Donald Trump is playing into North Korea’s hands by turning on the South, accusing it of appeasement, snubbing its leader and threatening to end their trade deal in moves that analysts say risk weakening a decades-long alliance.
More than 24 hours after Pyongyang shook the ground and the world with what it said was a hydrogen bomb test, the US president had yet to speak to his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-In.
But he had already had a telephone conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, their second of the weekend. In a series of tweets posted hours after the test, Trump denounced the North but also criticised Seoul, saying: “South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!”
That came after he said on Saturday he was considering pulling the United States out of its free trade pact with the South — an economic deal that analysts say underpins the breadth of the relationship between the two countries, which have been security allies for nearly 70 years.
Trump’s unexpected attack on the country took many by surprise, and analysts say his undisciplined tweets were worsening the situation at a crisis moment. Moon backs engagement with the North as well as sanctions to bring it to the negotiating table, and called for stronger measures in response to the latest nuclear test.
But John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul said Trump was comparing Moon to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sought to satisfy Adolf Hitler’s territorial demands in Europe before the Second World War. “What it indicates is that he puts so little value in that relationship right now that he is willing to publicly attack his partner in Seoul,” he said.
The US is security guarantor for the democratic and capitalist South, where 28,500 US troops are stationed to defend it from Pyongyang after the 1950-53 Korean War ended with a ceasefire instead of a peace treaty.
The alliance with Seoul has been a key pillar of Washington’s geopolitical strategy in Asia, where China is increasingly flexing its muscles and the North has made rapid advances in its weapons programmes. But as well as talking to Japan’s Abe, Trump tweeted that China was “trying to help but with little success”.
“The hierarchy is clear that South Korea is at the bottom of
the pile,” Delury said. — AFP
Hwang Sunghee
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