The U.S. Chooses Favorites: North Korea over South Korea

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here  coming to you from Colorado. I was just listening to the radio, and I had to pull over because I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was listening to some sort of satire radio, but no. Donald Trump is in the process of functionally ending the alliance with South Korea, specifically, the South Koreans and the United States have annual exercises to basically prepare for North Korean invasion. And, Trump has largely ended U.S. participation of it, which is a long standing North Korean propaganda demand. In his Truth Social post, Trump said a lot of bad things about South Korea, specifically called out Chairman Kim of North Korea, the despot, as one of his good friends and as a respectful leader and whew… 

Three big things here. Number one. Bothers me that I have to say this out loud, but North Korea is not a friend. North Korea is literally pointing to their nuclear tipped, nuclear weapons at us, and is one of the world’s greatest concentrations of cyber crime, specifically crypto crime that disproportionately attacks Americans. So the idea that Trump has a personal relationship with the dictator Kim, and that is somehow benefiting the United States, is delusional at best. 

Number two, yes, South Korea is a beneficiary of the United States. But I would argue in a post globalized world, South Korea is one of the top five countries that we really, really want to have a strong relationship with. Once you get past the trade disputes that the Koreans and the Americans have, which I might add were largely addressed by a free trade agreement negotiated by Trump One. There are two really big things that we need them for. Number one, South Korea is one of the world’s best shipbuilders, and the US Navy was relying upon Korean tech, Korean technicians and Korean modules in order to jumpstart U.S. naval ship building. We can probably now kiss that goodbye, which means that the rate of building new ships is going to continue to be very slow. 

The second piece is in computers. Everybody obsesses about GPUs, which are primarily the product of TSMC out of Taiwan high end processing nodes. People forget that you also need something called DRAM, dynamic random access memory. It’s a high end memory chip, and the Koreans make almost all of those, all the good ones anyway, and are really the only ones researching how to make better ones. So whereas Biden and now Trump are pushing to get GPUs produced in the United States have kind of forgotten about the other piece of high end computing. And without the Koreans, it’s just that goes away. Third, yes, Korea is a security beneficiary, but they’re not a free rider. In fact, aside from North Korea, special case because they impoverish their people, making them eat grass in order to have a big military with 25% of their population under arms, and Ukraine and Russia, which are in a hot war, the Koreans have regularly outspent everyone on the planet going back to 1950. Yeah. 

But they have focused at American insistence on defensive weaponry and on short range weaponry. So they don’t have a ballistic missile program, they don’t have an independent jet program, and they certainly don’t have a big naval program. So Trump called out in his Truth Social post about how the Koreans refused to assist in the denuclearization of Iran. And let’s put to the side first, that the Trump administration, six months in, still doesn’t have a plan for that. 

The South Koreans guess how many ships they have that can make it to the Strait of Hormuz? Zero. So, I mean, what were they supposed to do? Swim. 

Now, if the United States really is backing away, and the South Koreans are going to have to face the North Koreans alone and defend themselves in a neighborhood with superior military forces like Japan and China themselves. Well, they’re kind of in a similar situation to the Europeans. There’s no point in them getting a lot of artillery and tanks and rocket systems and jets, because it would take too long to build. And the Trump pullback is being so rapid that just won’t work. So they’re doing two things. Number one, they have a very aggressive partnership with the Ukrainians to mass produce drones. Expect to see a lot more of that. So the marriage of South Korean technical skill and manufacturing prowess with Ukrainian innovation and field testing, we’re going to see a new generation, several new generations of advanced attack drones and offensive drones that the United States now will not have access to, but will form the backbone of this new Korean military structure. 

Second, there’s one other thing that they can do that has a big bang for the buck and you can do pretty quickly, and that’s built nuclear weapon. The Koreans have always tried to stay just a couple of steps shy of weaponization, because they were never quite sure in the long run, if the United States was going to stick around or not. 

Now, they more or less have an answer to that question, and that means we’re going to have a third nuclear power in Northeast Asia. If the Koreans decided to pull the trigger today, they could have a device in days. They’ll probably be able to have a deliverable nuclear weapon within months. And then this strategic balance that existed in relative peace in Northeast Asia for the last 75 years. You can kiss that goodbye, because then the Taiwanese and the Japanese really will have no choice but to follow suit. So there we are. I would love to say that there’s some sort of strategic goal here the Trump administration has. Unless it’s having dinner with the North Korean dictator, I don’t see what it could possibly be. 

And that’s all I’ve got for now.