Trump, wrong about so much, somehow hit a nerve about America’s willingness to use nukes

GOP candidate’s comments about the Far East nuclear umbrella came just before big nuclear summit

By Tim Townsend

Over the past week GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has suggested that Japan and South Korea should start defending themselves. He called the nuclear weapons agreement between US and Japan “a real problem.”

“If we are attacked, they don’t have to do anything. If they’re attacked, we have to go out with full force,” Trump told the New York Times. “That’s a pretty one-sided agreement, right there.”

His portrayal of the Asian military alliances as bad financial deals came just as world leaders gathered Thursday in Washington for the Nuclear Security Summit. Trump managed to irritate just about everyone with a stake in the issue (which, when it comes to nuclear proliferation, is essentially everyone on Earth), but in doing so, he hit on a thorny geopolitical anxiety about the role of the US as a nuclear-armed protector.

Experts on the US nuclear umbrella — the security arrangement in which the US guarantees its protection in exchange for a promise that the non-nuclear ally will remain that way — said Trump is just flat out wrong on just about every detail in his Far East military analysis.

“His comments contradict what has been a core, consistent long-term foreign policy objective for the US, going way back to the Cold War,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

The US has more than 50,000 troops in 14 bases in Japan and nearly 30,000 in eight bases in South Korea. Those alliances form what the Washington Post called “the cornerstones of its military presence in Asia” which “is meant to keep North Korea, as well as China, in check.” The total cost of maintaining the bases in both countries is $8 billion, and Japan and South Korea pay more than a third of that.

Despite getting the economics wrong, Trump still managed to hit on a sensitive issue that threatens to change the dynamic of the current military arrangement. Experts say America’s non-nuclear allies have been wondering lately whether the US really has the will to push the big, red “NUKES” button if need be. And that question is prompting debate in such nations about whether they should get out from under the umbrella, and build their own bombs.

The nuclear option wasn’t on the table for Japan as it wrote its post-war constitution in 1947. The document laid out that the Japanese people “forever renounce war … and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”

And yet, with the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade old, in the 1950s the Japanese considered building a bomb, according to Kristensen. Other world powers had begun ramping up their nuclear arsenals and Japanese leaders didn’t want to be left unprotected in an arms race.

But Japan was too small for nuclear weapons testing — fallout would have been a major issue for its population — and if it had the bomb, it would be a target. A strategy meant for security would invite insecurity, so Japan listened to its constitution and decided against arming itself.

In the 1970s South Korea entertained the possibility of developing its own nuclear bombs, spurred by US foreign policy in Asia. President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 prompted South Korea to ask what a US-China detente would mean for its own security. And in 1979, President Jimmy Carter withdrew thousands of troops from Asia. Those moves pushed South Korea to begin a secret nuclear weapons program. The US pushed back hard, worried that the number of nuclear-armed countries could spiral out of control.

“We had an interest in security for them so we could have our military forces forward-deployed in that part of the world,” said Kristensen. “But we were also interested in preventing those countries from developing weapons that would trigger global insecurity and increase the risk that weapons could be used against us.”

The Koreans agreed in the 1980s, in exchange for a recommitment from the US to guarantee its security, including nuclear and conventional force. US troops were important to South Korea because North Korea’s army was far superior.

But over the decades a few holes have been torn in the nuclear umbrella. The US nuclear weapon infrastructure is aging and the number of weapons that are actually ready for use has dropped. But beyond old weapons is the nuclear age-old moral quandary.

“We have several hundred warheads we can deploy whenever, but will is a whole different question,” said Jonathan Bergner, an independent national security analyst who focuses on nuclear strategy proliferation.

In other words, if Pyongyang destroys Seoul in a nuclear attack, would the US honor its commitment and nuke Pyongyang if those 50,000 US troops aren’t stationed in South Korea? If US troops were not on the ground — were not killed in an attack — would a US president be as quick to retaliate against North Korea, knowing that, as soon as the US hits the nuke button, Kim Jong Un would send his own missiles toward San Francisco or Los Angeles?

Questions like that have provoked debate in academic and military circles in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere, said Bergner. Some are making the case — like Trump, but for different reasons — that nuclear proliferation might not be such a bad thing.

The Soviet Union and the US, India and Pakistan — they were a lot more careful with one another knowing the other side was capable of nuclear mass annihilation. The same might be true for China and North Korea if they knew Japan or South Korea could act on their own and deploy nuclear blasts without the US.

“There’s a certain stability in mutually-assured-destruction,” Bergner said. “But it’s less about money and more about how stabilizing it is to have these serious weapons. The only thing that hasn’t happened in the world since World War II is full scale, major war. That’s a pretty good track record for nukes.”