How Trump Could Push Japan, S Korea To Go Nuclear

But Trump's plans for his second term regarding US forces were set long ago, during his first presidential experiment. Former Trump national security advisor John Bolton in his memoir provided detailed accounts of“Trump's relentless desire to withdraw US military assets from the Korean Peninsula” accompanied by the former president's unquenched thirst for – and firm belief that he could make – a grand peace deal with North Korea's Kim Jong Un.

“I feared Trump's ultimate threat – withdrawing our troops from any country not paying what he deemed to be an adequate amount – was real in South Korea's case,” Bolton wrote after leaving office.

Former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper offers his own account of his repeated, and partially successful, efforts to block Trump from withdrawing troops. As he wrote:
“I became very uneasy when Trump talked about the need to pull all US forces completely out of Korea,” Esper wrote.

The former defense secretary recounted how he and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested to Trump that he make that a second-term priority.

“This placated him,” Esper wrote.“Trump responded with 'Yeah, yeah, second term,' as a Cheshire Cat smile came across his face.”

Former Trump defense official Eldridge Colby, widely considered a candidate for a senior position in a second administration, has been giving interviews making it clear that this game plan still is intact.

Colby told the Yonhap news agency in an interview published on May 7 that the US had to give priority to confronting China and that North Korea was primarily a problem for South Korea to deal with.

“South Korea is going to have to take primary, essentially overwhelming responsibility for its own self-defense against North Korea because we don't have a military that can fight North Korea and then be ready to fight China,” Colby said.

“The fundamental fact is that North Korea is not a primary threat to the US. It would not be rational to lose multiple American cities to just deal with North Korea. That's a different calculation for South Korea.”

Colby, echoing remarks made previously by Trump, indicated that the US should accept, if not support, the nuclear option for South Korea, especially since the US would no longer offer its nuclear umbrella.

“It would be self-defeating and foolish for us to simultaneously not provide South Korea with a viable defense umbrella and then threaten to sanction it when it decides with us to take measures that provide for security in the face of a tremendous nuclear buildup by North Korea and China,” he told Yonhap.

What will South Korea do if Trump follows through on his plans? The answer is now provided in an important study just published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.

Entitled“Breaking Bad: South Korea's Nuclear Option ,” and authored by a former national security official and distinguished Korea expert Victor Cha, the study is based on a detailed poll of over 1,000 strategic elites in South Korea, conducted between January and March of this year.

On the good news side, the poll offers a clear refutation of the rather superficial idea, based on somewhat faulty polling, that more than two-thirds of Koreans favor the nuclear option.

As the study shows, those polls ask a simple question, yes or no, about support for the nuclear option. The polls never ask if Koreans would support such a path if it meant endangering the alliance with the US or would lead to South Korea's international condemnation.

Cha's poll goes further with elites who are better informed about the consequences of going nuclear and finds that two-thirds do not favor nuclearization, mainly because of the potential international reaction and damage to the US alliance. The opposition to the nuclear option is non-partisan, embraced by both conservative and progressive elites.

There was a very different response, however, when the poll asked elites about how they would respond to a return to the America First policy – a shift in which the US would denigrate its allies and decouple, specifically withdrawing American ground troops.

In that case, more than half of those who favored the non-nuclear option would now support nuclear weapons development. They would favor an autonomous nuclear capability over the option of sharing nuclear weapons with the US, by a two-to-one margin.

“Any way you look at it, if Trump wins and he is decoupling, you are going to get this huge shift in elite opinion to go nuclear, and a public already in that camp,” Cha told this writer.“It means it could happen very quickly. You wouldn't have to have a national discussion and build public opinion.”

There is a historical parallel to the present moment. In the early 1970s, in response to the US withdrawal of one of two infantry divisions from South Korea and the defeat in the Vietnam War, the South Korean government of Park Chung-hee ordered a secret program to develop nuclear weapons.

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It was uncovered by American intelligence, though policymakers in Washington were initially skeptical about how serious it might be. In the end, only tough American pressure, including blocking the sale of French and Canadian nuclear technology, halted the program.

What would it mean for Japan if South Korea went nuclear? Every Japanese foreign policy maker that this writer spoke to rejected, rather emphatically, the idea that Japan would or could develop nuclear weapons as a response to Trump's return to power.

A senior figure at the conservative daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun did not hesitate to reject the nuclear option, regarding it as not only politically impossible but antithetical to postwar Japanese policy.

But that conviction weakened when asked about how Japan might respond if South Korea headed down that road.“If South Korea has nuclear weapons, Japan will surely have them,” the prime minister's advisor, who had recently returned from a visit to Korea, told me.

Another senior foreign policy maker, who has served as an advisor to both Abe and Kishida, as well as to the Democratic Party of Japan, went even further. Japan, he told me in a private conversation, should develop nuclear weapons in a joint program with South Korea.

Given the two countries' history, that is a radical idea, if not a politically impossible option. However, as he pointed out, it does have both strategic and technical logic. Both Japan and South Korea will face even more immediate threats from China, North Korea and Russia in a second Trump administration, and will no longer be able to rely on the US for extended deterrence.

Technically, while South Korea can move faster politically, Japan has the fissile material already in storage – the plutonium stockpile from reprocessed spent fuel – as well as a potential long-range delivery system in its H-2 and H-3 rockets.

“We have to face the sheer reality of who is leading the US,” the former senior Foreign Ministry official concluded.“We cannot change that.”