Trump, Iran, and Seoul’s steady, silent turn to self-reliance

“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran” and “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding”. It’s plenty tough and threatening, but it’s not diplomacy, it’s hardly negotiating, and it’s certainly not serving any purpose, outside the narrow, narcissistic need for yet another Fox News sound bite.

U.S. soft power is disappearing faster than a bouffant comb-over on a windy day - and in Seoul the winds are blowing hard.

Trump’s responses on Iran lurch from maximalist threats to last-minute ambiguity, as establishment chicken-hawks like Lindey Graham and Ted Cruz push for confrontation and MAGA-aligned figures like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon question commitment on ideological grounds. The mess casts U.S. foreign policy not as principled leadership, but as cable news-driven Fox News sound bites.

Trump tries to satisfy both and satisfies neither. The image projected is one of confused dysfunction, not decisiveness. And this image is what lands in Seoul’s headlines, classrooms, and public debates.

The result is a weakening of U.S. normative authority in Korea. Soft power, by definition, depends not just on capacity, but on credibility. It rests on the perception that the United States acts in a way that is predictable, value-driven, and aligned with the global order it claims to lead.

When a president jokes about missile strikes, delays action until after consulting poll numbers, and alternates between appeasing isolationists and threatening major escalation—all in the space of a week—the narrative breaks down.

The headlines say it all. Absolute irresponsibility. It’s like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with nuclear codes. The parents are out of the house and the kids are in control.

South Korean opinion-makers, think tanks, and younger policy professionals increasingly treat U.S. leadership with skepticism. What once might have been interpreted as strategic patience is now read as indecision. What once passed for resolve now looks like impulse.

More critically, the alignment between U.S. rhetoric and U.S. action—once a key pillar of American credibility—no longer holds. This credibility gap has direct consequences for Korea’s strategic trajectory.

The longstanding push for greater independence—once controversial—is gaining mainstream traction. Policymakers are more openly investing in autonomous defense capabilities. Universities and research institutes are reorienting toward Indo-Pacific cooperation frameworks that don’t necessarily center on Washington.

Public discourse is shifting: rather than asking how Korea can better fit into U.S.-led alliances, the question increasingly being asked is how Korea can prepare for scenarios in which U.S. leadership is absent, unreliable, or even obstructive.

The erosion of U.S. soft power resonates acutely with Korea’s younger generations, particularly Gen-Z and millennials. Unlike their parents, they did not grow up in the shadow of war or under the tutelage of U.S. security guarantees. Instead, they have come of age in a prosperous, technologically advanced, and globally influential Korea—confident in its economic strength, cultural soft power, and growing military capabilities.

For Gen-Z and millenials, national capability is a given, not a goal. As a result, they are far less inclined to view the United States as a benevolent protector. If anything, they are just as likely to see it as a destabilizing force—prone to erratic decisions, self-interest, and strategic imposition. Where older generations saw alliance as survival, the younger see ambiguity, risk, and the need for distance. They are not anti-American. They are pro-Korean.

This generational shift matters. It affects military recruitment attitudes, participation in alliance programs, enthusiasm for joint training, and even academic exchange.

If American soft power once provided moral glue for the alliance, its disintegration now exposes the pragmatic coldness of security dependence. The alliance still functions—but it no longer inspires.

As Washington debates whether to escalate in the Middle East, Korean policymakers are not just watching the outcome. They are studying the process.

The chaos, the division, the mixed signals—all of it serves as a case study in why overreliance on any single external power is dangerous. Trump may not be the cause of Korea’s turn toward autonomy, but he is undeniably the catalyst. His approach to Iran—vacillating, theatrical, and decoupled from allied interests—reminds Seoul that it must prepare for a world where U.S. leadership is erratic, not exceptional.

Despite their public theatrics and mutual disdain, the one arena where establishment neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz find rare and unspoken agreement with MAGA firebrands like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon is China.

Whether cloaked in the language of democratic values and freedom of navigation or wrapped in apocalyptic warnings of communism and civilizational decline, both camps increasingly converge on the narrative that the United States must prepare—economically, militarily, and psychologically—for an inevitable confrontation with Beijing.

For Graham and Cruz, it is about reaffirming American primacy through alliance structures and arms buildup. For Carlson and Bannon, it is cast as a final battle for Western survival against a rising authoritarian leviathan. What unites them is a shared conviction that China represents the core strategic threat of the era.

This bipartisan war-footing has immediate implications for America’s allies in East Asia, none more so than South Korea.

Washington’s strategic gaze increasingly sees the peninsula not as a Cold War relic locked in a North-South standoff, but as a key piece on a larger chessboard involving China’s rise. Korea, geographically wedged between Northeast Asian powers and functionally tethered to U.S. security guarantees, now finds itself on the frontline of this evolving contest. The logic of “great power competition” is steadily eclipsing the logic of peacebuilding, pushing Seoul to make stark choices between preserving autonomy and reinforcing alliance solidarity under pressure from Washington’s China policy.

Military interoperability exercises once aimed at deterring Pyongyang now double as readiness drills for a hypothetical Taiwan contingency.

This convergence across the U.S. political spectrum leaves Korea with few illusions. Whether the White House is led by a liberal internationalist or a nationalist populist, the strategic outcome for Seoul looks increasingly similar: intensified pressure to align with U.S. posturing against China, even at the cost of regional stability and its own economic interests. In the process, Korea risks becoming collateral in a broader hegemonic struggle it neither initiated nor benefits from.

The push for greater independence is no longer framed as nationalist aspiration. It is viewed as strategic necessity.

Autonomy in defense, diversification in diplomacy, and resilience in information policy are now seen not as alternatives to the U.S. alliance but as prerequisites for surviving its possible failure.

The Iran crisis is not just a regional flare-up—it is a global mirror. It reflects the consequences of U.S. soft power in decline, and the accelerating transformation of allies from dependents into hedgers.

For South Korea, the lesson is simple: if America’s image is no longer dependable, its promises may not be either. The age of faith-based alliance politics is over. The era of strategic self-reliance has begun.