With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, many taboos could disappear both in America and in the rest of the world. 11,000 kilometers from Washington, South Koreans, worried that the next American president will let them down in the face of an increasingly bellicose Kim Jong-un, are now some 70% wanting to acquire atomic weapons, according to a survey by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
President Yoon Suk-yeol and his counterpart Joe Biden certainly signed an agreement in 2023 confirming to Seoul the protection of the American nuclear umbrella in the event of an attack by Pyongyang. But the country of Morning Calm was burned by the first Trump term. Believing that the South Koreans were not investing enough in their defense, he put an end to major joint military exercises and threatened to withdraw his soldiers from the peninsula. The billionaire, then a presidential candidate, even said he was open in 2016 to Japan and South Korea acquiring the bomb.
A possibility already mentioned by the South Korean president
South Korean elites have long remained cautious about such a revolution. But Russian nuclear blackmail in Ukraine and the fact that North Korea is now raising the specter of using atomic weapons in a conflict with its enemy to the South have changed the minds of decision-makers, explained the South Korean researcher Tongfi Kim, during a speech at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri).
“Although still low, the probability that Seoul will seek to develop a nuclear arsenal is much higher under a Trump administration, he believes. If this again weakens the bilateral alliance, there will be in Korea South strong support for this scenario.” The South Korean president himself declared in early 2023: if the North Korean threat increased, his country would consider asking the United States to deploy nuclear weapons on the peninsula. Or make your own. Trump probably wouldn’t mind.
For now, faced with fears raised by China and North Korea, Seoul and Tokyo are investing massively to strengthen their conventional defense. Japan indicated at the end of 2022 that it intended to increase its military spending to bring it to 2% of GDP in 2027, and thus become the third largest defense budget in the world behind the United States and China – It is estimated at 54 billion euros for this year.
South Korea, which devotes 2.7% of its GDP to its defense, is also accelerating significantly in this area (+3.5% increase expected in 2024, for a total of 43 billion euros). It also recently agreed to share more with the United States the costs linked to the presence of 28,500 American soldiers on its soil. Enough to put Donald Trump in a good mood, even if he will undoubtedly put pressure to go further.