A great deal of attention is rightly focused on what happens to American relations with Taiwan and China under a second Trump presidency. But the Korean peninsula is potentially more volatile and therefore dangerous, partly because Russian leader Vladimir Putin is promising new military technology to Pyongyang.
The Taiwan situation involved three primary players–Washington, Taipei and Beijing, with Japanese leaders in Tokyo watching carefully. The Korean situation is much more complicated because there are two Korean governments and four major powers have interests–the U.S., China, Russia and Japan.
We know that Trump believes he has the power of personality to deal directly with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The two met in Singapore in June 2018 but their diplomacy failed during their second meeting in Hanoi in February 2019. No agreement could be reached on rolling back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program–nor will there ever be. It is Kim’s ace in the hole in his view.
We also know that Trump, during his first presidency, said that South Korea was not paying enough for the 28,000 American troops stationed in the country to protect it from the North. He indicated in an interview with Time magazine that he may once again, if re-elected, demand that they pay more.
Another wild card–Joe Biden has helped engineer a detente between Japan and South Korea, who have many historical reasons to not trust each other. Japanese Prime Minister Kishida and South Korean President Yoon have been persuaded to bury at least some of their differences. But an election looms in Japan and Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party is expected to lose. That could create shockwaves.
But the major nightmare scenario is this: Trump once again reaches out to Kim. They meet and pose for lovely pictures. To sweeten the negotiating pot, Trump agrees to withdraw a few thousand troops from the South because they are expensive to maintain and Trump wants to prove he can secure a deal with Kim.
Kim will then be in a much more powerful position than he has been in years–he will be wooing both Russia and the United States. He has a mutual defense agreement with Putin and he senses weakness in the American position–and fewer U.S. troops in the South. And there could be a diminished Japanese commitment to the South’s defense.
Will he sense an opportunity to stir up trouble with the South? If he concludes he has support from both Putin and Trump (with the Chinese watching nervously from the sidelines) he would be capable of almost anything. A missile strike on the South? Shooting down South Korean fighter jets? This is a combustible mix, to put it mildly. The possibilities for miscalculations are far greater than in the U.S.-Taiwan-China triangle.
