Transactional diplomacy started in Seoul, not Washington

Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy - crude, brash, unapologetically transactional - is treated in Washington as a horrifying aberration. “Allies are sacred," the foreign policy elite gasped. “We don’t treat friends like business partners!” But this outrage is theater.

The truth is, America’s alliances have always been about interests, not friendship. And nowhere is this more obvious - if you bother to look - than in the KORUS alliance.

From the very beginning, the KORUS relationship was a business deal, not a bond of brotherhood. It was born not out of mutual admiration, but out of desperation and cold calculation.

In 1953, after three years of bloody stalemate in the Korean War, Washington was desperate for an armistice. Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s authoritarian president, wanted no part of it. He still dreamed of marching north and unifying the peninsula under Seoul’s rule. A ceasefire was defeat to him.

Rhee resisted U.S. pressure for months, using every tool at his disposal, including threatening to unleash South Korean forces without U.N. authorization. The Americans, exhausted and overstretched, needed Rhee to stand down before the war expanded into an even larger conflict with China - or worse, the Soviet Union.

The solution was not sentimental speeches or appeals to shared values.

It was simple: a transaction.

➔ Rhee would grudgingly accept the ceasefire. ➔ In return, the United States would sign a bilateral Mutual Defense Treaty, guaranteeing South Korea’s security against future northern aggression.

Peace was bought, not earned. Protection was secured, not granted out of friendship.

This transactional bargain — ceasefire for defense treaty — embedded a hard realism into the alliance from its first breath. Everything that came afterward was built on this foundation. American soldiers defended South Korea not because of undying loyalty, but because it served U.S. strategic interests: containing communism, securing the Japanese islands, projecting power in Asia, and securing a foothold on the Eurasian continent within striking range of Beijing.

Meanwhile, South Korea used the American security umbrella to buy time - and space - to rebuild its shattered economy and consolidate its political order. The alliance enabled the South’s rapid industrialization, its eventual democratization, and its ascent as a mid-sized economic power. But Seoul never forgot that the arrangement was conditional. Alliances were tools for survival, not lifelong commitments.

For decades, both sides dressed up the alliance in the language of brotherhood and shared sacrifice. But behind the slogans, Korea pursued autonomy at every step. From developing its own arms industry, to expanding its diplomatic reach, extending missile payloads, securing technology, to hedging carefully between Washington and Beijing - Korea never acted like a country that believed in unconditional loyalty.

It believed in transactions - just as it always had. The same as the U.S.

What Trump did, in his vulgar way, was simply to strip the mask off the pretense of values in the alliance.

When he demanded more cost-sharing, called alliances “bad deals,” and suggested that American troops might leave if Seoul didn’t pay more, he wasn’t breaking new ground. He was just speaking openly about what had been true all along.

South Korea understood this long before America did. The alliance was a contract, not a covenant.

And that reality has consequences.

Once alliances are understood - by both parties - as transactions, their stability depends entirely on whether the deal continues to deliver value.

Today, the cracks are showing.

• South Korea hesitates to fully align with the U.S. against China, fearing economic retaliation.
• America increasingly sees Korea as unreliable - enjoying the benefits of U.S. security while freelancing its own independent foreign policy.
• Disputes over defense spending, trade, technology policy, and semiconductor supply chains continue to mount.
• Fundamental differences are emerging in South Korea’s political environment - much the same as they did at the end of the Joseon Dynasty.

Trust, to the extent it ever existed, is evaporating.

This isn’t a temporary phase. It’s structural.

As America becomes more inward-looking and demands more “returns” from its alliances, and as South Korea grows more confident and self-interested, the room for sentimental illusions shrinks.

The alliance will survive as long as both sides believe it serves their cold interests. It will falter when it doesn’t.

There will be no grand betrayal, no climactic break. Just a slow, grinding erosion of commitment, hidden behind smiling photo-ops and hollow communiqués.

The irony is brutal. Many American strategists still talk about “shared values” and “ironclad commitments.”

They still act as if South Korea owes the U.S. something - loyalty, gratitude, permanent alignment. But Seoul’s epistemic community understands the truth.

They have always understood the truth: in international politics, gratitude is worthless and loyalty is rented, not owned.

They learned it from the very first deal they struck with America in 1953. They learnt it in history books telling the tales of the country being torn apart by supporters of China, Russia, Japan and others at the end of the Joseon Dynasty.

Trump didn’t destroy the KORUS alliance.

He didn’t cheapen it.

He just said out loud what had been true for seventy years: The alliance was always for sale. It was always a transaction. The challenge now is ensuring that it is a valuable transaction - and this is where Trump will fail.