Where will the Singapore summit lead the US?Getty
- President Donald Trump said the US would stop military drills with South Korea during peace talks with North Korea.
- In doing so he may set the US up to lose its status as the world's dominant power.
- Without drills, the US forces in South Korea will wither, and if peace talks continue, the very rationale for them will erode as well.
- If the US pulls out of South Korea, as Trump wants to, it will accelerate China's dominance in Asia, and likely around the world.
- Trump and Kim wrote of a new future for the world in their joint statement, but that new future may be one ruled from Beijing, not Washington.
President Donald Trump's joint statement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday provided few specifics and no binding commitments, but likely set in motion a series of events that could unseat the US as the dominant world power.
Trump, going above and beyond the statement on paper, promised to halt joint military drills with South Korea. For the US, its 30,000 or so troops in South Korea represent a foothold on the Asian mainland and a major check on China's growing global ambitions.
South Korea and the US forces themselves were shocked by the news, but North Korea and China both seized on this concession.
Kim said "to achieve peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and realize its denuclearization," North Korea and the US "should commit themselves to refraining from antagonizing with each other," according to North Korean media.
To China, the agreement sounded like one they had been pushing all along, a "suspension for suspension", where the US stops military drills with South Korea in exchange for North Korea halting missile and nuclear tests.
The US has long resisted calls from North Korea and China for dual suspension, saying that the bilateral, planned, and transparent military drills are legal while North Korea's nuclear program is not.
If North Korea's illegal nuclear program forced the US military to stop training with its ally, then it sends a powerful message to leaders everywhere: The US can be blackmailed with nukes.
The US loose tooth in Asia
U.S. soldiers stand guard near a U.S. F-22 stealth fighter at the Osan Air Base on February 17, 2016 in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. U.S. military has deployed four F-22 stealth fighter jets to the Korean Peninsula as another response to North Korea's nuclear and missile threats.Jeon Heon-Kyun-Pool/Getty Images
Without military exercises, the massive installation of troops will wither. Already, North Korea has criticized the US and South Korea's military drills, saying they're not helpful for peace talks.
Trump, seemingly unprompted, has long wanted to withdraw the US from South Korea, and now he may have found a reason.
If the US and North Korea, or North and South Korea normalize relations, that undercuts the stated rationale for having US forces on the peninsula.
Why should the US station 30,000 troops in Korea if Korea is at peace? One reason could be to rein in China.
China is set to overtake the US as the world's dominant power within the coming decades. As China embraces capitalism and uses strong-arm tactics to become a technological power while modernizing the world's biggest armed forces, it falls on the US to reassure its allies in Asia and around the world that international order will stand up to Chinese hegemony. The US military in Asia remains vital to that task.
China's rise has been a long time coming. The US military, even with its massive forces in Japan and Korea, already strains to contain it. But losing the foothold in South Korea could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
"The US-DPRK summit — the first in history — was an epochal event of great significance in overcoming decades of tensions and hostilities between the two countries and for the opening up of a new future," Trump and Kim's joint statement read.
But the new epoch envisioned here by Trump and Kim may be one in which the US loses its grip on Asia, and then the world, and the new future will likely be ruled from Beijing, not Washington.
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