Donald Trump turns on the charm in South Korea and bolsters the alliance

When he’s not threatening war or griping about skewed trade relations, Donald Trump seems to appreciate the power of flattery. The US president certainly laid the compliments on thick for his South Korean hosts during the second leg of his five-nation tour of Asia on Wednesday. In a speech before South Korea’s legislature, the first by a US president in nearly a quarter-century, Trump could hardly contain his praise for the close US ally, which he gushingly referred to as “one of the great nations of the world”.

The president listed off the fruits of South Korea’s economic rise after the Korean war, commonly termed the “Miracle on the Han”, from huge strides in life expectancy to the massive expansion in gross domestic product. He noted the country’s largely peaceful transition to free elections in 1987, its hosting of the Olympic Games the following year, and its advances in technology and science. He pointed out that Korean authors have published about 40,000 books this year alone and Korean musicians regularly fill concert venues all around the globe. If all of that weren’t enough, Trump expressed his admiration for South Korea’s prowess in golf, with special mention, unsurprisingly, going to the performance of Korean golfers at this year’s US Women’s Open at Trump National Golf Club.

“I know that the Republic of Korea, which has become a tremendously successful nation, will be a faithful ally of the United States very long into the future,” Trump told the National Assembly, referring to their security alliance dating back to the war.

It was an effusive display many miles removed from the candidate whose “America First” rhetoric saw him repeatedly accuse South Korea of freeloading on the back of Washington’s commitment to its defence. That, of course, was before Trump was faced with the Gordian knot of disarming a North Korea with little incentive to relinquish its increasingly formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. The US president’s task, if not quite impossible, is at least gargantuan – for Pyongyang, nuclear weapons and missiles are a matter of regime survival, bolstering its legitimacy among a population propagandised into a siege mentality and guarding against interference from the outside.

While the prospects of Trump getting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to change course may be slim, they’re slimmer still if Washington and Seoul can’t at least present a united front. The same goes for the Korean peninsula maintaining its fragile peace.