President Donald Trump commands media attention as the President, the same way he kept ratings high for his reality TV show “The Apprentice” — by always keeping the audience wondering what might happen next. And while unpredictability might be useful for commanding the public’s attention or seizing the initiative against rivals, it is also a source of great anxiety for allies. This will make planning for President Lee Jae Myung’s upcoming summit with Trump far more difficult than usual meetings between leaders.
There are four approaches other leaders have taken with Trump. The first is to openly clash with Trump, like Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada did. This approach helped Carney come up from behind to win national elections in April, but Korea is not Canada. The United States and Canadian economies are joined at the hip like Siamese twins, with parts and components travelling back and forth across the border between Ottawa and Michigan half a dozen times before final assembly. The United States cannot abandon Canada by dint of geography, economics and familial ties, so Canada can get away with sibling fights. Korea is a close ally and an important economy for the United States, but abandonment is geographically possible. That is why 90% of Koreans support the alliance with the United States despite Trump.
A second approach would be to avoid the summit. Critics of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accuse him of quietly appealing to anti-US voters on the left of his Labor Party by avoiding a meeting with Trump while defying the Trump administration’s pressure on defence spending and the Gaza conflict — though not in the same pugnacious way as Carney. This has not hurt Australia thus far, but sooner or later, Albanese will have to meet with Trump. While only a third of Australians trust Trump, they do expect their Prime Minister to manage the alliance with the United States, which 80% of Australians say is necessary for their country to manage challenges from China. So in that sense, Albanese also has to decide what the strategy with Trump will ultimately be.
A third approach would be to keep a low profile and just focus on very narrow issues of importance to Korea. In some ways, this is what former President Moon Jae-in did with Trump in the US President’s first term. He flattered Trump and sought frequent meetings but mainly with the narrow aim of pushing for a Trump-Kim Jong Un summit that Moon hoped would pave the way for renewed North-South reconciliation. Moon read Trump’s ego well, even endorsing him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and Trump did pivot from threatening “fire and fury” on the Korean Peninsula to holding summits with the North Korean leader in Singapore, Hanoi and at the DMZ. But it is hard to say what Moon really achieved for Korea strategically. The lowering of tensions with Pyongyang was important, but that crisis was started by the North’s launch of new intercontinental missiles and then escalated by Trump’s rhetoric. When the crisis abated after Trump’s summits, Pyongyang continued advancing its missile and other weapons programs uninterrupted. President Moon was probably also deeply disappointed that Pyongyang ignored Seoul’s courtship and put everything into wooing the US President. Any serious student of North Korean strategy would have predicted this outcome given Pyongyang’s long-held goal of diminishing South Korean legitimacy and seeking to undercut South Korean security by cutting deals with Washington to abandon the South.
President Lee could go for his own version of a narrow approach with Trump by pushing for Korean wartime operational command — which might work because Trump and some of his senior officials like Bridge Colby at the Pentagon will be attracted to an option that shrinks the footprint of US Forces on the Korean Peninsula in order to shift the US military focus to China. However, the diminishment of US military commitment to Korea, absent a larger strategic framework, could be risky for South Korean strategic influence in the region and security on the peninsula. This would particularly be the case if Trump decided to go for another peace treaty with Kim Jong-un and accidentally legitimised Pyongyang’s nuclear programs and undercut confidence in US security commitments across the region.
A fourth option would be to go broad with Trump — to study his priorities and present a strategic framework for US-Korea cooperation in a broader regional and global context that fits with the “America First” theme and Korea’s national interests. Other leaders have succeeded with Trump by using this broader approach, not just for a narrow national agenda but for broader security in their region. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain used his summit with Trump to steer the US President away from the abandonment of NATO and, in turn, helped muster European support for a commitment of 5% of GDP defence spending for Trump’s June 2025 NATO summit. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo also focused Trump on the Russian threat, as no other European leader has been able to do, by describing what the Russian threat looked like on the front lines. In Trump’s first term, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe convinced the US administration to adopt Japan’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept as the US coordinates for the region. This would be my preferred approach. However, replaying Abe’s success will be harder since there are fewer strategic heavyweights in the administration this time to play the role that officials like HR McMasters, Matt Pottinger, or Randy Schriver did in Trump 1.0. If anything, President Trump has blocked any officials from advancing a coherent national strategy for the United States, preferring instead to retain maximum freedom of manoeuvre for himself.
The best approach for President Lee might be a combination of the third and fourth options — but it will also require a Korean commitment to investing in the US economy and a recognition that Trump will insist on some level of tariffs, even if that hurts US consumers more than Korea. Seoul will also want to ensure that its vision for the Korean Peninsula reinforces broader regional peace and security rather than retreating from it. And President Lee will want to present his approach as an effort to reduce what Trump sees as an imbalance in burden-sharing rather than as a restoration of Korean sovereignty. Donald Trump always wants to say that he won, and the art of summitry with him is to win by convincing him that he has won. I hope that President Lee succeeds.