Freudian Slip

At the summit on November 1, South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, publicly asked Trump to provide fuel for nuclear submarines that his government plans to build, and to authorize Seoul to enrich and reprocess spent uranium rods. Lee justified the request by noting that Seoul’s existing diesel submarines fall short in tracking North Korean and Chinese vessels. This unprecedented remark explicitly linked Seoul’s naval capabilities to US strategic interests in the region, while signaling a gradual attempt to reduce its economic ties with China, its largest trade partner.

The following day, Trump gave his approval for South Korea to build nuclear submarines on the condition that it does so at a Philadelphia shipyard owned by Hanwha Ocean and Hanwha Systems, subsidiaries of South Korea’s defense conglomerate Hanwha Group. This put South Korea on course to become the first nonnuclear power with nuclear submarines and the first US ally to receive such technology. Talks over an amended US–Korea nuclear pact have already entered their final stage, with Seoul’s demand for the right to enrich spent nuclear rods.

Despite these unsettling developments, Lee’s summit with Chinese president Xi Jinping, held a few hours after Trump’s nod of approval, struck a conciliatory tone that was consistent with the US–China economic truce. The two leaders seem to have agreed to keep a lid on their simmering geopolitical tensions so long as the truce holds.

On November 13, the White House announced that Washington would grant Seoul the right to enrich spent nuclear waste — a privilege it has hitherto only extended to Japan — and that the two countries would jointly build nuclear submarines in South Korea. In addition, Seoul committed to invest a total of $350 billion in the United States over the next ten years, with $150 billion earmarked for the US shipbuilding industry.

South Korea also pledged to raise annual defense spending to 3.5 percent of GDP “as soon as possible.” In a separate arrangement, Seoul will provide $33 billion to support the US forces in South Korea. Despite these enormous financial commitments, the South Korean ruling elite appears content with the outcome, viewing these agreements as a significant step toward full nuclearization.

Hostile Brothers

South Korea’s military ambitions and capabilities have often been overshadowed by the rise of North Korea as a nuclear power on a permanent war footing. Yet the ruling elites of the two Koreas are hostile brothers, both vying for sovereign legitimacy and ultimate dominance over the Korean peninsula and a place in the global and regional hierarchies.

To shorten a very long and complex story, Washington thwarted Seoul’s first full-scale nuclear project in the late 1970s in a move to keep its control of East Asia intact and preserve the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) after Pakistan’s nuclear breakthrough. In the early 1990s, the United States withdrew its own nuclear weapons from South Korea and Japan to Guam and other locations as part of its military deployments following the end of the Cold War.

Pyongyang’s subsequent, all-out pursuit of nuclear weapons was a rational choice on its own terms. It was a bid to secure the regime’s survival amid seemingly irreversible political isolation and a devastating economic implosion that crippled its capacity to update its conventional weapons, faced with an often thuggish Washington and an increasingly self-confident Seoul. Since then, there has been little reason for the North’s hereditary regime to abandon or surrender its nuclear ambitions.

The last serious attempt to bring about denuclearization came in 2018 from the liberal South Korean government of Moon Jae-in, as it positioned itself as a mediator between the United States and North Korea. In 2019, Trump publicly embarrassed both Moon and Kim Jong Un by abruptly demanding broader access to North Korea’s undeclared nuclear sites for inspection during a summit in Hanoi. However, throughout his first term, Trump continued to engage in personal correspondence with the young North Korean leader, while Moon largely refrained from further engagement with Kim.

Meanwhile, the regional balance has begun to tilt in Pyongyang’s favor. Kim has forged new military and economic ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, assisting its war in Ukraine. In doing so, he has managed to partially restore the old Cold War dynamics, creating a situation in which he can play Putin and Xi off against each other in order to gain what he wants politically and economically.

Pyongyang no longer needs Seoul even as a temporary go-between with Washington — a role the North once reluctantly expected the South to play, only to watch it fail miserably. It can now instead look to either Beijing or Moscow for such mediation. Despite Trump’s continued overtures, Kim will not engage unless Washington formally acknowledges North Korea as a nuclear power and lifts at least part of the economic sanctions.

Between Patterns and Whims

In 2024, North Korea renounced its founding principle that the two Koreas are a divided nation destined for reunification. By declaring itself to be a separate state, Pyongyang, among other things, signaled its intent to sideline Seoul and deal directly with Washington over its status as a nuclear power.

This has inflamed sentiments in South Korea that are somewhat similar to Charles de Gaulle’s skepticism of the US nuclear umbrella. The French president decided to develop his own country’s nuclear arsenal, suspecting that the United States would not “trade New York for Paris” in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike. South Koreans now harbor a similar doubt that the US would trade Seattle for Seoul if and when North Korea perfects an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of striking the US mainland, despite the regular presence of US nuclear submarines at South Korean ports.

The combination of North Korean’s recent missile tests and Trump’s whims have reinforced South Korean anxieties. Pyongyang has recently unveiled a new albeit untested ICBM in a military parade, test-launched short-range cruise missiles, and fired long-range artillery toward the demilitarized zone (DMZ). This represents a clear attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington in the hope that Trump, driven by his pursuit of the Nobel Prize, may seek a quick deal with Pyongyang at Seoul’s expense.

Deepening mistrust of Trump has also rekindled public calls for the government to reclaim wartime operational control over its forces from the United States — calls to which Washington recently responded positively. The shift is unsurprising. There are 28,500 US troops now stationed in South Korea, and they are no longer configured as frontline combat forces, with the majority serving in reconnaissance and intelligence roles aimed at China. The actual number of combat-ready troops is around 10,000, compared with South Korea’s 550,000-strong army.

Quiet Buildup

South Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has gained traction among a once-skeptical public. According to a recent poll by the Seoul-based centrist Asan Institute of Policy Studies, about three-quarters of respondents supported this goal, and 68 percent said they would continue to support it even in the face of international sanctions.

Since Pyongyang launched its nuclear project, Seoul has quietly built up reconnaissance assets and nuclear-capable delivery systems without crossing the threshold into full nuclearization. Currently, there are five South Korean spy satellites watching over the Korean peninsula, Japan, and parts of China. The country is the only nonnuclear power armed with submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The manufacturer Hanwha, which once copied German prototypes, is now competing with its German rival ThyssenKrupp for Canada’s procurement project of twelve submarines.

Seoul’s push has always had bipartisan support, with the assertiveness of liberal governments often exceeding that of conservative ones. This is driven by a deep-seated nationalist distrust of the strategic reliability of the US–South Korea alliance, combined with doubts about Seoul’s diminishing leverage to bargain away Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities.

It was the liberal Roh Moo-hyun government in office from 2003 to 2008 that commissioned Seoul’s first indigenous Aegis destroyer and its first nuclear submarine program. The Moon government of 2017–2022 followed suit with the introduction of the country’s first homegrown jetfighters and SLBMs.

Robust, all-inclusive domestic procurement of both conventional and high-tech weaponry has helped South Korea emerge as the world’s tenth-biggest arms exporter. The current liberal Lee government has unveiled plans to transform the defense industry, together with artificial intelligence, into the country’s next growth engine. Seoul is likely to channel significant portions of the expanded defense budget target into promoting arms exports.

Since the 1970s, South Korea’s state bureaucracy and industrial conglomerates have often deviated from free-market tenets to maintain the core of the defense sector through global capitalist cycles of boom and bust. A case in point is the rise of the Hanwha Group, the country’s largest defense conglomerate.

Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, the forerunner of Hanwha Ocean, built South Korea’s first submarine in 1993 after benefiting from two separate government bailouts. In 1999, Daewoo went bankrupt amid the Asian financial meltdown. The government effectively nationalized the defunct shipyard and shored it up after job cuts and financial maneuvering. In 2023, the Hanwha Group acquired it.

“Hanwha” is short for “Korean Gunpowder.” The conglomerate began in the early 1970s to provide munitions and explosives for the South Korean and US militaries. It has now evolved into a vertically integrated defense giant that offers everything from artillery and surveillance systems to submarines.

MASGA

Hanwha, in tandem with Hyundai’s and Samsung’s shipbuilding affiliates, has committed $150 billion to revitalize the US shipbuilding sector, which was badly damaged four decades ago when Ronald Reagan ended federal subsidies for its defense component. The initiative, which has been dubbed Make American Shipbuilding Great Again (MASGA), will show that Trump’s call for a manufacturing renaissance in the United States merely offers a return to a war economy with China in mind.

Along the way, the South Korean state and its conglomerates may well cast themselves as innocent and unfortunate victims, ensnared in Trump’s whimsical and crude ambitions. Nothing can be further from the truth. The South Korean ruling elite has already bound its future prosperity to Washington, just as North Korea’s leader and his close-knit inner circles have pawned their fate to nuclear arsenals and the military resurgence of Russia and China.

This will come at the cost of peace in North Asia and beyond. Perhaps we are witnessing the full maturity of a new Cold War — one unfolding on the same tiny Asian peninsula where the original Cold War turned hot eighty-five years ago.