Originally published in Hankyoreh.
It has long been the dream of the U.S. foreign policy elite to bring Japan and South Korea into a tighter alliance.
Notoriously dismissive of history, American leaders don’t understand why the two countries can’t just overcome their past differences. For these Americans, the imperative of strengthened security in the region is so much more important than the legacy of colonialism, disputes over textbooks, or the territorial squabble over Dokdo.
From an outside perspective, Japan and South Korea do seem to have a lot in common. The two countries have military alliances with the United States. Both are democracies. Both are worried about North Korea’s nuclear weapons and wary of China’s economic hegemony. They both have advanced economies and overlapping cultures of aeni/anime, manhwa/manga, and K-Pop/J-Pop. Even the languages share a huge number of Chinese-origin words.
It takes a very strong force to overcome the polarizing impact of history. Also, a very conservative prime minister is in charge in Japan and a liberal reformer is in his second year of power in South Korea. Those politics don’t mix.
But now a force seems to have come along that can unite Japan and South Korea.
That force is Donald Trump.
The U.S. president has made it clear that all traditional alliances are up for renegotiation. He wants U.S. allies to pay more for their own defense. He has slapped punishing sanctions on virtually all countries, including Japan and South Korea. And he has negotiated with adversaries—China, North Korea—over the heads of his supposed friends.
Trump, in short, is unreliable. In general, countries crave predictability and will go to great lengths to secure it. Only because Trump leads a powerful country do world leaders take him seriously.
As such, very few countries have openly defied Trump, for fear of higher tariffs or other forms of retribution. So, the leaders of Japan and South Korea have treated the U.S. president cordially despite his crudity.
But there are other, more indirect ways of responding to the erratic policies of the Trump administration. One of those is for middle powers to work together more closely to reinforce what remains of the rules-based order.
At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this year, Canada’s Mark Carney called on middle powers to adjust to the rupture in this rules-based order—which Carney implicitly blamed on the United States—and establish a measure of “strategic autonomy.” Although widely applauded for its candor, Carney’s speech was also dismissed as impractical in a world dominated by the United States and China. And, indeed, a Middle Powers Club has not emerged in the wake of the speech.
But new world orders are not conjured suddenly into existence by speeches, no matter how eloquent.
What has happened instead is a subtler shift in international relations. European countries, all of them certifiably middle powers, have begun to explore greater military, energy, and technological independence from the United States. As a result of tariffs, powerful countries like Brazil are reorienting their trade away from the United States even as economic interactions within the Global South have been steadily increasing. African nations, too, have been hedging their bets by reducing dependency on the United States and relying more on regional integration.
Meanwhile, in Asia, Lee Jae Myung broke with tradition by visiting Japan before going to the United States. Lee and Japan’s current leader Sanae Takaichi have now met four times in the last six months to discuss energy, explore ways of diversifying the supply chains of critical minerals, and play drums together.
Lee and Takaichi are not united by ideology. The Japanese leader has taken a much stronger pro-containment position toward China, and Korean progressives are unhappy with her efforts to rip up Japan’s “peace constitution.” But just as pragmatism dictates that the two countries coordinate their efforts in the face of tsunamis, the unnatural disaster of Donald Trump requires joint crisis management.
The U.S. foreign policy elite welcomes the meetings that have taken place between Japan and South Korea. But the consensus is the two countries should come together not to hedge against Trump but to unite against China.
This is a mistake, if only because China is relatively predictable and close while the United States is unpredictable and far away. As Trump presides over the global decline of the United States—its power reduced by wars, political corruption, self-inflicted economic wounds, and the destruction of the international system that has long sustained U.S. hegemony—China has steadily expanded its global influence. Korea and Japan ignore that reality at their peril.
But there are two Chinas. One China upholds the global order and exports renewable energy to the world. The other China clings to its fossil fuel imports and wants to absorb Taiwan and all the riches of the South China Sea.
Middle powers can nudge China in the first direction by collaborating on the rules of the road and research into new climate technologies. Middle powers by themselves cannot create a new world order. But by working together, they can gradually shift the center of gravity away from the unpredictable geopolitics of the United States and toward a more stable order.
It would seem, at first glance, that Korea and Japan are not the best middle powers to lead this effort. Both remain hesitant in their transition to clean energy. Both are increasing their military spending. Both are dependent on outside suppliers of critical minerals. But if they are now overcoming their historical differences to work together—in the face of Donald Trump’s unreliability—surely they can find common cause on clean energy, diversified supply chains, and non-military security.
Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps.
But if, just a few years ago, I’d written that the leaders of Korea and Japan would sit down one day behind twin drum sets and play pop music together, I would been called a dreamer. And yet Lee Jae Myung and Sanae Takaichi have done just that and more. Now it’s time for the two countries to take the next step and establish a middle-power compact to push the region much faster toward clean energy and cooperative security.
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