So much of any week’s White House news falls under the category of palace intrigue that it’s easy to overlook the crucial revelations. This week’s report by NBC News that White House chief of staff John Kelly regularly calls Donald Trump an “idiot” and has cast himself as the country’s “savior” seems dubious or at least markedly exaggerated. One detail, though, caught our attention. The president, two White House officials told NBC, wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea before the Winter Olympics and was only persuaded not to do it, “in one heated exchange,” by Kelly.
It is tempting to dismiss this as the sort of fevered, anonymously sourced reporting we’ve seen too often from the mainstream media over the last year and a half. But consider Defense Secretary James Mattis’s answer on April 27 to a reporter’s question about a potential withdrawal from South Korea: “That’s part of the issues that we’ll be discussing in negotiations with our allies first, and of course with North Korea.”
We don’t know what the president thinks about our military presence on the Korean peninsula, but we know that U.S. authorities are moving ahead with a proposed meeting between Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un later this month. If Richard Nixon was unsuccessful at portraying himself as an unpredictable “madman” in 1969, his present successor is doing a rather better job of it. This is the first time in 30 years that North Korea’s leadership seems puzzled by American intentions and feels obliged to react to U.S. moves rather than vice versa. There are advantages to be gained from unpredictability.
Yet if the North Koreans don’t know what Trump has in mind, neither do the rest of us. The unsettling fact is that nobody knows if he’s really inclined to pull our troops out of South Korea. He has expressed stridently isolationist views in the past, and so the idea is hardly unthinkable.
The North Koreans have long demanded the withdrawal of America’s nearly 30,000 soldiers from South Korea as a criterion for their cooperation. Never before has the United States hinted that such a withdrawal is negotiable. Ahead of last weekend’s summit between the two Korean leaders, Kim pretended to drop his regime’s demand for an American pullout, and South Korean president Moon Jae-in predictably seized on the statement as a diplomatic win. It was a strange moment, its significance hard to divine. We can only fall back on what we know. To repeat: It is Pyongyang’s chief foreign policy aim to preside over a united Korean peninsula, and there is no room in that vision for American troops. Whatever it may say from one moment to the next, the North wants the Americans gone.
So why shouldn’t the president use America’s presence in South Korea as a bargaining chip with Kim Jong-un? The first and most obvious answer: Pyongyang has no intention of shedding its nuclear arsenal. North Korean leaders have fashioned an entire national identity around the possession of nuclear weapons. Kim may “denuclearize” North Korea if by that term we mean temporarily halting nuclear test launches and the like—and we wish the U.S. administration would stop using that ambiguous term—but he will not willingly abandon the only thing that gives his otherwise insignificant country any leverage.
With the United States out of the way, furthermore, Kim is sure to find a reason to “defend” his country by making war on the South, either with conventional or nuclear weapons. To fail to acknowledge that reality is, again, to misunderstand the nature of the Kim regime: Its leaders fully anticipate a time when the North subsumes the South under one totalitarian government.
China, Russia, and Japan have all coveted the peninsula for different reasons at different times; the American presence there has ably kept the peace for well over half a century. Even the South’s most doe-eyed liberal politicians grasp that reality. A full-on American pullout has no real purchase in South Korean politics—partly, it’s true, because the little nation is addicted to American defense aid, but mainly because Seoul understands that an American withdrawal would invite Northern aggression. Moon, however, is a vocal proponent of détente with Pyongyang, the so-called Sunshine Policy of his liberal predecessors Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-hyun, and like them he believes that only the South can interpret and deal effectively with the North. The Sunshiners are impatient with U.S. warnings against dealing directly with Pyongyang even as they rely on the U.S. defense umbrella.
And so America finds itself in a dangerous position vis-à-vis North Korea. Our interests are represented by a man who governs by instinct rather than principle or understanding. Most of what the United States is hearing from North Korea, moreover, comes through a South Korean government burdened by a Sunshine ideology that naïvely places too much trust in the word of dictators. We’re in effect at the mercy of enthusiastic multilateralists who, although they would not deliberately rid their country of American protection, may push an intermittently isolationist president to make a foolish decision.
We trust that sane minds in the administration will impress on the president the danger of even hinting that withdrawal from South Korea is a possibility. The United States has very little to gain from these negotiations—and northeast Asia has a lot to lose.
