The Worst Foreign Policy "President" In Living Memory

Did South Korea put him on a postage stamp? No-- but North Korea did. According to a report from Nicole Gaouette and Kylie Atwood at CNN, Trump has soured on South Korea, not North Korea, South Korea, our allies. The orange-hued imbecile "has reacted to four North Korean missile tests in less than two weeks with little more than a shrug," they wrote. "Instead, he appears to be turning his frustrations about the peninsula on South Korea. Trump chided Seoul on Twitter Wednesday for paying 'virtually nothing' for US protection, while two administration officials said that behind closed doors, the President is fuming that South Korea is not doing more to contain Pyongyang's increased aggression."

Speaking to reporters Wednesday on the White House South Lawn, Trump said the US and South Korea "have made a deal" in which Seoul will "pay a lot more money" toward the costs of basing US military personnel in the country-- the second increase the Trump administration has pushed for and gotten this year.

"We've been helping them for about 82 years and we get nothing, we get virtually nothing," Trump said, incorrectly, and hinted that he would push for still higher payments in future. "They've agreed to pay a lot more and they will agree to pay a lot more than that."

Two US officials said that Trump has further soured on South Korea in recent months. As North Korea has grown more aggressive with its missile launches, the President sees it as South Korea's role to rein in Pyongyang and does not think Seoul has done much to deliver. NSC officials declined to comment on those assertions.

Trump's dismissal of Pyongyang's missile tests, his push to ratchet up South Korea's payments to stay under the US security umbrella and his criticism of Seoul raise concerns that North Korea is successfully driving a wedge between Washington and Seoul, analysts said.

At the same time, Trump's transactional approach to South Korea prompts questions about whether he is committed to an alliance that serves US interests as much as it does South Korea's.

"The US-South Korean alliance was forged in blood during the crucible of the Korean War," said Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "Its enduring motto is katchi kapshida-- 'we go together'-- not 'we go together, if we are paid enough."

Klingner and others said the US defense of its national interests in Asia requires US bases, access, enough deployed military forces to deter aggression, robust follow-on forces and strong alliances with South Korea and other Asian partners.

Kim has been focused on undermining the US-ROK alliance in particular, said David Maxwell, a senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. One of Kim's "main line of efforts is to divide and conquer the US-ROK alliance," Maxwell said.

Vipin Narang, a political science professor at MIT, called Trump's assessment of the alliance "a stark break from 70 years" of US presidential custom.

"2019 is weird," Narang said. "The President has more respect for Kim Jong Un than he does for South Korea ... our formal ally."

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that "South Korea has agreed to pay substantially more money to the United States in order to defend itself from North Korea. Over the past many decades, the U.S. has been paid very little by South Korea, but last year, at the request of President Trump, South Korea paid $990,000,000."

Trump went on to say that "talks have begun to further increase payments to the United States."

South Korea spends about 2.6% of its GDP on defense spending, more than most NATO allies, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The US spends about 3.2% GDP on defense.

Seoul has also long reimbursed the US for various operating costs for the American troop presence there.

But Maxwell and others raised concerns that Trump could badly strain or even undermine the alliance.

"With Trump making these demands on South Korea, it could be a perfect storm to damage the alliance," Maxwell said.

Despite Trump's tweet saying talks on more payments had begun, a South Korean official said they haven't and added that a starting date hasn't even been set. The White House on Wednesday countered that at least some discussions are underway.

Eliana Johnson wrote for Politico about how Señor Trumpanzee, delusional as always imagined he would be heading "into the 2020 campaign season as the world’s consummate deal-maker. He may instead enter his reelection campaign not just empty-handed, but vulnerable to the charge that his policies have helped sow chaos across the globe. His trade war with China keeps escalating, with mounting costs to the U.S. economy. Diplomatic overtures to Iran and North Korea have so far failed to yield the president’s desired outcome. Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan, two years in the making, is nowhere to be seen. And America’s retreat from Syria, where the president once boasted he had defeated ISIS, has allowed the terrorist group to regenerate, according to a new Pentagon inspector general’s report."

Trump’s critics see these data points as alarming signs that the president is out of his depth on international affairs, if not complicit in the breakdown of global order. And while his allies enthusiastically support his efforts to squeeze Iran, some are quietly nervous-- if not openly scornful-- of his policies elsewhere.

“He’s trying to pivot from being sort of a militarist to being a deal-maker and delivering on diplomacy. That’s his sort of political goal going into 2020,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “He’s made all of these decisions and choices that are sort of getting him into trouble and he’s having to cope with the decisions and consequences.”

...Whether pushing for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan or imposing tariffs on China, many of the administration’s most consequential foreign policy moves over the past few months have taken place over the objections of the president’s senior advisers. Trump allies describe a wear-down factor among his top aides in the face of Trump’s uncompromising views on these issues as they work to manage crises across the globe...The sheer number of complex international standoffs, former officials said, threatens to overwhelm an already taxed foreign policy apparatus in Washington.

...[T]here are signs, too, that the president’s penchant for personal diplomacy is bumping up against the harsh realities of global power politics.

And now the Pentagon is warning that ISIS has been taking advantage of Trump's drawdown in Syria in anticipation of a come-back. "Despite losing its territorial 'caliphate,' the Islamic State solidified its insurgent capabilities in Iraq and was resurging in Syria. The reduction of U.S. forces has decreased the support available for Syrian partner forces at a time when their forces need more training and equipping to respond to the ISIS resurgence." Basically everything turns to shit that Trump touches.

Chuck Park, a career foreign service officer, resigned from the State Department and penned a blistering op-ed in the Washington Post that he could no longer serve in "The Complacent State," particularly in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting. He wrote that he "worked to spread what (he) believed were American values: freedom, fairness and tolerance. But more and more I found myself in a defensive stance, struggling to explain to foreign peoples the blatant contradictions at home... I let free housing, the countdown to a pension and the prestige of representing a powerful nation overseas distract me from ideals that once seemed so clear to me. I can't do that anymore. My son, born in El Paso on the American side of that same Rio Grande where the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter were discovered, in the same city where 22 people were just killed by a gunman whose purported 'manifesto' echoed the inflammatory language of our President, turned 7 this month. I can no longer justify to him, or to myself, my complicity in the actions of this administration. That's why I choose to resign."