Pivot from Asia? What Trump’s South Korea ‘shock’ says about US strategy

Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon policy chief, has just completed a tour of South-east Asia where he tried to assure America’s allies that the US is still with them and dissuade them from pursuing a “middle power” strategy that excludes Washington and its weapons industry.

It was undercut just days later when US President Donald Trump announced – via a social media post – that he was ordering the Pentagon to scale down joint military exercises with South Korea . The two militaries subsequently agreed to shorten their drills.

The move was seen as a betrayal of one of the US’ closest allies in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly as Trump said it was “based on [his] very good relationship with Kim Jong-un” – the brutal communist dictator of North Korea, a US enemy.

Trump’s affinity with dictators and strongmen is well established. His eagerness to build bridges with such men is a defining feature of his foreign policy.

Meanwhile, his order to reduce joint military exercises came just as the US redirects its last remaining aircraft carrier in the Pacific, the USS George Washington, to the Middle East to replace the ailing USS Abraham Lincoln .

Taken together – and against the backdrop of Trump’s desire to strike a grand bargain with Chinese President Xi Jinping – the developments have rattled observers of US policy in Asia.

Evan Feigenbaum, vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former adviser to Republican secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said the US had gone from the Democrats’ “pivot to Asia” to a “reverse pivot from Asia”.

He also recently said the US under Trump was “long on attitude, short on strategy” in Asia.

Derek Grossman, an international relations professor at the University of Southern California who specialises in Asia, said the pivot towards Asia was “dead”.

There may be some truth to that. But there are other factors at play here.

It is surely no coincidence that Trump’s order to scale down military exercises came just as South Korean Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan touched down in Dallas on Sunday for high-stakes trade meetings.

He was there to discuss a $US350 billion ($490 billion) trade and investment deal, born of tariff negotiations, which is facing difficulties. Only a day before, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung dismissed his chief trade negotiator, while the Trump administration has expressed frustration with the slow pace of talks.

Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific security chair at the right-leaning Hudson Institute in Washington, says Trump is using his usual ambiguity to disrupt the negotiations. His social media post was “meant to be a shock”.

“He is trying to put pressure on Lee Jae-myung to concede more of what Washington wants,” he says. “There are both tactical and transactional negotiating reasons why Trump did what he did. There’s also a policy play, if not a strategy play.”