Donald Trump will head to South Korea on Tuesday waving a red, white and blue cape in the direction of a North Korean bull who has a nuclear goring on his mind. And some in Seoul can’t wait for it to be over.
Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in could hardly be more like a chili-oil-and-water mix, especially when it comes to dealing with the belligerent communist state that invaded southward in 1950 and has never stopped threatening its neighbor despite a tense armistice.
The U.S. president has called dictator Kim Jong-un ‘Little Rocket Man’ and threatened publicly to ‘totally destroy’ his country if he makes a menacing move toward American allies, including South Korea and Japan.
On Monday in Tokyo he branded North Korea a ‘menace’ and said the U.S. stands against the rogue regime’s ‘dangerous aggressions.’
‘Some people said that my rhetoric is very strong. But look what’s happened with very weak rhetoric over the last 25 years. Look where we are right now,’ the president said during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The U.S. Defense Department has raised the strategic temperature by telling lawmakers that a ground invasion would be the only way to ensure ‘with complete certainty’ that North Korea couldn’t use nuclear weapons against the West.
But President Moon, a cautious liberal who will welcome Trump on Tuesday, has shown the sort of diplomatic patience that his American counterpart can’t stand.
President Donald Trump is set to visit Seoul, South Korea at a time when nuclear tensions are running high on the Korean peninsula
The president will address the South Korean national assembly and is expected to lay out a hard line against North Korea – even as South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in (shown) is trying to negotiate with the belligerent communist North
Tension: Donald Trump has a budding bromance with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (right) while South Korea’s new president Moon Jae-in (left) becomes more concerned with the U.S. president’s saber-rattling at the communist North Koreans
Trump and Abe held a joint press conference on Monday, during which North Korea was a major topic
Trump soft-pedaled his praise for Moon in a tweet on Tuesday as he left Tokyo for Seoul.
‘Getting ready to leave for South Korea and meetings with President Moon, a fine gentleman. We will figure it all out!’ he wrote.
After Trump threatened ‘fire and fury’ against Pyongyang in August, Moon tut-tutted publicly that ‘no one should be allowed to decide on a military action on the Korean peninsula without South Korean agreement.’
While Trump was tweeting, Kim was busily conducting missile tests, including some that flew over Japan and one aimed in the direction of the U.S. island territory of Guam.
And Moon was making direct outreach to the communist North – leading the U.S. president to point his social media shotgun at Seoul.
‘South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work,’ the brash billionaire wrote in September, adding that North Koreans ‘only understand one thing!’
Moon had already seemingly acknowledged that his hands are tied.
‘What we must realize, painfully, is that although this is a Korean peninsula issue of greatest urgency for us,’ he said in July of the nuclear crisis brewing to his north, ‘in reality, we have no power to resolve it.’
Resentments are growing in Seoul over Trump’s decision to spend twice as much time in Japan as in what South Koreans call the Land of the Morning Calm.
The slight is felt so acutely that news commentators have a name for it: the ‘Korean passing.’
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s territory starts just 35 miles from South Korea’s capital, putting South Korea in the position of having to be a front-row spectator as the nuclear status of its belligerent neighbor is decided by other countries
Golf and fish-feeding: Trump tossed fish food into a koi pond alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during a visit to the Akasaka Palace on Monday; the pair played golf together a day earlier, cementing their close relationship forged over mutual disdain for North Korea
Trump warned during a bellicose September 19 speech to the United Nations General Assembly that he could ‘totally destroy’ North Korea if Kim Jong-un makes a menacing move toward the United States
They see the fourth-largest economy in Asia being passed over, with Trump treating it like a weaker stepchild to Japan and China in the tug-of-war with North Korea.
And it hasn’t gone unnoticed that the White House has yet to nominate an ambassador to serve in Seoul.
Add to that the specter of 5,000 protesters, mostly peace activists, who are expected to turn up when Trump arrives, and tensions will be high both inside and outside the Blue House.
Groups have already staged demonstrations in advance of Trump’s visit, shouting ‘No Trump, no war!’ and holding signs declaring Seoul a ‘no Trump zone.’
Some have yelled that the U.S. president is a ‘dotard,’ an insult Kim Jong-un leveled at Trump in September. The word suggests a senile, doddering fuddy-duddy.
Kim is 33 years old; Trump is 71.
Peach activists are ready for Trump’s visit to Seoul, staging demonstrations warning that the U.S. presidnt’s provocations will result in a nuclear war
Protesters have been out in force every day since Nov. 1 in Seoul
Park Ji-eun, a waitress near Dongguk University in the Jung-gu neighborhood of Seoul, said Sunday that ‘Trump makes many of us nervous.’
‘We are not wanting to start a war,’ she told DailyMail.com. ‘In fact we are anxious and hoping he comes and goes, quickly and quietly.’
Choe Min-jun, who said he studies international relations at Seoul National University, insisted that Americans ‘including your president’ are ‘thinking wrong about South Korea.’
‘We are less than 60 kilometers from the North,’ said Choe, ‘and even if no one fires a nuclear missile we are more vulnerable than you know.’
Choe compared the proximity of the peninsula’s two powers to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
‘It wouldn’t take much to start a new war,’ he said, ‘and that’s why the U.S. was the reason for moderation on both sides for decades. I say “was” because with Trump you don’t know what he will do.’
‘It’s too much stress,’ Choe said, sighing. ‘Let’s be over and done with his visit.’
Neither Choe nor Park said they would participate in the protests.
Trump has become close with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and is being criticized in Seoul for spending twice as much time in Tokyo as he plans to spend in the South Korean capital
North Korean despot Kim Jong-un’s regime is racing to complete a nuclear missile that can reach the United States, prompting Trump to leave all military options on the table
Han Sung-ho, a banker-turned-cab driver, told DailyMail.com that he wants ‘more economic pressure and less yelling’ at Pyongyang, and also said he would support abandoning his nation’s status as a non-nuclear state ‘if that’s what is necessary.’
‘I like this idea of you Americans putting the small nuclear missiles here, to keep everything balanced,’ he said as he weaved through traffic on the Incheon International Airport Expressway.
A recent Gallup poll found 60 per cent of Han’s countrymen want to see their nation arm itself with nuclear weapons.
The U.S. had tactical nukes on South Korean soil and offshore until 1991, when President George W. Bush pulled them out in the hope that North Korea would abandon its own nuclear ambitions.
It didn’t.
The White House is downplaying the saber-rattling coming from the Oval Office, and says Trump’s stop in Seoul will keep to the policy contours of past presidential visits.
A senior administration official said that in Trump’s speech Wednesday to the country’s National Assembly, ‘he will celebrate the enduring alliance and friendship between the United States and the Republic of Korea, and call on the international community to join together in maximizing pressure on North Korea.’
But privately, according to reporters based in Seoul, some South Korean diplomats are saying Trump’s visit could change the entire region’s power dynamic.
Trump wil not visit the DMZ separating South Korean from North Korean, with the White House saying it’s become a ‘cliche’
Former presidents George W. Bush (left) and Barack Obama (right) both visited the DMZ and peered across to the North Korean side using military binoculars
Instead of the U.S. remaining a voice of calm between the two Koreas as it has since the late 1950s, they fear it will be South Korea stepping in to break up a fight between Trump and Kim Jong-un.
Jung H. Pak, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and an East Asia policy expert, urged Trump in October to link arms with Moon and show a unified front.
‘He must convincingly reassure President Moon and the South Korean public that the United States and South Korea are in lockstep on the North Korea issue,’ Pak wrote. ‘There must be no daylight between the two leaders.’
She also slapped at Trump for not going out of his way to emphasize ‘parity’ between South Korea and Japan.
‘Don’t spend one day in Seoul if you’re going to spend two days in Tokyo,’ Pak added.
Pictured is the South Korean National Assembly building, where Trump will speak Wednesday; he’s expected to deliver a message of solidarity with Seoul and angry warnings for Pyongyang
The White House also maintains that Trump will not make the traditional presidential visit to the heavily fortified border between North and South Korea known as the Demilitarized Zone.
The senior administration official who briefed reporters last week said that standing along the strip of land dividing North and South Korea is a photo-op that presidents can afford to skip in favor of sending underlings in their place.
‘The president is not going to visit the DMZ. There’s not enough time in the schedule,’ the official said, emphasizing that Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have all been there.
‘It’s becoming a little bit of a cliche, frankly,’ the official insisted.
Trump has instead accepted Moon’s invitation to visit Camp Humphreys, a jointly funded military base about 40 miles to the south of the nation’s capital.
But as he swung through Japan, the North Korean menace was never far from his mind.
Trump has extended his Asia trip by a day so he can meet with Vladimir Putin face-to-face, a prospect that a Trump administration official says was the Russians’ idea; Russia shares an 11-mile border with North Korea
He said at at the Yokota Air Base near Tokyo that the U.S. ‘will never yield, never waver and never falter in defense of our people.’
‘No one – no dictator, no regime and no nation – should underestimate, ever, American resolve.’
It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which North Korea’s belligerence will impact Trump’s swing through Asia, the longest such presidential trip in 25 years.
Even his final stop in the Philippines, 1,700 miles from Pyongyang, will touch on the brewing nuclear nightmare.
Trump announced suddenly before leaving the White House that he would extend his trip by a day so that he could take in the East Asia Summit a day after speaking to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The reason: a rare one-on-one meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Russia and North Korea share an 11-mile border; and Trump needs to ensure that Moscow applies economic sanctions mandated by the United Nations.
An administration official told DailyMail.com on Monday that a Russian official proposed the meeting.