Calls grow for Seoul to prepare for Trump 2.0 following debate with Biden

U.S. President Joe Biden, left, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speak during a presidential debate hosted by CNN on Thursday (local time) in Atlanta. [AP/YONHAP]

The South Korean government is quietly bracing for the possibility that former U.S. President Donald Trump might return to office following his debate with current President Joe Biden on Thursday in Atlanta.

While the official position of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration is that the South Korea-U.S. alliance will remain unchanged regardless of the outcome in November, both the Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry in Seoul have set up separate teams to track statements from both candidates and their campaigns to ensure stability in the country’s relationship with the United States after the November presidential election.

But voices both within and outside the government are arguing that Seoul should do more to prepare for a second Trump presidency, especially considering that the Yoon administration’s most important agreements with Washington were inked during Biden’s ongoing term.

Bilateral security cooperation between South Korea and the United States has increased since the two countries set up the Nuclear Consultative Group last year and revived the Extended Deterrence Strategy Consultative Group in September 2022 after it went dormant during Trump’s first term in office.

If Trump were to be re-elected, there is a real chance that Washington could downgrade or de-emphasize its consultative channels and cooperative frameworks with Seoul, according to Prof. Kim Jae-cheon at Sogang University’s Graduate School of International Studies.

“It remains unclear whether such efforts would be able to maintain their current momentum if Trump is re-elected because they might be regarded as part of Biden’s foreign policy legacy,” Kim said.

Although Reuters reported on June 28 that Trump’s policy advisors have informed South Korean and Japanese officials in recent weeks that they support strengthening U.S. cooperation with both Asian allies if the former president wins a second term in office, they have also emphasized that they do not speak for Trump himself.

South Korean experts have warned that Seoul should steel itself for the possibility that Trump could seek to renegotiate a defense cost-sharing deal hammered out while Biden is in office, especially given the former president’s belief that allied governments do not pay enough for the United States to station troops on their soil.

“Trump approaches alliances with an eye on costs and benefits, so South Korea should not only be prepared to assume a reasonable burden but also try to anticipate what he might expect to receive in return,” said Park Won-gon, a North Korean studies professor at Ewha Womans University.

But if Trump seeks to downscale U.S. security commitments to South Korea upon re-election, he could reignite the domestic debate in South Korea over nuclear weapons development, according to experts.

Victor Cha, senior vice president for Asia and Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine on June 26 that Trump not only appears to be “prioritizing cutting a deal with Kim [Jong-un]” that would leave North Korea’s huge arsenal of weapons intact, but that he “might then also pull U.S. soldiers from South Korea.”

Cha noted that such a scenario “would almost certainly result in the nuclearization of the entire Korean Peninsula,” given that “a majority of the South Korean public already strongly supports developing nuclear weapons.”

Cha observed that a CSIS survey of South Korean academics, politicians and business leaders from January to March found that a majority of respondents agreed that their stance against developing nuclear weapons would change if the United States pulled back from its commitments to South Korean security.

Another recent survey conducted by the Korea Institute of National Unification (KINU) found that 44.6 percent of respondents said they would choose the development and possession of an independent nuclear arsenal over keeping the U.S. military presence in South Korea, while 40.1 percent said they preferred the opposite.

BY PARK HYUN-JU, MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]