Baffled and concerned

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Some people are just a tiny bit curious about Trump’s hostility to South Korea and warm affection for its neighbor to the north.

South Korea’s president said Tuesday a solid alliance with the United States underpins national security, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s abrupt order to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises left many many South Koreans baffled and concerned.

Trump made the surprise announcement in a social media post just before U.S. and South Korean soldiers began Monday’s annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, which are largely designed to sharpen readiness against North Korean threats.

Trump cited what he said was a good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s refusal to join the U.S. war against Iran.

Which is so Trump. He thinks he has “a good relationship” with Kim Jong Un (which of course he doesn’t: Kim is playing him like a fiddle) and that the imagined “relationship” with the boss is all there is to relations between the two countries. He’s mentally a child, and that child gets younger and dimmer every day.

Trump’s move was apparently taken without consultations with South Korea and meant to reach out to Kim, deepening concerns about the reliability of the U.S.-South Korean alliance forged in the turmoil of the 1950-53 Korean War.

That is, concerns about Trump’s understanding of that alliance and what his dimwitted understanding will prompt him to do.

A weakening of the U.S. defense commitment could shake South Korea’s national security as it has no nuclear weapons and is under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” protection, which guarantees a devastating American response in the event of an attack on its ally by nuclear-armed North Korea. The U.S. has about 28,500 troops in South Korea.

Confidence in the U.S. has already eroded among many South Koreans because of Trump’s tariff war and last year’s immigration raid in the U.S. state of Georgia that led to the detention of hundreds of South Korean workers.

…

In his social media post, Trump said the military exercises with South Korea are not only costly but “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House.

By which he means Kim Jong Un has pretended to be his buddy and he’s stupid enough to believe the pretending.

Comments

3 responses to “Baffled and concerned”

  1. The Whimster Gap Avatar
    The Whimster Gap

    There’s a lovely – probably apocryphal – story about James I & VI and his relationship with money that’s relevant here. James could be lavish in his spending and patronage, but also had a reputation for stinginess. If he was warned about his spending on something, it’d bounce off him; and so one day he was shown how much he’d spent on a project by having the equivalent value in coin tipped on the floor in front of him.

    He was horrified. Seeing the money made it real and so got around an intellectual block. Very clever though he may have been (and he was), his brain simply didn’t do money or big numbers. That’s probably true for most of us: big numbers are difficult to imagine.

    Trump is analogous here. He likes things he can see and that can be put in a ledger. Does spending on security cost? Yes. Does it yield an income in a way that a double-entry bookkeeper might be able to write it down? No. And so Trump doesn’t believe it’s real.

    You could try explaining to him that American military hegemony allows the US to write the rules of international trade and diplomacy, and that what we used to call the West is happy to go along with that because those rules are the continuation of a system that’s much older than American hegemony and that makes us all very wealthy.* You could try explaining this, but you’d fail, because he doesn’t have that kind of higher-level thinking. In his world, if you spend money, you get a thing in return.

    Spending money to secure peace to secure law to secure institutions to secure trade to secure wealth is just too long a chain.

    * Well, OK: not to write the rules, but to maintain and develop them. That was the deal at Bretton Woods. We Brits couldn’t sustain the system any more, but everyone agreed that it was a good system, and so we just moved it from London to New York, a bit like the Romans shifting power to Byzantium.

  2. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Whimster Gap, I think you are right on the money ther (pardon the pun). With Trump, I think you can add the concept that it doesn’t make him any money and you would have an entire picture. Trump doesn’t care about anyone but himself and sees everyone as either someone who can do something for him, or as a parasite. Often he sees them as both.

    And the idea that in some abstract way it protects his money and his ability to earn more just flies right over his head.

  3. The Whimster Gap Avatar
    The Whimster Gap

    [Thumbs up emoji]

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