Dem
50
Ties
1
GOP
49
Until somewhat recently, the "honor" of being the worst foreign policy president belonged to either Lyndon B. Johnson or George W. Bush. However, those two men are out of the cellar for good, as they have most certainly been overtaken (undertaken?) by Donald Trump.
With both of the earlier presidents, at least they had a foreign policy. That foreign policy may have been ill-advised, and may have worked out poorly, but there was at least a philosophy in play that each man's administration basically stuck to. With Trump, there is no foreign policy. Or, at least, there's no foreign policy that lasts for more than a few days before he moves on to a new one. He's isolationist, then he's interventionist. He's pro-Russia, then he's sympathetic to Ukraine. He wants NATO to be shut down, then he wants to work with NATO. He wants to focus on the Western Hemisphere, then he starts a war in the Middle East.
The latest development, as many readers will have heard by now, is that Trump has decided he wants to (partly) turn his back on one of the United States' most important and most stalwart allies, namely South Korea. Yesterday, that nation and the U.S. commenced an annual series of military exercises called Ulchi Freedom Shield. This is part of a defense treaty between the South Koreans and the United States, and it serves not only to give soldiers on both sides some useful experience, but also to demonstrate to North Korea that it better not get frisky because the U.S. has South Korea's back.
Late Sunday, just before the exercises were set to commence, Trump got on his social media platform for the easily flattered to make this announcement:
Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises! While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, "No thanks!" Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Because if you can't trust a power-mad authoritarian with sociopathic tendencies, who can you trust? Oh, and Kim Jong-Un isn't very trustworthy, either.
What, exactly, drove this last-minute hissy fit? There are many possibilities:
Corruption: We don't actually know what opportunities exist for grift, since North Korea is a poor, economically backwards nation. However, if there is an opportunity somewhere, you can be certain that Trump and the two caporegimes he fathered have found it. Trump Tower Pyongyang, perhaps?
Anger, Part I: South Korea, readers will recall, is one of the many nations that agreed to invest billions of dollars in the U.S. so as to avoid tariffs. In their case, the figure was $350 billion. Who knows how much of that was new investment (probably close to zero), how much of it was investment they were going to do anyhow, and how much of it was pure vapor. Certainly, everyone expected Trump to declare his "win," which he did, and then to forget about it, which he probably also did. But now, he's apparently angry that the $350 billion is not being spent fast enough (despite the fact that South Korea did not commit to a timeline). It would not surprise us if it comes to light that, say, Newsmax did a segment this weekend titled "Where's the South Korea money?" Certainly, someone put a bee in Trump's bonnet.
Anger, Part II and Iran, Part I: Trump asked South Korea to join the alleged alliance against Iran, and the South Koreans politely said "no." This apparently infuriated the President. It is true that other close allies of the U.S. also said "no, thank you," but those nations—the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, etc.—are predominantly white, and South Korea is not.
Iran, Part II: The United States aids in South Korea's defense, partly with personnel, but mostly with missile batteries. Many of those missiles have now been withdrawn, so that they may be used against Iran. One day soon, Trump was facing the possibility of an embarrassing admission that the U.S. can't live up to its commitments right now, and won't be able to do so again anytime soon. By throwing a tantrum, however, he converts that from "an embarrassing misstep" to "a deliberate choice."
Iran, Part III: Similarly, and see below for more, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln situation has become a huge black eye for the administration. The only carrier that is close-by, apparently, is the U.S.S. George Washington, as we noted last week. The problem is that the George Washington is currently supporting operations in southeast Asia, including Ulchi Freedom Shield. And there's no carrier available to relieve the George Washington as it departs to relieve the Abraham Lincoln, leaving the Pacific Rim carrier-less. So, we have another circumstance where throwing a tantrum converts "an embarrassing misstep" into "a deliberate choice."
Oneul-eul Jeulgiseyo: According to Google Translate, that is the Korean equivalent of "carpe diem." In any event, Kim Jong-Un might be a vile person, but he's also a very clever person. He knows a mark when he sees one, and he's now had more than a decade to take the measure of Trump. Though there's been no reporting along these lines yet, it would not surprise us to learn that Kim sensed an opportunity here and got Trump on the phone this weekend for some shallow flattery. Note that Trump once before railed against Ulchi Freedom Shield, and that was in 2018, shortly after one of the Trump-Kim summits.
We would guess we are on the right scent here, probably with more than one of these. Indeed, it could be all of them.
Whatever is going on, it illustrates that Trump is either a liar or a buffoon when it comes to foreign policy (and possibly both). The primary reason for the Iran War was to keep them from becoming a nuclear power. Well, North Korea is closer to being a nuclear power than Iran is, and is also considerably more likely to lob a nuke than the Iranians are. If Trump truly is concerned about nuclear war, then doing everything he can to support South Korea should be his top priority.
It has also grown tiresome that he can only think in dollars and cents. Yes, he's a second-tier real estate developer who thinks he was hired by the American people to run USA, Inc. However, the U.S. rarely, if ever, gives out money and aid solely out of the goodness of its heart. It's buying something—in this case, and in most cases, soft power—with that money. Should a war break out on the Korean peninsula, it will lead to vastly greater financial costs for the United States than the (relatively minimal) cost of a 10-day training exercise. Should that war become a regional conflict, or should it commence World War III, then multiply that by fifty, or a hundred. Why can't anyone in the White House make Trump understand that? Dan Caine, that should be your job. Or yours, Marco Rubio.
And what makes it even more galling is that Trump is not only being ignorant, he then has to lie to make his (very weak) point of view look stronger than it is. He told reporters that, during his first term, he got South Korea to increase its financial commitment to the U.S. military presence in that country from $0/year to $3 billion/year, and that Joe Biden canceled the whole $3 billion. In fact, Trump inherited a commitment of $800 million (so, not $0) from Barack Obama, got the South Koreans to increase that to $1 billion, and then was unable to increase it any further. When Biden took office, he got a 13.9% increase in 2021 and an 8.3% increase in 2024. That means that, far from canceling the expenditure, Biden actually got the Koreans to kick in more additional money ($233,537,000/year) than Trump did ($200,000,000/year). Inflation probably cancels out most of the difference between the two figures, but the point remains that "Barack Obama and Joe Biden charged the South Koreans nothing, while I, Donald Trump, laid down the law" is pure fantasy.
At this point, there cannot be a single ally that has any confidence in Trump. He doesn't understand geopolitics at all. More importantly, he's incredibly mercurial, and can't be trusted to honor his commitments. The real question is how much that will bleed over into the next presidency. There is no plausible presidential candidate right now, Democratic or Republican, who is as ignorant as Trump or as unreliable as Trump. So, will the allies just dismiss Trump as an anomaly once January 20, 2029, rolls around? Or will they conclude that Trump has exposed the flaws in a now-broken system, that the Pax Americana is over, and that they need to hold the U.S. at arm's length from now on? We suspect it's going to be more the latter than the former, which will even more thoroughly cement Trump as the worst foreign-policy president ever. One European diplomat summarized the situation very succinctly when he said: "We can't trust the security of Europe to 5,000 voters in Wisconsin every 4 years." South Korea and other countries also understand this. (Z)