Pivot from Asia? What Trump’s South Korea ‘shock’ says about US strategy

Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon policy chief, has just completed a tour of South-east Asia where he tried to assure America’s allies that the US is still with them and dissuade them from pursuing a “middle power” strategy that excludes Washington and its weapons industry.

It was undercut just days later when US President Donald Trump announced – via a social media post – that he was ordering the Pentagon to scale down joint military exercises with South Korea. The two militaries subsequently agreed to shorten their drills.

The move was seen as a betrayal of one of the US’ closest allies in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly as Trump said it was “based on [his] very good relationship with Kim Jong-un” – the brutal communist dictator of North Korea, a US enemy.

Trump’s affinity with dictators and strongmen is well established. His eagerness to build bridges with such men is a defining feature of his foreign policy.

Meanwhile, his order to reduce joint military exercises came just as the US redirects its last remaining aircraft carrier in the Pacific, the USS George Washington, to the Middle East to replace the ailing USS Abraham Lincoln.

Taken together – and against the backdrop of Trump’s desire to strike a grand bargain with Chinese President Xi Jinping – the developments have rattled observers of US policy in Asia.

Evan Feigenbaum, vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former adviser to Republican secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said the US had gone from the Democrats’ “pivot to Asia” to a “reverse pivot from Asia”.

He also recently said the US under Trump was “long on attitude, short on strategy” in Asia.

Derek Grossman, an international relations professor at the University of Southern California who specialises in Asia, said the pivot towards Asia was “dead”.

There may be some truth to that. But there are other factors at play here.

It is surely no coincidence that Trump’s order to scale down military exercises came just as South Korean Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan touched down in Dallas on Sunday for high-stakes trade meetings.

He was there to discuss a $US350 billion ($490 billion) trade and investment deal, born of tariff negotiations, which is facing difficulties. Only a day before, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung dismissed his chief trade negotiator, while the Trump administration has expressed frustration with the slow pace of talks.

Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific security chair at the right-leaning Hudson Institute in Washington, says Trump is using his usual ambiguity to disrupt the negotiations. His social media post was “meant to be a shock”.

“He is trying to put pressure on Lee Jae-myung to concede more of what Washington wants,” he says. “There are both tactical and transactional negotiating reasons why Trump did what he did. There’s also a policy play, if not a strategy play.”

It’s not just the trade deal. Lee is pushing hard to regain military independence from the US through what is known as the transfer of wartime operational control, or “opcon” – an effort he renewed after Trump’s order to reduce joint exercises.

Since the 1953 armistice in the Korean War, authority to direct South Korean forces in a time of war has rested with the US. The head of the Combined Forces Command is always an American four-star general. Up to 30,000 US troops are stationed in South Korea; Camp Humphreys is the largest overseas US military base anywhere in the world.

Transfer back to South Korean control has been on the table since 2006. Cronin says Trump is leveraging Lee’s desire to get it done quickly for negotiation purposes.

As part of the aforementioned $US350 billion deal, South Korea has pledged to invest $US150 billion in the lagging US shipbuilding industry. For comparison, Australia is paying $US3 billion into the US submarine industrial base as part of the AUKUS pact.

Cronin points out that the administration is sceptical of some of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea’s left-wing tendencies, including support for the labour movement. And in another parallel with Australia, Washington is concerned about Seoul’s treatment of the technology industry.

‘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.’

Richard Fontaine, chief executive of Centre for a New American Security

Republicans in Congress have written a series of letters to South Korea demanding a more lenient policy on big tech. In April, a group of 54 members of Congress wrote to South Korea’s ambassador to the US complaining of “targeted and discriminatory actions against US companies”.

That included actions against the company Coupang – the so-called “Amazon of Asia” – which operates mainly in South Korea but is now headquartered in Seattle and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. After a massive data breach last year, South Korea fined Coupang more than $US400 million in June.

Earlier this month, another group of Republicans wrote to the chairman of the Korea Media and Communications Commission to complain about new South Korean laws that enable large fines against news outlets and social media users deemed to have spread “false or manipulated information”.

The changes were “specifically aimed at American companies” and targeted American-owned platforms like YouTube, they asserted.

All of these factors plug into Trump’s highly transactional foreign policy. In addition, analysts believe he is pushing for a meeting with Kim Jong-un this summit season (The Wall Street Journal reported as such on Tuesday), and he also has his eye on his upcoming meeting in Washington with Xi.

Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Centre for a New American Security and a former Republican foreign policy adviser, says there have been “a number of contradictions and inconsistencies” in Trump’s approach to Asia, which has befuddled US allies.

“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,” Fontaine says. “Maybe that’s true, but words do have meaning, and diplomacy is about words.”

Cronin at the Hudson Institute says it is premature to cast Trump’s recent decisions as a pivot away from Asia. But he points out that under Trump, the Quad – a diplomatic partnership of the US, Australia, Japan and India – has also slipped into irrelevance. He suggests instead that there has been “a degradation of unity of purpose” in the administration’s Asia policy.

Publicly, Trump says his decision to scale down military exercises with South Korea derives from his desire to maintain good relations with Kim and punish Seoul for declining to join the US-Israeli war against Iran (something everyone else did). Why, he asked in the Oval Office on Monday, are we spending all this money protecting South Korea if they won’t help us when we ask?

That is also a classic Trumpian view of the world. But in this administration, everything is connected – or more pertinently, nothing is siloed. A decades-old military alliance is not immune from being used as a coercive tool in trade negotiations. Nor is it safe from retribution over recent grievances.

The temptation is – as Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney advocated, and as Colby condemned – to pull away from the US and form new alliances among lesser but more equal powers.

Writing in the September issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, two senior advisers to former president Joe Biden on the Asia-Pacific, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi, counselled against pessimism.

They argued that current schisms were more due to presidential personality – read: Trump – than to any durable changes in US posture. Bureaucracies continued to drive co-operation behind the scenes. And the enemy was still clear: China and Russia.

“The grievance in allied capitals, while heartfelt, is not a lasting guide to what comes next,” Campbell and Doshi wrote. “Dire as the moment appears, the United States’ alliances will survive the Trump shock for reasons the headlines miss.”

Asia – including Australia – has taken a somewhat different tone to Europe or Canada in dealing with Trump’s tariffs and other coercive efforts. They have broadly eschewed performative responses for quiet dialogue – playing Trump’s transactional game, as the US Studies Centre’s Bruce Wolpe wrote for this masthead.

Broadly, this strategy has paid dividends. But the US and South Korea are now at the pointy end of talks on a major investment deal. With Trump, it always pays to follow the money.

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