SEOUL – During his 2024 election campaign, Donald Trump described the United States’ alliance with South Korea as a terrible bargain for his country, accusing the Asian ally of not paying enough for the 28,500 US troops stationed on its soil.
But when he mentioned Mr Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea who has threatened to use nuclear weapons against the South, he talked as if Mr Kim were a long-lost friend.
“It’s nice to get along when somebody has a lot of nuclear weapons or otherwise,” Trump said about Mr Kim in July. “He’d like to see me back, too. I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.”
South Koreans are bracing themselves for Trump’s return to the White House with growing anxiety and uncertainty, as it raises the spectre of the diplomatic roller coaster ride on the Korean Peninsula they endured during his first term.
Some fear that Trump will once again threaten to withdraw US troops from South Korea unless it greatly increases its share of the costs, and that he will rekindle an ill-calculated diplomatic bromance with Kim.
“South Korea-US relations will sail into a storm,” said Mr Lee Byong-chul, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul. “But we will likely see Kim Jong Un and Trump exchanging love letters again.”
North Korea has not reacted to Trump’s election.
But analysts say Mr Kim may see it as an opportunity to restart negotiations with the United States – with more bargaining power than he wielded when he first met Trump.
Between then and now, North Korea’s nuclear and missile abilities have expanded significantly, allowing Mr Kim to demand a higher price tag for making a concession on his nuclear programme, the analysts said.
Since 2019, Mr Kim has developed and tested more nuclear-capable missiles.
He signed a mutual defence treaty with Russia in June. In September, North Korea for the first time unveiled a weapons-grade uranium-manufacturing site, where Mr Kim vowed to produce “exponentially” more nuclear weapons.
After launching a new Hwasong-19 intercontinental ballistic missile last week, Mr Kim said North Korea would “never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces.”
South Korean officials warned that Mr Kim may even conduct his country’s seventh nuclear test, which would be its first since 2017, to further elevate his leverage before negotiating with Trump.
Trump will most likely begin his second term with more political clout, too, after a big election win and with the Republicans on track to control both Chambers of Congress, although he also faces foreign policy challenges, including the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
If he takes on North Korea, he will confront a decades-old riddle that successive American governments have tried to solve but failed.
The last time he did, he veered between applying pressure and unleashing insults against Mr Kim to more friendly, toned, one-on-one diplomacy, but he, too, failed.
If Mr Kim and Trump were to restart talks, Mr Kim would be widely expected to try to persuade Trump to ease sanctions and reduce the American military footprint on the peninsula in return for freezing North Korea’s long-range ballistic missile programme and limiting – but not eliminating – its nuclear arsenal.
For decades, the United States and its allies have pushed for a “complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear programme.
“Kim Jong Un wants the United States to accept his nuclear weapons as a fait accompli and engage him in arms-reduction talks,” said Mr Cheon Seong-whun, a former head of the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification. “If such negotiation happens, it will cause shock and confusion in South Korea because it will be tantamount to recognising North Korea as a nuclear weapons power.”
Trump and Mr Kim spent much of 2017 exchanging personal insults and threats of nuclear war.
Trump threatened to rain down “fire and fury” and “totally destroy” North Korea in the aftermath of its nuclear and long-range ballistic missile tests.
He sent long-range bombers and aircraft carriers toward the peninsula to warn Mr Kim, whom he referred to as the “little Rocket Man.”
Mr Kim called Trump a “mentally deranged US. dotard.”
Then they did an about-face, meeting in Singapore in 2018 in the first summit meeting between their nations.
Trump facilitated his diplomacy with Mr Kim by cancelling or scaling down joint military drills with South Korea, which had long symbolised the alliance’s will to deter North Korea and, more recently, China.
Trump later said he and the North Korean dictator “fell in love.”
South Koreans had watched their meetings with both scepticism and hope, many wishing that the two leaders would negotiate a history-making peace deal on the peninsula, one of the world’s most enduring flash points since the 1950 – 1953 Korean War ended with a truce and left the two sides technically at war.
But negotiations between Trump and Mr Kim fell apart in 2019, as they disagreed on how far North Korea should roll back its nuclear programme in return for relief from international sanctions that Mr Kim badly needed for economic development.
Since he took office in 2022, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has worked with the Biden administration to restore and expand the joint military drills involving the allies.
He will find his legacy at risk if Trump again diminishes those military exercises, which he has called “very expensive,” and resumes diplomacy with Mr Kim at a time when North Korea has rejected South Korea as a dialogue partner.
When Trump talked with Mr Yoon on the phone on Nov 7, he showed “interest in North Korea,” kicking off discussions of the country, including its recent missile tests and its offensive of “trash balloons” sent into South Korea, Mr Yoon said.
The two leaders agreed to meet soon, he added.
South Korea’s leader said US politicians told him that he and Trump may share “chemistry,” perhaps because both entered politics after spending a lifetime in other fields. NYTIMES
