Can Trump handle today’s Korean peninsula?

President Trump has promised so much on his first few days back at his desk in the White House, one must wonder, however, how much he or any other mere mortal could accomplish.

Somewhere down the list comes North Korea, where his old friend Kim Jong Un remains ensconced in the capital of Pyongyang. Trump has said he believes Kim would like to talk again, as they did in their summits in June 2018 and twice in 2019. But Kim now has a powerful friend in the form of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, to whom he’s supplying arms and troops in exchange for technology for his nukes and missiles — and food for his hungry people. By now he doesn’t necessarily need to rekindle his brief bromance with Trump.

Playing into the drama, turmoil in South Korea also changes the give-and-take between Washington and Seoul. Trump knows whom to see in Pyongyang, but he has no real idea whom to turn to in Seoul until the chaos dies down and we see who’s in charge in the Republic of Korea.

We can probably forget about the South’s current president, Yoon Suk Yeol, now in jail while the constitutional court considers whether to approve his impeachment by the National Assembly. He will soon go on trial for committing “insurrection” — his abortive attempt at imposing martial law on Dec. 3. Even if the court doesn't approve his impeachment, which requires the vote of six of its nine judges, he’s not going to regain the power and authority needed to govern effectively while the opposition Democratic Party, controls the assembly.

The danger of the bond between Kim and Putin, reinforced by the new alliance reached at their summit in Pyongyang in June, compounded by unrest in the South vastly alters the dynamics of the standoff on the Korean peninsula. In Washington, Trump is obsessed with domestic topics, including expulsion of illegal immigrants, sealing borders and stopping woke-ism in schools and universities. Internationally, he will be forced to tackle Ukraine’s war against the Russians and North Koreans, as well as Israel’s perpetual struggle with Iran and its terrorist proxies.

All of which means Americans, including Trump, have to wonder how much they should care about Korea, North or South.

News of the North’s latest missile tests — including long-range hypersonic models capable of carrying warheads almost anywhere on earth — is almost routine, worthy of intense interest among experts but not to most people. In Seoul, the jailing of South Korea’s leader, protests by demonstrators on both sides and the end of joint exercises on the ground by American and South Korean forces also don't generate mass attention. We’ve been through that scenario before: the daily protests that preceded the impeachment, ouster and imprisonment in 2017 of Park Geun-hye, daughter of the long-ruling dictator Park Chung-hee who was assassinated in 1979 by his intelligence chief, have faded into history.

Korea, however, has a way of assuming top billing when we’re not expecting it.

The North Korean invasion of South Korea caught Americans by surprise in 1950, as did Chinese intervention in that war when American and South Korean forces believed victory was in their grasp several months later. If Trump is serious about standing up to the Chinese, redressing the immense trade imbalance between the U.S. and China and halting China’s advances across the Indo-Pacific region, he must also place South Korea’s welfare high on his agenda.

He can’t upset South Koreans by pulling out American troops, already down to 28,500, and he’s got to forget about temporizing with Kim Jong Un, who’s not going to give up (or even decelerate) his program for building ever more nukes and missiles — not as long as he’s got Putin firmly on his side.

Difficult though it is to grasp the connection, Trump has to see the relationship between the war in Ukraine and the rising menace of North Korea. How can he count on Putin as a friend and begin to solve the Ukraine war, as he has said he would do in a day, while Putin’s deals with Kim are enough to bail North Korea out of economic failure? And how can South Korea stand up to the North while paralyzed by internal divisions that are likely to worsen if Yoon is totally ousted as president and then imprisoned for a crime that carries the death sentence — insurrection?

The repercussions extend far beyond the Korean peninsula. Trump also has to show his willingness to defend Taiwan, which has faded of late from the news, against Chinese bullying and intimidation, and confront China on the South China Sea in defense of the Philippines.

Would Trump commit the U.S. to the defense of Taiwan if China’s president, Xi Jinping, were to decide now’s the time to recover the independent island state? And how willing is Trump to strengthen the American alliance with Japan? The Japanese, ever bound by Article 9 of their post-war constitution forbidding Japan from going to war beyond its borders, would surely do away with all pretense of that policy if needed to stand up against Russian or Chinese intervention on behalf of North Korea or Chinese assault on Taiwan.

Although barely mentioned among dilemmas that Trump is addressing, these are not abstract issues. They all are reasons why Americans, and Trump, should approach them with the same urgency as the danger of widening wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The success or failure of Trump’s second presidency rides on his ability to go beyond big talk about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Those proposals are not likely to gain more than ephemeral headlines. We should measure Trump’s toughness when we see what he really does about the defense of East Asia, from the Philippines to Taiwan to Japan — and especially South Korea, in danger of fragmenting while Kim waits to reunify the Korean peninsula on no one’s terms but his own as a nuclear state and one of Russia’s few allies.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.

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