By Judson Berger
Friday, August 21, 2026
What will be the toll from President Trump’s purely
transactional approach to geopolitics?
It has long been observed that the president applies a
real-estate developer’s tactics to dealmaking in office. But the costs of his
methods must be piling up after six nonconsecutive years, as one alliance after
another is put to the test of Trump’s capricious trials by ire.
In this week’s episode, the U.S. president surprised officials in South Korea by telling the Pentagon
to “substantially reduce” their joint military exercises — while talking up his
relationship with Kim Jong-un and fretting that the exercises “send a signal
that is totally inappropriate and hostile” toward his hermit kingdom.
Not even between the lines but right in the Truth Social post, Trump tied the order to frustration
over a lack of cooperation on Iran. He later told reporters that South Korea’s president had rebuffed his
request for help in the Strait of Hormuz: “We have 39,000 soldiers over there
guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to
help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? . . . Well, why are we
involved in helping you?”
As Noah Rothman writes, “Perhaps the president’s bullying will
shake something loose in Seoul.” Trump has a time-honored practice of picking
fights and then ending them, if temporarily, with the announcement of
concessions, real or imagined (see the ongoing dance with Canada over tariffs).
But it would be delusional to think that America’s
alliances are so resilient as to be unaffected by such repeated breaking and
mending. The president’s latest outburst sends a signal, yet again, “that he is
easily disenchanted with longtime allies whose friendship should be considered
a strategic boon to the United States,” Rich Lowry writes:
Whether musing
about making Canada the 51st state, briefly campaigning to take control of
Greenland, imposing tariffs on friend and foe alike, or hammering NATO, Trump
has been careless of the goodwill of our allies.
They need us more
than we need them, which means they are willing to put up with a lot, but
sowing dissension unnecessarily is a foolhardy game at a time of growing
international threats.
South Korea has
been a treaty ally since 1953 and is a wealthy, technologically advanced
democracy that occupies strategically important ground in Northeast Asia. It is
obviously both threatened by and a bulwark against potential North Korean
adventurism.
South Korea is only the latest friendly nation to face retaliation from the Trump
administration in connection with its stance on the Iran war. NATO allies
are facing renewed pressure to back Trump’s foreign policies, while the president recently
told Fox
News he’d “bomb the sh**” out of Oman if the country gets in the way of
efforts to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. (A quick fact check from Jeff Blehar: “Don’t worry, Trump won’t.”)
As for the “pivot from Asia,” specifically, Noah writes,
Combined with the
president’s decision to leave the Western Pacific without a deployed U.S.
aircraft carrier group (the USS George Washington has been tasked with
relieving the long-deployed USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East),
some fear a breakdown of deterrence in the far East. “Anyone that says this
whole package of steps is a net positive for deterrence is deluded,” said one
George W. Bush-era State Department official. “We’ve gone from a stillborn
‘pivot to Asia’ to a reverse pivot from Asia.”
On the other side of the ledger, Trump continues to — in
public, anyway — blur the lines between historical friends and foes. Aside from
Trump’s conciliatory language toward Kim, Elliott Abrams points out that as part of Gaza talks, Jared Kushner met
with Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya. He writes,
The excuses for
the meeting are simple to imagine, but none are persuasive. Al-Hayya is an
old-timer and a survivor as a Hamas leader and is in that sense up to his neck
in blood. He will not give Kushner concessions he would otherwise refuse, and
he will never abandon Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel nor its commitment to
violence to get there.
Just because America is pushing allies away doesn’t mean
her enemies can be converted.
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