiwan and South China Sea as leading contenders), the possibility of greater friction with China is far more likely than not. The third and most important factor driving the U.S. toward a harder line on China is politics. Consider how Democrats and even some Republicans have pulled Trump back to a more moderate position on Iran. With China, it’s going to be the opposite. The dominant criticism in Washington — across the political spectrum — is that Trump has failed to deliver on China. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has accused Trump of being 'nothing more than a paper tiger' on China. Across the aisle, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, John Cornyn, recently introduced legislation to increase scrutiny of Chinese investments in the U.S., arguing that 'It’s time to wake up to the mounting risks' of China’s threat to the American economy. And let’s not forget that the Bannon-ist, populist, nationalist wing of the GOP first lit this issue on fire in 2016 by blaming China for emptying U.S. factories. Bottom line: ahead of elections in 2018 and 2020, Trump will feel mounting pressure from all sides to make good on his campaign promise to hold China to account for its unfair trade practices. But is America even capable of taking on Beijing if it wanted to? You don’t have to search far these days to find doomsday predictions of American decline. Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer stole the mid-November cover of TIME magazine to argue the contest is already over, proclaiming that 'China Won'. Sensing a similar reversal of fortune, former Foreign Policy chief editor David Rothkopf tweeted upon the President’s departure to Asia that 'Trump about to make history as first POTUS who had to travel all the way to PRC to meet world's most powerful man.' Fair enough: After all, who could fail to compare Xi Jinping’s Davos-friendly odes to globalization with Donald Trump’s protectionism and damaging withdrawal from the Paris climate deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement? Yet the reality in Asia betrays a far more complicated picture. For starters, in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) concerns about Donald Trump, the most important happenings while Trump was in Asia were demonstrations of resistance to — not willing or reluctant acceptance of — China’s growing influence. On trade and investment, the remaining eleven members of the TPP managed to move forward on the deal without the U.S. Washington’s absence was notable and costly, but more significant is the collective desire in the region to avoid a China-led economic order. Similarly, for the first time in a decade, senior officials from Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S. met as a 'Quad' to re-energize cooperation among the region’s leading democracies. Again, little nuance that this is anything other than an effort to generate alternatives to a Sino-centric future. It bears remembering that Xi Jinping may be consolidating power at home, but remains deeply unpopular overseas. Pew Research polls, often used as evidence of Trump’s low ratings globally, have also shown that the world has barely more confidence in Xi, leaving the Chinese President about as popular as Vladimir Putin. Despite the billions of dollars the Chinese government has spent trying to burnish its leader’s image abroad, Xi’s numbers are in the basement compared to respected figures like Angela Merkel and Barack Obama. This all suggests it is premature to declare China victorious while the region and the world are rejecting both its leadership and its leader. Finally, let’s remember that, despite Trump’s corrosive effect, the foundations of American power remain strong. The U.S. economy is still the largest and most advanced in the world, with the best universities, the most capable military, strong demographics, and a vibrant civil society. By comparison, take your issue area — economics, politics, environment, energy, demographics, ideology — and China’s position looks more perilous than dominant. China is no doubt a force to be reckoned with, but Trump has the wherewithal to play hardball on trade, Taiwan, or the South China Sea should he choose. Donald Trump, of course, is the ultimate wildcard, and predicting the future of U.S. foreign policy under his watch is risky business. Nonetheless, all signs are now pointing toward a harder U.S. line against China, regardless of either the royal treatment Trump received in Beijing or his 'great chemistry' and 'very good relationship' with Xi. This post originally appeared in The Interpreter, published by the Lowy Institute.

The Turks thought the president would be their friend. Instead, ties with Washington have only gotten worse. 

Despite the swirl of anxiety in the U.S. media about President Donald J. Trump’s big Asia trip, one thing went right in Manila: continued progress with India. On Monday, Trump met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the margins of the ASEAN Regional Forum in Manila. The meeting reportedly lasted forty-five minutes, and according to the White House readout covered the “free and open Indo-Pacific,” and resolved “that two of the world’s great democracies should also have the world’s greatest militaries,” in a nod to the rapidly strengthening U.S.-India defense partnership. They also discussed Indian oil imports from the United States (now more than ten million barrels), and the upcoming Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad, India. (Ivanka Trump will lead the U.S. delegation, and the Hyderabad police are already relocating streetside beggars in a citywide drive.) The Indian Ministry of External Affairs provided a press briefing with further details. According to Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar (video via India Today’s Geeta Mohan), Trump and Modi also discussed North Korea, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the supply line India has developed to Afghanistan through the Chabahar port in Iran, since Pakistan blocks Indian overland access. The first wheat shipment through the Chabahar route arrived last week. What attracted the flurry of media attention, however, was not so much the Trump-Modi encounter but a lower-level meeting of officials from the United States, Australia, India, and Japan on Sunday—the “Quad.” This gathering at the assistant secretary level showcased a meeting of four great democracies committed to ensuring a “free and open” region, with “enhanced connectivity,” “respect for international law,” and “the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific.” These quotes draw from the slightly different press statements each country released following the meeting (individual, not joint statements), but the general intent seems clear. Greater coordination among all four countries—two of them U.S. treaty allies (Japan and Australia), and one (India) a “strategic partner” of the other three—has the potential to be the most significant strategic response to China’s challenge of the rules-based international order. How the Trump administration works to realize the full potential of the Quad, and of a larger regional Indo-Pacific vision encompassing India and the Indian Ocean, will be the strategic question to watch. I’ve written recently about my concerns that the U.S. economic approach does not cohere with the strategic framework, for example the absence of a policy to incorporate India in economic groupings such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC). I hope the Trump administration seizes this moment to recognize the strategic potential of supporting India’s economic growth by helping it achieve greater linkages across the entire region. The president is wise to bet on India, but a successful strategy toward New Delhi will depend on getting both the strategic and the economic vision right. My book about India’s rise on the world stage, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World, will be out in January. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa. Or like me on Facebook (fb.me/ayresalyssa) or Instagram (instagr.am/ayresalyssa).

Part Two Read Part One here.  So, the bilateral meeting between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte appears to have gone well, at least on the surface. Earlier in the visit, Duterte actually crooned a Philippine love song at a leaders’ dinner, reportedly at the request of Trump. But while the bilateral meeting appears to have been warm, and the two men have developed a kind of mutual admiration society over months—partly, it seems, because the U.S. president admires other strongmen including Duterte, Xi Jinping, and many others—there is only so much that the United States can do to sway Duterte from many of his policy positions. Indeed, in addition to the fact that Trump’s meeting with Duterte probably hurt the cause of human rights in the Philippines, it is unclear whether the meeting achieved anything substantial on key issues including the South China Sea. In fact, according to some news reports, Trump did not even bring up the South China Sea in his meeting with Duterte. Instead, the two leaders talked about the self-proclaimed Islamic State and counterterrorism, among other topics. Duterte definitely is increasingly realizing that he needs U.S. assistance in counterterrorism, piracy, and other issues related to the Islamic State than he had imagined a year ago. Since the battle in Mindanao this past year, the Philippine armed forces are exhausted, and unprepared for another breakout of major conflict in the south. Duterte has lined up new counterterrorism assistance commitments from Singapore and Australia, but these countries’ counterterrorism assistance cannot match the levels of potential aid from Washington. But on the South China Sea, Duterte seems resolute—though it makes little sense that Trump did not even bring up the issue in their bilateral meeting. After all, much of the Philippine military and security establishment still hopes to take an assertive approach to the South China Sea, one in line with the position of the previous Benigno Aquino administration. Trump should have at least raised U.S. concerns about Duterte’s South China Sea policy. To be sure, Duterte appears determined to let Beijing dictate terms on the South China Sea, even as the Philippine military establishment tries to convince him otherwise—and to circumscribe his ability to completely overhaul Manila’s South China Sea policy. It is not wrong that the White House is eager to prioritize counterterrorism in its relationship with the Philippines—this is an issue where real, win-win cooperation is possible. In addition, Trump and Duterte both share goals of reducing piracy in the Sulu-Celebes Sea, a highly lawless area that is rife with pirates, human traffickers and Islamist militant groups—including organizations that combine all three activities. But in the White House’s vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” in which the United States and its partners would defend freedom of navigation, among other interests, it is hard to see how Duterte and his South China Sea approach would fit in. For the past year, nearly every time China has applied pressure on Duterte to take a relatively accommodating position regarding the South China Sea, Duterte has complied. Most recently, earlier this month the Philippines’ defense chief announced that Manila would end any work on a sandbar at Sandy Cay, near Thitu Island—after pressure from Beijing. Earlier in the year, Duterte also canceled a planned visit to Thitu, probably after pressure from Beijing, telling China he’d done so because he valued Beijing’s friendship. The Philippine leader, who this year serves as the chair of ASEAN, also has done little to rally ASEAN nations to come up with a coherent position on the South China Sea. He has, in some ways, seemingly been an obstacle on any ASEAN unity on the South China Sea. And, despite Duterte’s desire for greater U.S. assistance on counterterrorism and other domestic security challenges, there is little evidence that Duterte plans to move Manila back, even modestly, toward the Aquino administration’s tougher approach to the South China Sea.

Part One The meeting between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was highly anticipated, and—for theater—the two leaders did not disappoint. The two leaders have been engaged in a long-distance kind of bromance going back months. On a phone call in the spring whose transcript was later leaked to the press, Trump and Duterte chatted warmly, and Trump has praised Duterte’s brutal approach to the Philippine drug war. The Philippine president seems to appreciate a U.S. leader who has made human rights a low priority in Southeast Asia, and who thus has mostly ignored any criticism of Duterte’s undermining of the rule of law. Indeed, the Trump administration has downplayed human rights in all aspects of U.S. foreign policy, including bilateral meeting with foreign leaders and funding for rights and democracy programs within the U.S. government, among other areas. This approach has, without a doubt, helped restore ties with some top Southeast Asian leaders, although it risks alienating large portions of Southeast Asian politicians. Besides Duterte, other autocratic-minded Southeast Asia leaders also see an opening in the Trump administration’s “America First” policies. Leaders from Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to Malaysian Prime Minister Najib tun Razak to Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha are operating, this year, with the gloves off against civil society and all other kinds of opposition. Prayuth and Najib already have visited the White House and met with Trump. In the run-up to Trump’s Asia visit, the U.S. president notably highlighted that he enjoyed warmer relations with Duterte than President Barack Obama had. Trump told reporters in early November that he was proud of his ties to Duterte, even though Duterte is widely criticized for his massive rights abuses. “You remember the Philippines—the last trip made by a president that turned out to be not so good,” Trump said, according to the Washington Post. “Never quite got to land.” [This statement is not exactly true—Obama was going to meet Duterte at a regional summit in Laos, not by landing in Manila, and Obama called off the visit, not Duterte, as the Post noted.] During Trump’s meeting with Duterte, the two indeed spent little time speaking about human rights, Then, Trump praised his “great relationship” with the Philippine president. Some administration officials seemed to suggest, before the meeting, that Trump would bring up human rights with Duterte, but it remains unclear whether he actually did. (This disinterest in discussing rights in Manila follows a visit by Trump to Vietnam where he also said virtually nothing about human rights.) White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that human rights had briefly come up in the meeting between the U.S. and Philippine presidents, but Duterte denied the issue was broached at all. What’s more, in a press availability with the two leaders, Trump also just ignored reporters’ questions about human rights in the Philippines, according to the Los Angeles Times. The U.S. president further said nothing as Duterte called reporters “spies” during a press availability. This was a chilling comment given that Duterte has in recent years warned that journalists could be targeted for assassinations, and that the Philippines in recent years has had some of the highest annual rates of journalists being murdered of any nation in the world. It may help keep the Trump-Duterte bromance going, but as I explore in the next post, the value of that bromance remains limited. Read Part Two here.

The following is a guest post by Miles Kahler, senior fellow for global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations. President Donald J. Trump’s trip to Asia will reveal the next phase in the Trump administration’s evolving stance toward the major Asian trading powers. Given Factory Asia’s central place in the world economy, Trump administration commercial policies toward Asia have global implications: will its rhetoric and actions, which have broken with past administrations, undermine the complex global trade architecture erected over the past three decades? The architecture that the United States and other major economic powers have promoted since the 1980s has narrowed the space for unilaterally imposed or bilaterally negotiated protectionist measures, promoted regional and plurilateral preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and awarded a central place to a legalized and strengthened global multilateral institution, the World Trade Organization (WTO). This rule-governed trading system accommodated new trading powers, moderated commercial disputes, and presided over a rapid expansion in world trade. A recent Council on Foreign Relations symposium, “The United States and World Trade: Future Directions,” underscored the risks that Trump administration trade policies pose for this superstructure, erected over cross-border exchange that has become increasingly complex, as global value chains (GVCs) link trade in product components across multiple national boundaries. Robert Reich’s question—"Who Is Us"—is even more pointed today than it was in 1990. For the Trump administration, “us” is defined by a vision of the United States as a trading power that exports goods (not services) wholly produced within U.S. borders and as an economic power that is uniformly exploited by cannier allies or rivals. This new orientation has informed bilateral relations with China, the world’s largest trading power, with regional preferential trade agreements, and with the WTO. U. S. bilateral relations with rising economic powers, particularly Asian competitors, have always been contentious. The heated rhetoric leveled by Trump the candidate against China, now the world’s largest trading power, surpassed previous China-bashing. Many predicted a trade war. So far, however, China has escaped significant trade protection and has conceded only modest trade concessions in its initial negotiations with the Trump administration. Even the Article 301 investigation into China’s intellectual property practices, announced in August 2017, remains only a threat to bilateral commercial relations, although a potent one, if realized. Neither the threats nor the actions taken by the Trump administration have dealt with the challenge that China poses to the future economic position of the United States or the world trading system: China’s industrial policies, as embodied in the Made in China 2025 program, which targets numerous technology-intensive sectors in which the United States, Europe, and Japan now enjoy a competitive advantage. Through discriminatory policies toward foreign investors, efforts to extract intellectual property from those investors, and subsidies, particularly to state-owned enterprises, many of China’s policies signal a retreat from liberalized trade and investment. To date, the Trump administration has failed to develop a broad-gauged strategic approach to China that aims to counter these measures and to build more reciprocity into China’s trade and investment relations with its economic partners. Even if it wielded a more coherent and comprehensive negotiating stance toward China, the United States alone does not have the leverage to impose such a grand bargain. Shifting China’s neo-mercantilist course will require allies; the administration’s attacks on regional trade agreements will ensure that few will be found. One of Trump’s first actions in office was withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a new bundle of trade rules designed to counter China’s commercial and industrial policies. Negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) were moribund even before the arrival of the new administration. Existing regional trade agreements, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have been a particular target of the president’s ire. Rather than seeking to modernize the agreement and its role in ensuring competitive North American industries vis-à-vis China, the Trump administration seems intent on pressing issues that are politically impossible red lines for Mexico and Canada. Even before the Trump administration took office, the third pillar of the international trade architecture, the WTO and its Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations, had reached a stalemate. Nevertheless, the dispute settlement mechanism at the WTO was robust and has attracted a growing number of governments. Director General Roberto Azevêdo made clear in his remarks at the CFR trade symposium that regional and plurilateral agreements were not viewed as competitors with the WTO but rather as important contributors to trade liberalization. Despite the disappointing Doha results, Azevêdo emphasized that successful trade negotiations had been completed recently at the WTO: the Trade Facilitation Agreement, the abolition of export subsidies for agricultural products, and the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement. Previous administrations have expressed their discontent with the WTO’s Appellate Body, which has been accused of overreaching its mandate. As in the case of NAFTA, however, the Trump administration has taken its criticism of WTO dispute settlement much further, threatening to resolve disputes outside the WTO and hinting that it might not comply with WTO rulings. If the WTO’s effectiveness is impaired, bilateral negotiations between the major trading powers—the Trump administration’s clear preference—would become the default venue for resolving trade conflicts. Those conflicts, if they persist, would introduce a new element of uncertainty into global economic relations.    A broad coalition should be opposed to the Trump administration’s undermining of the global trade architecture—those in Congress who view an open trading system as central to broader national strategy, corporations whose intricate cross-border linkages are vulnerable to disruption, importers dependent on reliable foreign supplies, and consumers wedded to inexpensive smart phones, cars, and appliances. Whether they can sustain U.S. support for the major constituents of the global trade architecture will determine whether the United States maintains its central place in the governance of trade. If they fail, we will learn soon enough whether the United States is in fact an indispensable nation for the maintenance of an open trading system. As other major economies continue their quest for twenty-first century trade agreements, the United States may find itself on the sidelines of economic diplomacy.

As President Donald Trump was kicking off the first state visit under the progressive administration of Moon Jae-in, the life-or-death question in South Korean minds was whether Trump intended to take an America-first or an alliance-first approach in response to the growing North Korean threat.   How Trump views American alliance commitments to defend South Korea from North Korean aggression has become an urgent question as North Korea has expanded the range of its missiles and the yield of its nuclear explosions.  When the North Korean foreign minister threatened an above ground thermonuclear test in response to President Trump’s threat at the United Nations in September to destroy the country, there was every reason for South Koreans to worry that the war of words might trigger a military conflict, with potentially catastrophic consequences for South Korea. They may have been reassured somewhat when Trump, at a joint press conference with Moon in Seoul, urged the North Koreans to “come to the table and make a deal,” stating that military options are a last resort and that the current strategy remains one of economic pressure and political isolation.   Yet despite what Trump called “movement” on the issue, denuclearization remains a distant goal—and Trump’s ultimate strategy an open question. North Korean leaders believe that the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons will finally even the nuclear playing field, after it has lived under what it sees as the threat of American nuclear attacks for decades. Trump has stated that the United States will not tolerate vulnerability to a North Korean nuclear strike capability—which is getting ever-closer as the North approaches the means to fit a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile—and that “Rocket Man” is on a suicide mission. But the South Korean capital city of Seoul is only a few dozen miles south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and has lived with the risk of destruction from North Korean artillery and rocket launchers for decades, making redundant the threat from North Korea’s nuclear weapons that Koreans have lived with following North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006.   Kim Jong-un has stated that an “equilibrium” with the United States will remove the risk of an American attack on Pyongyang, despite worrisome evidence to the contrary. Both statements reveal misplaced assumptions that raise the risk of miscalculation and pose new tests for a U.S.-South Korean security alliance that has helped deter renewal of war with North Korea for decades.   South Korea’s embrace of the security alliance with the United States has proven to be the country’s best strategy for securing its stability and prosperity, even at the cost of South Korean aspirations for autonomy. The clash between the need for an alliance protector and the desire for autonomy has evolved as a result of South Korea’s democratic transformation and as South Korea has become the dominant power on the peninsula, surpassing the North in the 1970s.  South Korea’s dependency on the United States has remained critical in facing down North Korea’s nuclear threat, as well as managing China’s rise—not least because South Korea’s embrace of global trade interdependence relies on rules made by the United States.   But South Korean domestic debates about America’s reliability have grown in recent years on issues such as how to balance relations between Beijing and Washington. More recently, South Korean debates have centered on whether to request a return of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korean soil, or even whether South Korea should develop its own nuclear weapons to balance the North. Just last week, the Moon administration started walking the high wire in Moon’s diplomacy with Trump and Xi Jinping as it launched what it calls “balanced diplomacy,” the goal of which is to pursue a diplomatic rapprochement with China following over a year of friction over the U.S. deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) missile-defense system in South Korea. While emphasizing the importance of joint U.S.-South Korean defense and deterrence against North Korea, Moon reiterated the importance of balanced diplomacy as a way of diversifying South Korea’s diplomatic relations at his joint press conference with President Trump. But this effort has generated debate about whether Moon is sacrificing potential for strengthened trilateral U.S.-Japan-South Korean security cooperation for the sake of better relations with Beijing.   Still, given the effectiveness of the U.S.-South Korean security alliance in deterring conventional aggression from a far weaker North Korean adversary, Pyongyang, using its classic guerrilla mindset and tactics, has been testing the alliance with unconventional challenges. One end of the spectrum involves unconventional provocations short of war, as when the North Korean sinking of a Korean naval vessel and shelling of a South Korean-controlled island near the North Korean mainland in 2010 raised the risk of South Korean unilateral retaliation. In those cases, U.S. Forces in Korea counseled restraint.   On the opposite end of the spectrum, of course, is the nuclear threat on the U.S. mainland, which has reversed this dynamic, with South Korean president Moon insisting in a speech to the National Assembly days prior to President Trump’s arrival in Seoul that “no military action on the Korean peninsula will be taken without the prior consent of the Republic of Korea.” In both instances, a primary source of tension is whether an America-first approach involving unilateral U.S. action, or an alliance-based approach, is likely to be a more effective solution to the problem.   The America-first approach to North Korea runs the risk of playing into Kim Jong-un’s hands. North Korea’s quest for the capability to strike the United States allows it to test the credibility of American security commitments—would the U.S. president really risk Los Angeles to save Seoul if North Korea invaded the South?—demand withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea, and pursue North Korean-led unification of the Korean peninsula. On the one hand, South Koreans worry about the risk of American abandonment of South Korea under threat of North Korean blackmail. On the other hand, they worry that a premature American strike on North Korea will entrap South Korea in a conflict that could potentially cost millions of Korean lives and threaten the economic base of one of the top 15 economies in the world. North Korea’s pressure on the alliance, combined with America’s own mixed signals—for instance Trump’s suggestion that South Korea and Japan should pursue their own nuclear arms during the election campaign—may together give Kim Jong-un hope that Trump might cave in and bring U.S. Forces in Korea home.   From an America first perspective, the Trump administration will want to examine every measure available to prevent North Korea from expanding its power to extort respect and resources from the rest of the world. In this view, the idea of nuclear vulnerability to Kim Jong-un is intolerable and must be stopped at all costs, including preventive war. But a premature unilateral strike on North Korea will most probably break both the U.S.-South Korea alliance, by precipitating a South Korean domestic backlash over whether conflict was necessary, and endanger the U.S.-led security architecture in Asia—in addition to forcing the United States to bear disproportionate costs for a protracted post-conflict stabilization process on the Korean peninsula.   On the other hand, an alliance-first approach to countering North Korea supports the continuation of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure and engagement campaign against North Korea. It holds the line on North Korean dreams of coercing the South into Korean unification while countering North Korean threats with certain knowledge in Pyongyang that crisis escalation would prevent Kim Jong-un from achieving his essential objective of regime survival, a solid form of restraint against North Korean adventurism. It should buy the time necessary to fully implement the Trump administration’s efforts to squeeze North Korea by building ever-greater coercive pressure in support of a diplomatic solution to the current crisis. Significantly, the strategy uses economic coercion in a fashion that more fairly distributes costs to all the concerned parties, including China, by forcing China to accept the necessity of sanctions enforcement.   Most importantly, the U.S.-South Korea alliance serves as an important brake on premature military action through preventive war without compromising U.S. capability to take actions in its own self-defense—actions which ultimately would be understandable to American allies—in the event that North Korea were to launch an attack on the United States.   This post originally appeared in The Atlantic.  

Donald Trump’s visit to Asia will put in the spotlight one of the biggest problems that has beset his administration’s policy toward North Korea. On the one hand, Trump is expected to provide assurances to Japanese and South Korean allies that the United States will fulfill its defense commitments in the face of North Korea’s expanding nuclear and missile capabilities. On the other hand, Trump must simultaneously convey the urgency and resolve necessary to squeeze North Korea and to face down Pyongyang’s direct nuclear threats toward the United States. Read more on The Hill