Donald Trump's Awkward Korean Love Triangle

0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. President Donald Trump really wants to rekindle his relationship with Kim Jong Un , the leader of North Korea , but America’s decades-long union with the South is getting in the way.

He cut short one military exercise with Seoul and canceled another in a gesture to Pyongyang, but the only response so far came not from Kim but his sister, who revealed her brother’s "good memories and feelings" about Trump.

U.S. soldiers died fighting against the North in the Korean War, so Trump’s courting of Kim may be putting the South through a crisis of faith over the only ally it’s ever known.

A series of photos posted to Truth Social this week were another reminder of Trump’s longing for "rocket man" Kim, who could represent his last shot at peace in a year full of war.

Trump has an odd way of flirting with dictators, an unusual brand of diplomacy that has successfully secured summits with Kim in addition to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and China’s leader Xi Jinping.

Back when Trump was a freshman president, his opening lines to North Korea were threatening and he labeled Kim a "madman." That was before the pair "fell in love" over Kim’s "beautiful letters," he said at a rally in 2018.

Trump now speaks admiringly of Kim’s power and his resolve as a ruler. He believes they share a deeper understanding.

"I get along with him. He'd like to see me back too. I think he misses me, if you want to know," he said at the Republican National Convention in 2024.

Trump has been coy about his overtures to Kim this time around. He told the press that they would meet again, but he wouldn’t say whether Kim was returning his letters.

The thought of Kim writing letters is classically romantic. North Korea entered the digital age long ago, thanks to modern technologies smuggled in from the West or sourced from China .

Kim, 42, is playing hard to get because he has the most to gain from Trump’s extra flattery. The North Korean leader has long craved legitimacy like an influencer thrives off publicity, good or bad.

Despite ruling one of the most isolated regimes—an effective pariah state living under U.N. sanctions for two decades—Kim is elevated to a statesman of equal standing each time Trump says his name.

Trump has one eye on a never-ending Iran war and another on the upcoming midterms, but Kim can afford to wait for more favorable conditions because he has nothing to lose.

Kim walked away from their last three summits with more confidence in himself and North Korea’s armed forces, which now control double the number of nuclear warheads as they did in 2019.

The dynasty in Pyongyang has doubled down on nuclear weapons by smartly positioning itself between Russia and China, leasing its military to one while holding the diplomatic attention of the other.

It’s been a rocky 18 months for the U.S. and South Korea , whose fates have been bound by a mutual defense treaty since 1953.

More than 23,000 U.S. troops are forward-deployed to bases across South Korea, the third-largest number anywhere outside U.S. territory after Japan and Germany.

The "tripwire" force—designed to deter a North Korean invasion across the Demilitarized Zone—represents the U.S.’s only permanent military presence in continental Asia.

Even being one of America’s most important trade partners, especially for high-tech goods like semiconductors, did not spare South Korea from Trump’s global tariff war.

Trump has personally criticized South Korean President Lee Jae Myung for failing to support the U.S. militarily in the war in the Middle East.

Even before Trump scaled back joint war games with the South Korean military, public opinion of the U.S. was in decline, according to the results of a spring survey published on August 24 by the Pew Research Center.

A majority of South Koreans—55 percent—have an unfavorable opinion of the U.S. for the first time in over 20 years, including 18 percent with a very unfavorable view, the poll showed. Favorable views of the U.S. were at 74 percent in 2017, at the start of Trump’s first presidency.

This year, only 21 percent of South Koreans believe the U.S. cares about interests other than its own, Pew said.

But 84 percent of South Koreans said the U.S. was their most important ally, perhaps the only nation capable of defending them from the North, which they see as their greatest threat .

Lee himself has sought to mend strained ties with the neighbors to the north. He has stopped propaganda broadcasts at the border and hinted that North Korea's nuclear weapons may be here to stay.

During a visit to the White House one year ago, he encouraged Trump to resume dialogue with Kim. And earlier this month, he directly called on Pyongyang to sign a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War.

But it's unclear whether Seoul's signals will be enough to reverse North Korea's declaration of the South as an enemy state.

Trump said it’s "a good thing" that he gets along with Kim, whose sister said their relationship "is still excellent."

He may see a realistic opportunity to stop the development of North Korea’s nuclear program or to talk him out of sending more weapons to Russia.

Before Trump and Kim met for the first time in 2018 on Sentosa, Singapore’s leisure island, Pyongyang sent a verbal invitation via Seoul.

North and South Korea are not on speaking terms right now, so, if the two leaders do meet again this year, there will be signs—but the South might be the last to know.

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