South Korean President Lee Jae Myung will meet Donald Trump for his first face-to-face talks over America’s decades-long role on the Korean peninsula, amid speculation that the US is preparing to scale back its military presence.
The US has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea under an alliance that dates back to the Korean war. But Washington wants Seoul to take on more of the burden of deterring nuclear-armed North Korea, as the US shifts its focus to containing China’s growing military strength.
Lee will also be tasked at Monday’s White House summit with cementing an eleventh-hour trade deal announced last month, which US and Korean officials have interpreted very differently.
It marks a formidable challenge for the former provincial governor, who was elected in June.
“The range of complex trade and defence issues the alliance needs to navigate, and the potential for them to be linked in unexpected ways, makes this a really difficult task,” said Christopher Green, a senior consultant for the International Crisis Group.
“If Lee can give his counterpart some takeaways he can trumpet and get out of Washington with his reputation intact, then it will count as a significant achievement.”
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Lee has never met Trump, though they bonded over their shared experience of surviving assassination attempts, according to people briefed on a phone call following the South Korean election.
His administration is also fleshing out proposals for investments and partnerships in US manufacturing, ranging from chipmaking and shipbuilding to defence and civil nuclear power. South Korean officials hope these will help Lee to solidify a preliminary trade deal agreed in principle one day before Trump’s August 1 deadline.
But officials acknowledge that many in the US national security establishment are wary about the return of a leftwing president in Seoul.
Lee has called for improved relations with China and accused his rightwing predecessor Yoon Suk Yeol — who was feted in Washington for rapprochement with Japan and taking a more hawkish line towards China — of pursuing an “unnecessarily hostile” policy towards Beijing.
As opposition leader, Lee also denounced South Korea’s joint naval exercises with the US and Japan in 2022 as a “disaster”, raising concerns in Washington that his administration could scupper US-led efforts to rally Asian allies to contain China.
Lee has since sought to move away from his image as a leftwing firebrand. He also met Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in Tokyo on Saturday, on his way to the US.
But analysts said his record may complicate those efforts.
Gordon Chang, an American conservative commentator, wrote this month in The Hill that “South Korea’s anti-American president” could endanger “the future of the treaty relationship between Washington and Seoul”.
Kim Jungsup, a senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute think-tank in Seoul, said that “dispelling the perception that Lee is anti-American and pro-China is one of the key objectives of his visit”.
Green said Lee’s task would be to “present himself as reasonable, non-ideological, pro-alliance, and not anti-Japan”.
That position is likely to be tested, however, by an American push to “modernise” the alliance by encouraging Seoul to make a larger contribution and consenting to US forces in South Korea focusing more squarely on China.
General Xavier Brunson, the American commander of joint US-South Korean forces, said in a briefing to reporters this month that the alliance was not restricted to deterring just one country.
He also said that the role of US forces on the peninsula should be assessed in terms of capabilities rather than troop numbers, feeding speculation that the Trump administration plans to reduce or reorient its military presence in Korea.
Kim, a defence minister in a previous leftwing government in Seoul, said the Lee administration was “willing to actively embrace the American expectation that South Korea take the lead role in defending the Korean peninsula”, including by raising defence spending and assuming more responsibility for command within the alliance.
But he added that Seoul was “uneasy” about the prospect of US forces in Korea “shifting their focus towards China”.
Seoul is already expected to pay Won1.52tn ($1.19bn) in 2026, up 8.3 per cent from 2025, under a deal signed the day before Trump’s election last year. During his first term, Trump had pushed South Korea to shoulder more of the costs of the US forces.
South Korea’s national security adviser Wi Sung Lac told reporters on Friday that Seoul’s defence spending “will increase due to the modernisation [of the alliance]”. Military spending currently accounts for 2.3 per cent of South Korea’s GDP.
Some senior Korean officials have expressed optimism that Lee and Trump could find common ground over North Korea. Both leaders have expressed a desire to revive diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang.
Lee has made conciliatory gestures, ordering his military to cease broadcasts across the inter-Korean border and likening the adversaries’ relationship to a troubled marriage in need of counselling.
But Green cautioned that Seoul was pursuing a contradictory policy, assuring the US that it could take greater responsibility for security while simultaneously attempting to woo Pyongyang.
“It’s a position that is completely impossible to sustain, and the North Koreans can see right through it,” he said, noting that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong dismissed Lee this week as a “vagarious poet” who cannot be trusted as a diplomatic partner.
“Pyongyang realised long ago that even leftwing South Korean governments will always end up prioritising its alliance with the US over peace efforts with North Korea,” he said. “Lee will do the same.”
On Sunday, North Korean state media said the country had tested “two types of new air defence missiles” that could target attack drones and cruise missiles, as annual US-South Korea military drills took place.
