Trump Is Choosing the Wrong Korea

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Add South Korea to the list of allies dumped on by President Trump.

 

In a Truth Social post over the weekend, he wrote that “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea.” He criticized the cost of the exercises and added that the maneuvers “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile.” The president then informed the public that he had directed his defense secretary to “reduce Joint Military Exercises!” and ended his post with the stinger that South Korea refused to join U.S. efforts to denuclearize Iran.

 

He followed up with comments to reporters at the White House about his anger that South Korea wasn’t helping in Iran (and mentioned that they’d also stopped paying the U.S. a fee for U.S. troops stationed in the country during the Biden years).

 

It’s worth remembering when considering this fracas that nearly 150,000 Americans gave their lives and limbs defending South Korea after North Korean forces, backed by Communist China and Soviet Russia, crossed the 38th Parallel on the morning of June 25, 1950. In the 76 years of unresolved cease-fire since, a South Korea has been established that is free, functional, and under threat of nuclear annihilation every day from its neighbor to the north. It’s been an official American ally since 1953. No worse friend, no better enemy — to borrow and bowdlerize General James Mattis, paraphrasing Lucius Sulla.

 

The president can be upset that South Korea isn’t materially contributing to the campaign against Iran (it’s generally been good about chipping in to other, past major U.S. military operations), but asking South Korea to denuclearize authoritarians thousands of miles away while in the same breath praising the nuclear authoritarian in its backyard is perverse.

 

There is a decade of history here, between Trump and Kim. The first Trump administration vacillated between fraternal overtures on the one hand, and the 2017 reroute of the USS Carl Vinson strike group from Australia to the Korean peninsula, joined by Japanese assets, for a potential beheading action against the Kim regime on the other. No doubt the president thinks this latest episode will further the diplomacy he’s employed in the past, but it lacks any sense of calibration. Consider, he is ordering his defense secretary to reduce joint exercises with South Korea at a time when North Korean forces are learning next-generation warfare on the Russian frontlines.

 

A serious U.S. distancing from South Korea would not only increase the likelihood that the country grows closer to North Korea and China but also remove the possibility that South Korea’s maritime heavy industry, one of the greatest outside of China, will build the fleet we need to restrain China’s advance on Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan.

 

Now, when American carriers are pulled from the West Pacific to support efforts near Iran, the president should be doing all he can to reassure allies of our steadfastness while communicating to our foes that we remain vigilant in the lands and waters that provide Americans and the world the means to advance human flourishing.

The Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Turn Against South Korea

By Eric S. Edelman

Friday, August 21, 2026

 

The annual joint military exercises with U.S. and South Korea are ending early after President Donald Trump lashed out on Truth Social on August 16, complaining the drills were too costly (with the U.S. bearing too much of the burden) and “totally inappropriate and hostile” to a North Korean regime that has been, as far as he is concerned, “unthreatening and respectful.”

 

Judging by the the Truth Social post and his subsequent comments in the Oval Office, Trump’s anger seems rooted the fact that the Koreans declined his request for assistance in dealing with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz (although Trump also said, confusingly, that we didn’t really need South Korea’s help), though it may simply be an effort to distract the American public from the cul de sac into which the president has driven U.S. policy in the Gulf.

 

Trump’s ire is the result not only of South Korea’s unwillingness to help him out of the war that he began without consulting Seoul (and which has created a triple whammy of inflation, higher interest rates, and a weakened currency in a country that imports 70 percent of its energy from Gulf) but also a longer-term view of U.S. alliance relationships as a protection racket in which South Korea has been unwilling to bear its share of the burden of common defense. Trump wrongly thinks the alliance solely benefits the Koreans and that the U.S. has no real interest. He also believes that South Korea, like other U.S. trading partners, has been taking advantage of America for years. He has demanded South Korean investments in the U.S. to offset our trade deficit, and some have suggested his anger stems from South Korea’s foot-dragging on a $350 billion pledge it made in 2025.

 

Trump’s account of the state of the U.S.-Korean defense relationship and burden sharing is, as CNN’s Daniel Dale has pointed out, a farrago of lies and misrepresentations. The reality is that, since 1991, South Korea has contributed to the maintenance of U.S. forces in Korea through a series of “special measures agreements” (SMAs) through which the Republic of Korea pays for labor, logistics, and construction to help defray U.S. costs. Under the current SMA, South Korea will pay $1.19 billion to help defray the costs of the U.S. military presence, but as an ally, South Korea also consumes U.S. defense goods and services. In 2025, the Koreans had $30 billion worth of active cases under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, including items like the F-35, the Global Hawk UAV, Patriot missile defense systems, and the AEGIS air and missile defense system. The South Koreans also procure roughly $1.5 billion worth of defense goods a year through direct commercial sales.

 

Of course, the U.S. benefits from its very much diminished presence in South Korea (now down to slightly under 30,000 troops, compared with twice that number during the height of the Cold War), because it helps maintain stability and security in northeast Asia, a crucial region abutting North Korea, China, and Russia. Those nations’ tightening collaboration, along with their ties to Iran, was highlighted by the 2024 National Defense Strategy Commission that I co-chaired and which noted that “this new alignment of nations opposed to the U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater global war.” In other words, North Korea is not just a threat to a part of the world that is crucial for American prosperity because of its importance for semiconductor and electronic manufacturing—it  represents a broader challenge to U.S. global interests. It is from that point of view that the president’s pronouncement seems particularly ill-timed.

 

Contrary to the president’s assertion that North Korea is “unthreatening,” his own director of national intelligence’s annual threat assessment for 2026 concluded that North Korea’s “WMD, conventional military capabilities, illicit cyber activities, and demonstrated willingness to use asymmetric capabilities to attack South Korea and the U.S. pose significant threats to the U.S. and its allies.” The Financial Times reports that North Korea is spending 15.8 percent of its GDP on defense, “supporting an arsenal of increasing diversity and sophistication that includes short-range tactical nuclear weapons, land-attack cruise missiles and a growing fleet of road-mobile ballistic missiles as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) such as the solid fuel Hwasong-18.” The DNI assessment also points out that “the benefits that North Korea receives for its support for Russia in the war against Ukraine have increased North Korean capabilities. North Korean military forces have gained valuable combat experience in 21st Century warfare along with equipment.” As former State Department official Frank Rose has pointed out, this is an argument for more joint exercises—not fewer.

 

Moreover, the North Koreans, in the days leading up to Trump’s post, had launched two ballistic missile “tests” to demonstrate their displeasure with the upcoming exercises. The North Koreans have also, according to Ukrainian intelligence, agreed to deploy 50,000 troops (they had earlier deployed some 11,000) to Russia to help overcome Russia’s manpower mobilization issues and assist in the war in Ukraine. This allegedly includes a ballistic missile battalion—and indeed there have already been reports of a North Korean-manufactured missile fired at Ukraine. In the wake of the president’s intervention in the South Korea exercises, North Korea fired off 10 medium-range ballistic missiles, and Kim Jong Un’s sister declared that the U.S. curtailment of the joint exercises changed nothing in the bilateral relationship with the U.S. In that context, the president’s directive looks less like an example of the Reaganesque “peace through strength” that he and his secretary of defense are fond of touting and more like an act of rank appeasement.

 

The president’s post also coincided with the news that the USS George Washington, the only U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific region, was being redeployed to the Middle East to relieve the lengthy deployment of the troubled USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for more than 270 days and which has reportedly been plagued with deteriorating morale among its crewmembers. These factors have called into question Washington’s credibility as a security guarantor not just for South Korea but for the East Asian region as a whole.

 

The episode clearly has unnerved the South Koreans and led President Lee Jae Myung to call for “for faster progress towards acquiring nuclear powered submarines and transferring wartime operation control of South Korean forces, which he has pledged to achieve by 2030.” The expressions of concern rippled beyond the Korean Peninsula and “deepened concerns about U.S. reliability among Indo-Pacific allies who were already nervous” about Trump’s rhetoric on Taiwan. As to Michael Green, a senior director for East Asia in the George W. Bush administration, told FT,  “one U.S. ally likened working with the Trump administration to ‘going into space with Sigourney Weaver’ in the movie Alien. ‘The latest monster to spring from the ceiling was the president’s threat to cancel US military exercises with South Korea,’ said Green.” The Trump administration’s recent moves are inevitably being viewed through the lens of the upcoming visit by President Xi Jinping to Washington, and they are guaranteed to heighten the anxieties of U.S. allies in the region that any agreements reached at that superpower summit are likely to come at their expense.

 

The immediate impact of Trump’s ill-considered social media post is to force our Asian allies to consider additional measures of security self-help in the face of what appears to be the U.S.’s waning commitment to the region’s security (despite what many anticipated would be a reprioritization of East Asian security in a second Trump administration). Where this will ultimately end up is impossible to know, but the ultimate self-help step would be for South Korea, Japan, and potentially Taiwan to pursue their own independent nuclear deterrents. The debate in South Korea has been ongoing for some time, and the clamor for an independent nuclear deterrent will now undoubtedly increase. Japan seems on the surface like a less likely candidate for nuclear proliferation for obvious reasons—it was, after all, the only country to sustain bombardment by atomic weapons. But Japan’s national security has been so closely tied to the U.S. for so many years that if it is forced to look for a Plan B independent of a reliable U.S. security guarantee, nuclear weapons are likely to look a lot more enticing. The prospect of “friendly proliferation” was almost inevitable in the wake of the administration’s failure to prioritize extended nuclear deterrence in its National Defense Strategy. It will now receive an added fillip from the president’s impulsive expression of anger at South Korea. It is another major blow against the teetering nuclear non-proliferation regime and, in the wake of the ill-considered Saudi nuclear deal, betrays a cavalier disregard of the last remaining vestige of the arms control era and global nuclear security more broadly.

Punishing South Korea Does Not Make Sense on Any Level

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

President Trump, speaking to reporters yesterday:

 

Now, I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea. It was, you know, an exercise against North Korea. When I’m friendly with him, when we have — I don’t see anything happening for certainly two and a half years, it’s not going to happen with me, but I don’t see anything happening.

 

And I was not happy when South Korea said, no, they’re not interested in helping us with the Hormuz Strait, and yet they get 60 percent of their oil from the Hormuz Strait. I said would you like to help us. He said, no, thank you. I said that’s nice, please, thank you. He made us a lot of money; I didn’t like that.

 

So, I felt that to do a massive — we were doing a massive war exercise. I thought that was very insulting to somebody that frankly has been, during my term at least, very well-behaved yeah.

 

Got that? Joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises, which have occurred in some form or fashion every year since the end of the Korean War in 1953, are “very insulting” to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

 

Oh, no! Heaven forbid that the U.S. ever insult a man who boasted a couple of years ago, “The whole of [the United States] mainland is within the range of our nuclear strike and the nuclear button is on my office desk all the time.”

 

Trump says that there’s no chance of North Korea doing anything provocative or aggressive while he’s president. Here’s how the administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy characterizes North Korea and its regime:

 

The DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a.k.a. North Korea] poses a direct military threat to the Republic of Korea (ROK) as well as to Japan, both of which are U.S. treaty allies. Although many of North Korea’s large conventional forces are aged or poorly maintained, South Korea must stay vigilant against the threat of a North Korean invasion. North Korea’s missile forces are also capable of striking targets in the ROK and Japan with conventional and nuclear weapons as well as other weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, the DPRK’s nuclear forces are increasingly capable of threatening the U.S. Homeland. These forces are growing in size and sophistication, and they present a clear and present danger of nuclear attack on the American Homeland.

 

Back in June, I wrote that the now dead-as-a-doornail memorandum of understanding represented a series of immediate U.S. concessions in exchange for vaguely worded Iranian promises — promises that the mullahs in Tehran started breaking almost immediately.

 

The pattern continues in Asia. Here’s how the North Korean regime demonstrated its appreciation for Trump announcing the U.S. would “substantially reduce” its role in the joint military exercises:

 

Pyongyang fired off a barrage of short-range ballistic missiles on Thursday, Tokyo and Seoul said, just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump claimed he would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this year.

 

The South Korean military said it had detected the launch of around 10 short-range missiles from the Pyongyang area toward the Sea of Japan, which Seoul calls the East Sea, the Yonhap news agency reported.

 

The Defense Ministry in Tokyo, meanwhile, said the North had fired off “multiple” ballistic missiles, with all traveling an estimated 320 kilometers and hitting a maximum altitude of 90 km before splashing down in waters outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

 

President Trump said Wednesday that he would meet with Kim Jong-un this year. Here’s what the North Koreans said about that:

 

The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has denied any ongoing communication between US President Donald Trump and her brother, maintaining that the US continues to engage in a “hostile” policy towards her country.

 

“Regarding the recent news from Washington about communication between the leaders of North Korea and the United States, I am completely unaware of it, and it is likely the only matter concerning our top leadership’s foreign policy that I am unaware of,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday.

 

I wish I had something more optimistic to write than the fact that our president is a doddering octogenarian who just blurts out the first thing that pops into his head, and who ardently believes that dictators of hostile states are not so threatening to the U.S. and its allies because they personally flatter him. But that is where we are.

 

Does the U.S. have some fair gripes with the South Korean government? Absolutely. (Read our Abigail Anthony for an eye-popping recent example.)

 

After the extremely messy end of right-of-center South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol — remember the whole “declaration of martial law” and impeachment and removal from office — left-of-center Lee Jae Myung took over. The Center for Strategic and International Studies summarizes that Lee has “pursued a nuanced strategy with China, one that evades regional security issues (e.g., Taiwan and the South China Sea), while maintaining ‘neighborly’ relations and acknowledging the importance of soliciting Chinese cooperation on issues ranging from North Korea to stable supplies of critical minerals.”

 

But as the Hudson Institute’s Patrick Cronin observes, punishing South Korea doesn’t make sense on any level. In fact, Lee, like Trump, has been eager to restart a dialogue with the North Korean regime:

 

Despite South Korea’s sharp political shift from Yoon Suk-yeol to Lee Jae-myung, and President Lee’s recent calls for renewed inter-Korean dialogue, Kim remains resolutely uninterested in serious engagement. . . .

 

Washington may disagree with some of President Lee’s policies, but it should not fault his government for failing to contribute to the alliance. South Korea carries a substantial defense burden and possesses industrial capabilities increasingly vital to American security. Few major U.S. allies devote a larger share of their economy to defense, and South Korea is indispensable to revitalizing the U.S. defense industrial base, particularly in shipbuilding, while remaining a critical partner in technologies such as semiconductors.

 

As for not helping the U.S. in its war against Iran, yes, the South Korean navy could have been an asset. South Korea has run the Cheonghae Unit — a rotating anti-piracy/escort deployment of roughly 260 personnel, a destroyer, small boats, and helicopters — since 2009. Back in 2020, during the first Trump administration, South Korea deployed the Cheonghae Unit to the Strait of Hormuz. But antipiracy and escort duties are a different task from deployment into an active war zone.

 

Of course, President Trump didn’t consult South Korea before launching the war against Iran, which set off a major energy crisis, the biggest stock market drop in South Korean history, a huge drop in the value of the South Korean won currency, and a spike in inflation in that country.

 

Let us also recall that, roughly a month before launching the war against Iran, Trump announced that the United States would “increase its tariff on imports from South Korea from 15% to 25% and also hike levies on the country’s automobiles, lumber and pharmaceutical goods.” If you take the most aggressive and combative stance on trade possible, you cannot be surprised that the same country you’re hitting economically doesn’t want to put its soldiers and sailors in harm’s way to help you militarily.

 

Hard to believe the government in Seoul wasn’t eager to help the Trump administration, huh?

 

America’s Continued Global Withdrawal

 

I know it sounds bizarre to level the charge of isolationism at an administration that launched a unilateral war against Iran. But look around the world, and you’ll see a recurring pattern.

 

In the Middle East:

 

One of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where America’s large overseas military bases have been battered by months of Iranian strikes, two people familiar with the ongoing analysis said.

 

The damage to these facilities has prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled that it might not rebuild its bases as they were before the conflict.

 

In Europe:

 

The Pentagon is planning to withdraw about 5,000 American forces from Germany, senior defense officials said Friday.

 

The officials characterized the move as a signal of President Trump’s discontent with the level of assistance that European allies have offered in the U.S.-Iran war. Mr. Trump has publicly criticized German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the leaders of other NATO member states for not getting directly involved in the U.S.’s military campaign against Iran.

 

That rotation of additional U.S. troops to Poland, announced in May to the elation of the Poles, has been very slow-moving.

 

In the Pacific:

 

The only remaining U.S. aircraft carrier patrolling the Pacific departed Asia through Singapore last week en route to the Middle East, marking the latest step in a steady drawdown of American military assets across the region.

 

An armada of naval forces, alongside a constellation of air-defense and missile capabilities, has been removed from a theater the Trump administration said just last year would be the battleground of the coming century.

 

And now, President Trump’s surprise decision this week to curtail military exercises with South Korea has further fueled anxiety across Asia, where Washington’s closest allies fear violent consequences from a vacuum of American power. . . .

 

The Australian government said it remained “deeply concerned” with North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, while Japan’s defense minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, warned of historic stakes.

 

“As Japan faces the most severe and complicated security environment in the post-war era, the cooperation among Japan, the United States and South Korea is critical to the peace and stability of the region,” Koizumi said in a statement.

 

Trump isn’t an openly declared isolationist; he appears to genuinely love meeting and schmoozing foreign leaders. But he has no respect for, nor appreciation of, America’s alliances and insults our allies regularly. Most Americans have already forgotten that in January, Trump blithely asserted during an interview with Maria Bartiromo that our allies in NATO had never been useful and had never made any sacrifices. “We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the frontlines.” NATO fatalities in Afghanistan included 457 British; 158 Canadians; 90 French; 60 Germans; and 44 Danes, the most per capita outside the United States.

 

(Similarly, President Trump asserted Monday: “The [aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham] Lincoln has been out there for a period of time, good period of time. But over the years we’ve had them out there much longer.” That is completely wrong, and it’s not even close. The previous record for consecutive days at sea for a U.S. aircraft carrier was 206, set by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in 2020. The USS Abraham Lincoln is now past 260 days.)

 

President Trump rarely knows what he is talking about and just blurts out whatever sounds good. He is incontrovertibly wedded to a narrative that all of America’s allies are useless mooching freeloaders, while he keeps getting charmed and flattered by some of the worst and most dangerous men on the planet, and downplays the threat they present to U.S. interests. He is an easy mark, a sucker, easily captivated and fooled, all the while convinced that he is, in the official words of the U.S. State Department, “the greatest dealmaker in the world.”

 

The president may not intend to leave America weaker on the world stage than when he found it. But that is the course we are on, with his accumulated erratic decisions, fits of pique and spite, and dumb and insulting comments.

 

ADDENDUM: Our Jeff Blehar looks at the pollsters you’ve never heard of before. These are ones that seem to show up out of nowhere with numbers that alter the perception of a particular race:

 

But even when these lesser-known pollsters — with their generically coded, anonymous names like “Florida Values” or “Progress America, Etc.” — aren’t just making up the numbers wholesale in a vain attempt to slant expectations, they’re usually just chumps: bad at polling, bad with statistics, cheaply run, and little better than a front for all the same impulses that inspire the pure frauds. Witness the tale of The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI), a startup pollster who rather clearly entered the race for ideological reasons: as friends of antisemitic bugman candidate James Fishback.

 

Fishback received 10 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary. The bad news is that this was about 177,000 votes. The good news is that more than 1.5 million Florida Republicans voted for the other candidates, Byron Donalds (who won the nomination) and Jay Collins.

 

In May, Fishback was the subject of a nearly 10,000-word profile in the New Yorker magazine, an article that asserted, “With voters under thirty-five he was beating Donalds by a factor of four — an indication, perhaps, of one direction the post-Trump right might take.”

 

(You’re seeing online comments like, “Fishback won 89 percent of the vote in the Florida State University precinct.” Yes, but that precinct had 28 total votes, and classes don’t start at FSU until next Tuesday, August 25. The only students who voted were A) registered Republicans and B) students who were already back for the fall semester on Tuesday.)

 

Gee, do you think the mainstream media wanted to hype up Fishback to demonize Republicans as a whole?

Bad Romance

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

There are four horsemen one encounters in trying to write 2,500 words about American politics every weekday. One is despair. The second is fatigue. The third is anxiety around finding a topic. The fourth is getting ahead of oneself.

 

The last is the least common but shows up more often than I’d like. For instance, imagine writing a newsletter about Republicans losing their image as “the party of strength” two days before the president publishes this unwitting proof of your thesis:

 

Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises! While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!” Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

 

See? See? What did I tell you?

 

There. Seven words down, 2,493 to go.

 

Fortunately, there’s more to say about the latest “love” letter from the president to his former beau than repeating the points in Friday’s column. So let’s pick up where that piece left off with this question: Realistically, what more could the United States do at this point to signal that it won’t, or can’t, defend the Far East from Chinese and North Korean aggression?

 

Pivot from Asia.

 

To begin with, the crisis in U.S. munitions stockpiles caused by the Iran war is now an open secret, part of the calculus in Beijing and Pyongyang. Our Asian allies saw it coming from a mile away, too.

 

As far back as late March, a month after the conflict began, they were watching the escalation in the Persian Gulf “with dread.” The Pentagon had already been forced at that point to redeploy Patriot missiles and a state-of-the-art THAAD air-defense system from South Korea to the Middle East. Less than five months later, 80 percent of the total U.S. inventory of THAAD interceptors and half the inventory of Patriots is gone. And won’t be replenished anytime soon.

 

Other American assets are also leaving the region. The Associated Press reported Saturday that the USS George Washington—the only U.S. carrier still operating in the Pacific—is headed to the Gulf to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln before conditions aboard the latter deteriorate further. China will use America’s local absence in its “narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that … China is the bigger power and the U.S. is not able to guarantee their security anymore,” one defense analyst told the AP.

 

All of that follows months of signaling by the White House that it now regards China as a “peer power” whom it prefers to accommodate rather than confront. “Constructive strategic stability” is the administration’s diplo-jargon for that posture, the New York Times noted in June: “The new catchphrase signals to agencies in both nations, and to other powers, that the United States and China—the world’s two largest economies and most powerful militaries—are looking to work together or limit hostilities, notably on trade and Taiwan.” The president himself made the pitch on camera, in slobbering terms, when he visited Beijing in May.

 

One might wonder whether postliberals’ bellicosity toward China circa 2016 was always a ruse meant to create a pretext to reduce U.S. military commitments around the world, with no intention of ever “pivoting to Asia” to contain a fellow illiberal regime. But then, I’ve gotten ahead of myself on that topic too.

 

If Trump still cared about deterring China or North Korea, he’d refrain from needlessly antagonizing U.S. allies in the Far East. After all, the more evidence there is of a rift between the U.S. and regional powers, raising doubt about America’s willingness to defend them, the more Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un might be tempted to try their luck militarily. That’s what hawks call “provocative weakness,” and the president engages in it regularly—usually toward Europe but sometimes further afield, as a no doubt very alarmed South Korean government is realizing this morning.

 

The cherry on this very unappetizing sundae is that North Korea hasn’t been behaving in an “unthreatening and respectful” way lately, as Trump falsely claimed. If anything, the regime has been more belligerent than it was over most of the last 73 years, “gaining battlefield expertise with drones and modern warfare by deploying troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine.” Kim has spent the eight years since his last summit with Trump building out his nuclear arsenal in hopes of extorting the U.S. for new diplomatic concessions, including sanctions relief. The president reportedly tried to send him a letter sometime earlier this year to reopen communications—and Kim refused to accept it.

 

A few days ago the North Koreans fired several ballistic missiles to protest the upcoming joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea. Our tough-guy leader’s response was to hurriedly scale back the operation, badmouth Seoul, and praise Kim disingenuously for his commitment to peace. That’s not so much “provocative weakness” as it is out-and-out appeasement of a rogue state, and it reportedly left the Pentagon “taken aback.”

 

Why did Trump do it?

 

It’s personal.

 

I see three possibilities, from least to most likely. The first is necessity.

 

The Wall Street Journal published an alarming story yesterday about Iran’s increasingly hardline leadership plotting to “widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S.” rather than wait to respond to the next round of American attacks. Escalation could include “sabotaging Internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.” One Israeli source told the paper that the Iranians are bringing damaged missile bases back online more quickly than expected as well.

 

Meanwhile, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine has reportedly urged the White House to find an “off-ramp” from the war, and Trump is doing his best to comply, opting for a “low-key” blockade of Iranian ports instead of renewed bombing. He appears to understand, and to accept, that further military escalation isn’t in America’s interest. But as the saying goes: In war, the enemy gets a vote.

 

If the president fears that the conflict in Iran is about to get very hot, he may be anticipating having to redeploy U.S. assets in the Far East to the Persian Gulf en masse. And if that’s going to happen, it’s probably better strategically to frame that redeployment as a matter of choice rather than a matter of necessity. We *could* help defend South Korea from a North Korean invasion while waging war on Iran, you see. Mighty America still retains a two-front capability! We simply *choose* not to do so because we’re mad at the South Koreans for whatever reason.

 

On this theory, Trump scaling back the military exercises is part of a larger spin operation to try to obscure the decline in U.S. military power by reframing retreat as a matter of dopey “America First” preferences. And the president is eager to hide that decline for obvious policy (and narcissistic) reasons. But even so, it all seems too clever by half. He’s been grousing about the alliance with South Korea for a decade, and he’s shown zero capacity for strategic foresight with respect to Iran. Why shouldn’t we take his post about this week’s joint military exercise at face value?

 

He’s probably sincerely miffed that the South Koreans didn’t want to get involved with his dumb Gulf war and is keen to punish them for it, whatever the consequences for American hegemony might be. Simple as that.

 

The second possibility is more probable: Rapprochement with North Korea has become another weird idée fixe in which Trump is emotionally invested for legacy reasons. Maybe Kim or his deputies quietly made it known to the White House that going ahead with the military exercises as scheduled would extinguish any chance of a third summit before he leaves office, and the president, unable to bear the thought, scrambled to satisfy them.

 

Usually his obsessions are vanity projects, like the White House ballroom or Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, or involve restoring random vestiges of how America did things during the glory days of his youth. His interest in face-to-face diplomacy with Kim is a bit of both. It’s a vanity project insofar as Trump plainly relished becoming the first U.S. president to meet with a leader of North Korea, another feather in his cap as a peacemaker of supposedly singular stature. And it’s a vestige of how America did things in his youth: If Richard Nixon could make history by going to China to make nice with communists, why can’t Donald Trump make history by going to the DMZ for a tête-à-tête between zaftig autocrats?

 

The special enchantment he feels for North Korean diplomacy, I suspect, is that it’s personal. Other presidents avoided personal diplomacy with Pyongyang because they didn’t want to lend American prestige to an abhorrent regime; Kim cleverly turned that around by playing to Trump’s thirst for monarchical prestige by insisting on leader-to-leader talks. The implication was that only the grandeur of a figure as exalted as the president himself could convince North Korea to set aside its long, implacable hostility to the United States.

 

The core of Trump’s narcissism, as he once famously said, is that “I alone can fix it.” Kim affirmed his belief by suggesting that Trump alone can fix the U.S.-North Korea relationship.

 

Nothing South Korea can say or do for the United States will ever make the president feel as special. To the postliberal mind, which divides the world between “friends” and “enemies” and perceives no distinction between the ruler’s personal interests and the interests of the state, maintaining a personal relationship with Pyongyang obviously takes precedence over maintaining a diplomatic one with Seoul. The fact that one nation is a belligerent third-world Stalinist abyss and the other a prosperous liberal democracy means less than nothing.

 

And so the military exercises were scaled back. Call it a favor for a friend.

 

Nutty even for him.

 

I’m leaning toward the third possibility, though. Maybe the snafu with South Korea is evidence of Trump descending further into the “YOLO phase” of lame-duckery.

 

He’s an 80-year-old strongman who’s been humiliated by his failure to break Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz. He knows what his polling looks like, even if he’s reportedly “in denial” about it and distracting himself with fun hobbies like picking out wallpaper for his ballroom and slapping new tariffs on Canada. He also has some dim intimation, one assumes, that his presidency will not be remembered as a golden age of American prestige overseas.

 

My theory about the YOLO phase is that the less Trump has to lose by behaving destructively to cope with his diminishment, the more destructively he’ll behave. And as a Democratic wave in November becomes more likely and the end of his presidency inches closer, he has less to lose every day.

 

Tom Nichols sees evidence of that sort of cope in the president’s turnabout on military exercises with Seoul. “He is seeking to assuage the psychic injury of his loss in Iran—including the American public learning of the shameful conditions to which he has subjected U.S. forces—by kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic.

 

If the only way Trump can reclaim a sense of dominance is to let U.S. allies be menaced by Russia and China until they beg for his favor, he’ll do so. That’s what the YOLO phase is all about.

 

There’s a different kind of cope in which he seems to be indulging more lately, though. It’s hard to measure these things, as the president has been riffing inanely in public appearances for 10 years, but his trial balloons increasingly seem to be falling into the nutty-even-for-him column.

 

On Friday, the president told an audience that he intends to claim the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory after Iran is defeated. His fans would say that he was joking, but he’s talked before in interviews about America becoming “the guardian of the strait” and being “reimbursed” for it by other nations. It was just last month that he announced a (later retracted) plan to extort tankers transiting Hormuz for 20 percent of the value of their cargo, never mind that the White House has said for months that international waterways should be open to all.

 

One of the biggest news stories in the country right now is sailors aboard the Abraham Lincoln struggling after spending nine straight months at sea. Meanwhile, the president is fantasizing about seizing a channel halfway around the world that would require a permanent naval presence in the Gulf to secure it. His grasp on the limits of his own power is slipping.

 

Another odd ad lib: On the other side of the strait sits the nation of Oman, an American ally that’s been intermediating between the U.S. and Iran to try to find a solution to the impasse. The Iranians want Oman to join its scheme to charge “fees” on ships passing through Hormuz while Washington naturally opposes the idea. This morning Trump was asked about the dilemma on Fox News and tactfully replied, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s—t out of them.”

 

Laying aside the fact that that would amount to the president starting a second war without congressional approval (if Richard Nixon could bomb Cambodia, why can’t Donald Trump bomb Oman?), attacking a Gulf ally would be supreme proof to America’s other partners that it’s time to look elsewhere for global leadership. It’s not a coincidence that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement last week “to diversify their security and defense partnerships,” as one European official delicately put it to the Washington Post. Only a fool would rely on a declining superpower led by an erratic madman.

 

Queeg-like.

 

The most unnerving Trump “ad libs” recently have nothing to do with bombastic threats involving Iran, though.

 

Last week the White House ordered the Navy to get rid of its modern electromagnetic system for propelling jets off the decks of aircraft carriers and revert to the antiquated steam-powered system of decades ago, never mind the consequences for the Pentagon’s budget or for military readiness. The Post reported Sunday that the overhaul might not end there: The president also wants the command tower on the Navy’s Ford-class aircraft carriers moved from the rear of each ship toward the front.

 

The cost would be “significant” and would affect the vessels’ weight and buoyancy, according to experts. So why bother? Quote: “Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.”

 

As I said earlier, there’s nothing new about the president hatching an idiotic belief that America should go back to doing things a certain way simply because that’s how America did it during his youth. But there’s a distinctly Captain Queeg-like quality to him ruminating about the minutiae of carrier aesthetics—for the stupidest possible reason—at a moment when the United States can’t even field a carrier in China’s backyard. That’s the sound of a man who’s no longer engaged with the duties of command in a meaningful way and has retreated into childish fantasy.

 

I thought the YOLO phase would be dangerous because it would leave him less inhibited about following his authoritarian impulses. What if it ends up being dangerous in a different way, when his already-threadbare tether to reality frays completely?

 

That’s too desperate a thought to end on (the first horseman is always near) so I’ll leave you with this happier one, from a Twitter user who looked on the bright side of the president’s fascination with figures like Kim, Xi, and Vladimir Putin: “I’m really glad President Obama rid the world of Osama bin Laden before Donald Trump had the chance to befriend him.” Thanks, Obama.

Donald Trump’s ‘Pivot from Asia’

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

On Sunday, the president abruptly ordered his secretary of defense to “substantially reduce” the U.S. commitment to a forthcoming joint exercise with South Korea’s armed forces. But Trump did not provide the public with much of a rationale for his maneuver.

 

In a social media post, he said he was “not happy” with America’s legacy commitments to these exercises in which he has had no input. Additionally, he said he has a “very good relationship” with North Korean despot Kim Jong-un and, presumably, didn’t want to upset that applecart.

 

But there was another matter “somewhat unrelated (?)” — yes, the president threw a question mark in there — of the Republic of Korea’s refusal to “join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The following day, Trump let everyone know that South Korea’s failure to support the U.S. mission in and around Iran was, in fact, the heart of the issue.

 

The United States has “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?” Trump complained. He recalled telling his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jae Myung, “Well, why are we involved in helping you?”

 

He tore into South Korea for failing, as have many NATO allies, to more actively support clearing measures in the Strait of Hormuz. “They get 50 percent of their oil, and they don’t want to get involved,” he pondered. “Why are we doing it?” And he fumed over a Biden-era maneuver that withdrew a fee Seoul was expected to pay for the privilege of hosting U.S. forces on its soil. “We would have been getting paid a lot more, but we can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us,” Trump explained. “So, all I want is fairness.”

 

But Trump isn’t too sour over the whole thing, it seems. During that exchange with reporters, the president mused wryly that North Korea’s communist dictator is enjoying the schism he’s engineering with the South Koreans. He even posted a silly meme on his social media feed playing up his bonds of friendship with the DPRK’s despot. At least the president is having fun.

 

Yet this outburst, in combination with Trump’s threat to bomb Oman if it continues to toy with Iran’s ploy to toll maritime traffic in the strait, lent credence to the New York Times’ summation of the whole affair: “Trump lashes out.”

 

The president risks being accused of a double standard. After all, he’s attempting to drum up support for a campaign designed to prevent nuclear proliferation even as he cozies up to a notorious nuclear proliferator. At the very least, none of this is especially “low key.”

 

The political press was swift to question the logic behind the president’s attack on Seoul. South Korea’s “defense establishment was deeply rattled” by the presidential slight, the Times reported. And it comes as North Korea has become more hostile in recent years. Its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine — first through the provision of weapons, munitions, and materiel and, later, with the deployment of a full-scale expeditionary force — is, according to Lee, “a rehearsal for an aggressive war.”

 

Congressional Democrats gave reporters plenty of florid quotes to illustrate the scale of Trump’s folly. The president is punishing South Korea “for no reason beyond Trump’s ego,” said Senator Jack Reed. “Our ability to help defend our ally against the North Koreans is because our forces are well trained and able to coordinate with the South Koreans,” Senator Mark Kelly agreed. “Hollowing out these joint exercises is shortsighted and a mistake.”

 

Partisans though they are, these Democrats echo the concerns of the Western defense community. 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.”

 

That’s a real concern inside South Korea, where, it must be said, politics happens, too. It was a point of contention inside South Korea and with its neighbors, like China, when the government in Seoul accepted the deployment of THAAD anti-missile batteries on its soil. Likewise, it was a scandal when Seoul was essentially told that those batteries would be relocated to the Middle East. Still, the South Korean government has deferred to Washington, and it continues to express hope of resolving the impasse with Donald Trump on mutually agreeable terms.

 

But what could those be?

 

“At first glance, South Korea appears to have a robust navy that could conduct expeditionary operations,” regional defense expert Ju Hyung Kim wrote in April. But Seoul likely cannot deploy its naval assets — its destroyers, in particular — without weakening deterrence on the Korean Peninsula. “Seoul could continuously maintain a single destroyer deployment without seriously impacting the regional posture,” he added. “Additional ships can be sent in exigencies for a limited period of time — yet it is unsustainable without drawing down the forces necessary for homeland deterrence.”

 

Those material considerations must compete for space in the heads of South Korea’s policymakers with the South Korean public’s distaste for the kinds of commitments Trump is demanding of them. In early spring, one public opinion poll found that over 60 percent of South Koreans oppose deploying naval assets to the Strait of Hormuz.

 

Back in May, South Korean Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok proposed an innovative solution to the conundrum. “Rather than diverting limited naval assets from the Indo-Pacific, Seoul can provide scalable, defensive capabilities designed to protect commercial shipping from asymmetric threats alongside logistics, maintenance, and industrial support,” he wrote for War on the Rocks:

 

This contribution could prioritize defensive hardware, including capabilities such as advanced surface-to-air missiles and directed-energy systems. For instance, the Cheongung-II (M-SAM) system has demonstrated ongoing success and near-perfect interception rates in recent Middle Eastern deployments. Additionally, the Block-I laser system offers a high success rate for a revolutionary cost of approximately $1.50 per shot, providing a sustainable counter to the low-cost asymmetric drone threats that currently force partners to expend million-dollar interceptors. Just as South Korea has emerged as the arsenal of Europe by becoming NATO’s second-largest weapons supplier, it is well positioned to extend that role to maritime security in the Middle East. In doing so, South Korea can strengthen the operational capacity of partners already present in the region.

 

It seems the South Korean government had no stomach for this option. Even if it did, it’s unclear it would satisfy the president. But the Blue House is eager to appease Trump. Shortly after the president set his sights on the Republic of Korea, Seoul revealed that it was “closely discussing with the United States practical and military contribution options” for the Strait of Hormuz.

 

That phrase, “military contribution,” raised eyebrows among South Korea-watchers. But the language does not depart dramatically from the South Korean government’s statements back in May, after Iran attacked a Republic of Korea-flagged cargo vessel. Back then, Seoul said it would “review its position” on the strait. It didn’t.

 

Perhaps the president’s bullying will shake something loose in Seoul. And if it does, maybe the other U.S. allies to whom Trump has put the screws — Japan, France, and the U.K., in particular — will follow suit. “It will work out,” Trump said of the presently unnavigable impasse in the strait. “It always works out.” Maybe it will. But it would be wise to avoid the temptation to attribute strategic thought to the president’s impulses.

 

He does, indeed, seem to be lashing out.

 

ADDENDUM: According to Reuters, Donald Trump’s job approval rating is approaching its lowest point in nearly ten years.

 

“Just 33% of respondents in the four-day survey said they approved of Trump’s performance in the White House, while 64% disapproved,” its dispatch reads. He “has now tied the lowest level of his prior term reached in December 2017.”

 

It’s been a rough summer for the president, and Trump is fast running out of time to repair his image in advance of the midterm elections. Historically, the midterm electorate’s vote will reflect how they feel about the president, so the GOP’s political class is bracing for a rough landing in November. But the party might take some solace in the fact that some of the president’s acolytes fare better than he does in polling.

 

At least, that’s the vibe in Utah, as Deseret News reported. There, Trump’s job approval rating is sagging, but both of his most visible lieutenants — Marco Rubio and JD Vance — are above water. The results suggest that some voters can still draw distinctions between Trump and his fellow Republicans.

 

Given the direction in which the polls are headed, though, Republicans are going to have to hope that voters everywhere are as generous as Utah’s. That’s a big bet.

 

 

The President Is an Idiot

By Luther Ray Abel

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

Donald J. Trump is a vainglorious fool.

 

That can be the only explanation for this truckling praise of North Korea at South Korea’s expense:

 

 

Good mercy, man.

 

 

Who Is Behind North Korea’s Expeditionary Force in Europe?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

‘For the first time in its history,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Monday, “Russia cannot wage war without reinforcements from North Korea.” That was less a note of triumphalism than a warning. The DPRK isn’t just providing Russia with munitions anymore — they’ve become a source for ballistic missiles and even troops, as Zelensky observed. And the threat this expeditionary force poses is not limited to Ukraine.

 

“The more North Korean strikes there are here in Ukraine, in Europe,” he wrote, “the more their missiles and soldiers are used, the more they correct their shortcomings and blind spots, the greater the danger will later be for Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and other countries in the region.”

 

The DPRK’s involvement in Russia’s war of conquest is not new. Despite Moscow’s protests over the West’s interference in the war, the Kremlin sought to internationalize its conflict within its first months — importing North Korean rockets and artillery shells for use on Ukraine’s battlefields as early as September 2022.

 

Pyongyang’s contributions to Russia’s campaign deepened at the end of 2024, when South Korean intelligence warned that it had seen indications that North Korea was deploying special forces units to Ukraine (which NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte subsequently confirmed). The capture of North Korean soldiers by Ukrainian forces on the war’s frontlines indicates that these troops have been deployed in an expeditionary posture — not exclusively to beat back Ukrainian incursions into Russian territory, as the Kremlin claimed.

 

According to Zelensky, the DPRK is further entrenching itself in Russia’s war, and its commitments are significant. A “decision has been made for 30,000 ⁠to 50,000 North Koreans to be deployed on the territory of Russia,” he wrote. Reuters all but confirmed Zelensky’s warnings in early August. “A North Korean missile unit has begun deploying to western Russia and could ​be equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine,” its dispatch read.

 

From the West’s perspective, there are two ways to look at this. One is encouraging.

 

The myth that Russia holds in reserve an inexhaustible supply of military-age men ready and willing to be tossed into the meat grinder is encountering a real test of its durability. Military recruitment is down by 20 percent compared with the first quarter of 2025 despite the incredible financial incentives that Moscow offers to new recruits. “Russia has begun to lose more troops than it can recruit,” read a May report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

 

Moreover, there are few indications that Russia can replenish its losses without issuing a general mobilization order. Leery of the unrest such an order might yield, Vladimir Putin has held that option in reserve. But he may not be able to hold out for much longer.

 

But the second takeaway is that the anti-American axis will not give up on Russia so easily.

 

The DPRK is aligned with Russia, but it is dependent on China. Knowing this, the Biden administration in its final year put public and private diplomatic pressure on Beijing to rein in its North Korean vassal. They apparently received reassuring nods from their Chinese counterparts. Indeed, reporting in Western outlets indicated that Xi Jinping’s regime was “uneasy” with North Korea’s participation in Russia’s war.

 

But the Chinese themselves were saying something different. “North Korea’s presence could thus be seen as a complementary deterrent to Russia’s nuclear options, adding a new layer to Russia’s defense capabilities while signaling to the West the depth of its strategic alliances​​,” read an analysis authored by a research fellow at China’s Charhar Institute. Far from “uneasy,” he said that China had given a “silent nod” to the emerging “North Korea-Russia partnership.”

 

Perhaps Beijing’s hands were tied. As the U.S. Army War College’s Brian Carlson observed, the People’s Republic has leverage over its partners in Pyongyang, but it has declined to deploy it to block these deployments. That is a departure from China’s past practices. “The perception of a consolidated China-Russia-North Korea bloc could also further strengthen US alliances,” he wrote, which Beijing would like to avoid — for now, at least.

 

China doesn’t just fear instability on the Korean Peninsula and the weakening of the DPRK as a buffer against the West. Most worryingly from Beijing’s perspective, the deployment of North Korean soldiers to a war zone on NATO’s doorstep increases the risk of miscalculation and a potentially catastrophic point of contact between the two worlds that could implicate Beijing in an international incident.

 

But all those concerns seem to have been subordinated to China’s other interests: preserving its influence with Pyongyang and Moscow and, more importantly, ensuring that Russia does not outright lose its expansionist war.

 

In unusually frank remarks to the European Union’s Kaja Kallas in the summer of last year, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi admitted that “Beijing did not want to see a Russian loss in Ukraine because it feared the United States would then shift its whole focus to Beijing,” the South China Morning Post reported. That admission aligns with the general perception of China’s posture toward the war. It might not have wanted Russia to invade Ukraine, but it cannot abide a Ukrainian victory.

 

The Ukrainians may not take this lying down, as the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan explains. Kyiv has the capability and rationale, now, to execute retaliatory strikes on North Korean targets, perhaps even as far afield as the Sea of Japan. “Alternatively,” he writes, “Ukrainian operatives could target North Korean intelligence and military officers and their networks around the world.”

 

The war in Ukraine has long had global implications, but it now has global participants. And there’s no indication that any combatant in this fight is eager to back down. Rather, in the middle of its fourth year, Putin’s war of conquest is ramping up.

Don’t Sell F-35s to Turkey

National Review Online

Wednesday, July 08, 2026

 

Despite all the challenges that NATO faces from outside the alliance, the controversy that may come to dominate the ongoing Atlantic Alliance summit in Turkey this week has come from within it.

 

“We’re going to be taking the sanctions off,” President Trump said of Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey on Tuesday. “It’s time to do that, okay? We don’t want to sanction friends.”

 

The sanctions Trump referred to are those that were imposed on Turkey under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). Trump himself signed that act into law in 2017 and applied it to Ankara in 2020 after Ankara agreed to purchase advanced Russian anti-aircraft batteries. Those sanctions ejected Turkey from a program that rendered it eligible to purchase America’s most advanced fighter aircraft, the F-35.

 

Ankara hasn’t abandoned the behaviors that resulted in its sanctioning in the first place. Nevertheless, Trump seems determined to sell F-35s to Turkey, and those sanctions are in his way. On Tuesday, the president said he intends to “consider” allowing Turkey back into the fold. But to hear his administration officials tell it, Trump has already made up his mind.

 

In advance of this week’s NATO summit, Trump lavished Erdoğan with praise. He’s a “friend” and a “respected leader,” the president insisted, neither of which, we hope, despite some evidence to the contrary, he actually believes. Moreover, according to administration officials, deepening America’s defense ties with Turkey is a geopolitical necessity given its proximity to the Russian menace. Trump “really likes Erdoğan,” onetime U.S. Ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey told Fox News. But beyond their personal rapport, Trump recognizes that Turkey is “essential to maintaining the U.S. perimeter around Eurasia.”

 

The New York Times is hearing the same thing. “The past few years have led to a new appreciation of what Turkey brings to the alliance,” its reporters contended. Ankara has “broad diplomatic relations” with geopolitical actors, good and bad. It “leveraged” its relationship with Hamas to facilitate a cease-fire in Gaza. It has become a “conduit” through which NATO members communicate with Iranian and Russian officials. And Ankara is building up an intimidating indigenous defense industry that it has deployed via proxies to great effect in places like Syria.

 

All those conditions have convinced the Trump administration to keep Erdoğan’s Turkey close, but there is a limit to the extent to which we can rely on our “closeness” to a country or, more specifically, a leader, who has made it clear for years, in word and in deed, that he is no friend of the West. It’s not just that Erdoğan’s Turkey has developed a working relationship with America’s enemies as well as its allies. It is arguably in violation of its NATO commitments by having provided material support to terrorist organizations like Hamas.

 

Israeli security officials have produced evidence of the Turkish government’s efforts to fund Hamas’s activities as well as to give it the means to improve the accuracy of the rockets it fires on Israeli civilian targets. That support continued even after the October 7 massacre.

 

“In December 2023, as the war in Gaza escalated, Israeli authorities again seized illicit goods from a Turkish ship at the port of Ashdod. Inspectors found weapons and components hidden inside an industrial weaving machine destined for the West Bank,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies Executive Director Jonathan Schanzer wrote last year. In March 2024, he added, Israeli security services broke up a Hamas terror plot planned by Hamas operatives inside Turkey.

 

In addition to its illicit support for Islamist terrorists, Turkey’s warm relationship with America’s near-peer competitors should bar it from accessing America’s most technologically advanced weapons platforms.

 

Turkey’s “partnership with Russia includes security and economic dimensions,” observed Isabelle Terranova, an analyst with the Canadian Macdonald–Laurier Institute. Ankara’s commercial relations with Moscow increased following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Turkey has refused to participate in the sanctions regime imposed on the Kremlin in response to its land grab. Erdoğan’s “partnership with China has also grown, particularly through its participation in the Belt and Road Initiative,” Terranova added.

 

All this should be enough to persuade the Trump administration that providing Turkey with F-35s would needlessly jeopardize American security and the lives of its service personnel. Granting Ankara access to that technology “would enable Moscow to potentially gain valuable intelligence helpful for shooting down F-35s flown by Americans or our allies,” Schanzer’s FDD colleagues observed. “If that were to happen, given growing security cooperation among the four Axis of Aggressors adversaries, we should not be surprised if Moscow shares sensitive technological details of the F-35 with Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. That would not only endanger American national security and pilots, but also U.S. partners who fly the aircraft.”

 

In other words, such a transfer would undermine not only U.S. security but also that of our allies. It would diminish the platform’s value. After all, what good is the F-35 if it cannot continue to beat Russian air defenses and Chinese stealth radar, as it has in the skies over Iran and Venezuela?

 

Trump may have some special affinity for his Turkish counterpart, but he should not place his faith in his own character judgment over the observable fact that Erdoğan is, at best, duplicitous and, at worst, hostile to American interests. Ensuring that Turkey does not gravitate further away from the West and into our enemies’ camp is certainly a strategic American interest. But there are other ways to reward a country that is, on its best days, a frenemy than by giving it access to our most sensitive military assets.