Trump’s giveaways to North Korea are a sign of the US’ diminishing presence on the world stage
Douglas H. Paal says in the eagerness to make a deal and woo American voters, Trump has further chipped away at the US’ global standing and undermined national security
The reason the US previously rejected the freeze-for-freeze was that it would unilaterally undermine South Korean and American readiness to defend against conventional, not nuclear, conflict. Korean troops are drafted and American forces rotate in and out of Korea.
If they do not exercise together while the North maintains its outsize and stable conventional forces, they will lose combat capability relative to the North. This suspension was therefore a unilateral concession by Trump to the North, without consulting the South.
Watch: Kim commits to denuclearisation and Trump pledges security guarantees
But, for the North, it meant the US withdraws its nuclear umbrella from South Korea and perhaps Japan. If the two sides are now accepting a common meaning of the term, why was it not memorialised in the joint statement? This casts doubt on Trump’s assurances.
There is much to say about what was achieved or not achieved in the Kim-Trump summit, and others will analyse it. But it is important to note the context before and after the summit to see how far Trump is unmooring America from the role it has championed since the second world war.
In Singapore, in a rambling press conference following the summit with Kim, Trump waxed on about not spending tax money on forward deployments of American troops and expensive military exercises, expressing the hope of withdrawing US forces from Korea.
Trump clearly has forgotten, or never learned, the American lesson that it is better to keep threats far from our shores than to await for them to arrive and fight them on the defensive. Instead, he spoke dreamily about developing North Korean coastal property, if such a future can be envisioned for the world’s nastiest communist dictatorship.
Trump said not a word about how a world left to its own national security devices would avoid costly arms races and regional conflicts at a time of global disorder. These conflicts would ultimately endanger America’s far-flung economic and other interests. He does not seem to care.
But for those who have lived amid the relative peace and prosperity of the past 70 years, the most alarming thing to note is the silence of the traditional American economic and security elite in the face of Trump’s direct challenges to what should be their legitimate legacy of security and prosperity.
Douglas H. Paal is vice-president for studies and director of the Asia Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace