SEOUL—The spectacle of several hundred thousand right-wing demonstrators flashing U.S. and South Korean flags near the main avenue from the American embassy here hides an inconvenient truth about U.S. policy toward North Korea.
The demonstrators are supporters of Yoon Suk-yeol, the conservative president who triggered a major political crisis by briefly declaring martial law in December. Yoon’s fans, like Trump’s MAGA supporters, view their political hero as being unfairly persecuted by the justice system and the victim of a rigged election—many even display “Stop the Steal” signs at protests and wear ball caps emblazoned with the words “Make Korea Great Again.”
To them, it’s unthinkable that Trump would betray South Korea the way he’s betraying Ukraine.
“He won’t give up on South Korea,” said Yun Sang-hyun, a conservative member of the South’s National Assembly, at an event in central Seoul this month memorializing the massacre of 10,000 Koreans by the Japanese on March 1, 1919. “The U.S. has 28,500 troops in South Korea. It is vital for the U.S.”
Sure. But in his first term, Trump threatened to pull American troops out of South Korea while demanding $5 billion from the South for keeping most of them on America’s largest overseas military base, Camp Humphreys, 40 miles south of Seoul, and nearby Osan, home of the Seventh Air Force, which is key to defense against the North.
Trump is now also saying he would like to speak to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un again after failing to get the despot to give up Pyongyang’s nuclear program over three meetings during his first term. Since they last met almost six years ago, Kim has vastly strengthened his alliance with Putin and sent thousands of his troops to fight and die in the war against Ukraine, along with shipments of millions of artillery shells and other armaments.
“He can show up with Kim Jong Un, and we need to be able to have these conversations with the Russians,” said Richard Grenell, Trump’s new ambassador for special missions, at a confab of the Conservative Political Action Committee near Washington. “I don’t think that talking means you’re weak. I actually think talking is a tactic to get to a goal.”
For Kim Jong Un, the goal would be much the same harsh result for which the Russians, and North Koreans, are fighting in Ukraine: Defeat of the Ukraine army and the downfall of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s regime in Kyiv.
In any new talks with Trump, Kim would also likely demand replacing the armistice that ended the Korean War in July 1953 with a peace treaty calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The U.S. would have to give up its alliance with South Korea, exposing the South to North Korean attacks with tactical nukes.
“It’s a very big asset for everybody that I do get along with him,” Trump said of Kim at the White House last month.
In South Korea, conservatives also cannot believe that Trump won’t support them in their demands for Yoon’s return to full power as president. A constitutional court is to decide soon on whether to approve Yoon’s impeachment; he also faces a charge of insurrection that could result in life in prison or even death—though that’s hardly likely since a district court freed him from jail while on trial.
The constitutional court on Monday overturned the impeachment of Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who was filling in as “acting president” until the assembly impeached him too. Han, having stoutly denied abetting Yoon’s martial law declaration, is back at his desk as acting president while tension mounts for a ruling on Yoon.
Far from being ready to rise to the South’s defense, Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine indicates he might be more open to the plans of South Korea’s leftist Democratic Party—or Minju—whose members are eager for talks with the North and a deal that would leave the South, like Ukraine, forsaken by the Americans.
In an effort to win support from Trump, leftists in the South have even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Evidence for this route to Trump’s heart lies in the handwritten notes of an influential member of Korea’s national assembly, Park Sun-won, of a meeting in which he told Joseph Yun—the acting U.S. ambassador to Seoul—that he had nominated Trump for the prize.
The notes report on a wide-ranging conversation in which Yun, who served from 2016 to 2018 as American point man on North Korea, discussed the North Korean issue “in the Ukraine framework.” They were joined by a leftist academic, Moon Jung-in, who advised South Korean leftist presidents on how to achieve reconciliation with the North.
The U.S. embassy in Seoul did not respond to requests for comment on Yun’s luncheon meeting with Park and Moon.
Together, Park and Moon are at the forefront of pressure for a deal with Kim, with whom Trump said he “fell in love” at their first summit in Singapore in June 2018. Park’s notes on his meeting with Yun convey the understanding, in Korean, that “we don’t have to argue” and “we don’t have to make any controversial issue.”
On American policy, Park wrote, again in Korean, “We are in the course of efforts to do something.”
Specifically, Park’s note said they had talked about the “Trump initiative” of “using Russian and Chinese leverage” over North Korea with an emphasis on getting away from multilateralism.
Rather than coordinating with NATO, Yun “explains the new approach,” said the note in a foretaste of Trump’s repudiation of NATO and trust in Putin in dealing on Ukraine.
