Why is Trump so fixated on Korea during the Iran war?

Since the outbreak of the Iran war on Feb. 28, U.S. President Donald Trump has directly mentioned Korea on his social media a total of three times over the subsequent 70 days, pressing Seoul to commit troops.

President Lee Jae Myung and U.S. President Donald Trump hold summit talks at the White House in Washington on Aug. 25, 2025. [YONHAP]

Since the outbreak of the Iran war on Feb. 28, U.S. President Donald Trump has directly mentioned Korea on his social media a total of three times over the subsequent 70 days, pressing Seoul to commit troops.

The frequency is nearly on par with Germany, mentioned four times, against which Trump took retaliatory measures, including the withdrawal of 5,000 U.S. troops.

Expanding the scope to include White House press briefings and media interviews, Trump’s pressure-laden references to Korea rise to 10 occasions — roughly once a week — explicitly urging military support.

The implication is that, in Trump’s strategic calculus, Korea — an East Asian ally — has been assigned a surprisingly significant role in the Middle East conflict.

On March 14, Trump demanded that Korea deploy naval assets and publicly remarked that "Korea did not help us" in a briefing at the White House on April 6.

More recently, he referenced the explosion incident involving the Korean cargo vessel HMM Namu in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, stating that the Korean vessel "decided to act alone" and "the ships protected by the United States were not attacked."

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a Pentagon press briefing on March 13. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Both within and beyond diplomatic circles, there is growing unease over what many describe as an extraordinary development: Washington attempting to draw Korea into a military conflict unfolding in the Middle East.

The immediate tensions eased only after Trump announced a temporary suspension of Project Freedom — a maritime rescue operation in the Strait of Hormuz. Yet diplomats caution that, depending on the trajectory of cease-fire negotiations, renewed demands for Korean troop deployment could resurface at any moment.

Seoul in recent months has moved swiftly to shield itself from the Trump administration’s tariff offensive while proving that the alliance remains, in Washington’s terms, a “mutually beneficial partnership."

In the joint fact sheet released following the Korea-U.S. summit last November, President Lee Jae Myung agreed to raise defense spending from the current level — just under 3 percent of GDP — to 3.5 percent as early as possible.

Seoul’s voluntary moves to raise defense spending and shoulder a greater share of the alliance burden have drawn favorable reviews across Washington’s foreign policy establishment.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on April 29 hailed Korea as a “model ally” over its decision to increase defense expenditures, adding that Seoul would receive special consideration from Washington.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attends a joint press conference in Berlin on April 16. [AFP/YONHAP]

The dynamic is also inseparable from Trump’s deeply ingrained belief that U.S. allies habitually free ride on security guarantees from Washington.

Throughout the Iran war, Trump repeatedly inflated the size of U.S. Forces Korea, currently around 28,500 troops, to 45,000 during public appearances, including a White House event on March 16, an Easter luncheon on April 1 and a press conference on April 6.

At the time, Trump openly vented his frustration, claiming that the United States has "45,000 people, soldiers in harm’s way and right next to Kim Jong-un with a lot of nuclear weapons.”

As such remarks continued to pile up, parts of the Korean government began dismissing them as little more than Trumpian bluster. During a closed-door meeting with a visiting bipartisan U.S. congressional delegation in Seoul on March 31, Lee reportedly asked if the United States was truly considering withdrawing from NATO.

The lawmakers immediately waved off the notion, adding “Never.”

They pointed out that Congress had already amended the National Defense Authorization Act in late 2023, effectively preventing any president from unilaterally pulling the United States out of NATO without either a two-thirds Senate majority or separate congressional legislation.

Recent events involving Germany, however, have underscored how quickly Trump’s pressure tactics can escalate from rhetoric into action.

After German Chancellor Friedrich Merz mentioned that the United States is being “humiliated” by Iran's leadership, Trump fired back the next day on Truth Social, declaring that Merz "doesn’t know what he’s talking about."

Within 24 hours, the White House formally announced a review of U.S. troop levels in Germany. By May 1, the Pentagon issued orders to withdraw 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany within the next six to 12 months.

Some observers warn that Korea, too, cannot dismiss the possibility of becoming a direct target of such pressure tactics.

In fact, Washington recently informed Seoul that unless the legal protections surrounding Coupang chairman Bom Kim are assured amid an ongoing investigation into a massive leak of users' personal data, it would be difficult to launch the high-level consultative channel tasked with implementing the security commitments laid out in the Korea-U.S. summit joint fact sheet.

With unrelated disputes repeatedly spilling over into the security sphere and disrupting bilateral coordination, follow-up talks aimed at implementing the joint fact sheet have been pushed back one after another.

“For Trump, alliances are rooted in a starkly transactional logic in which every security commitment made by the United States must yield a commensurate return," said Prof. Park Ihn-hwi, who teaches international relations at Ewha Womans University.

"Given that Washington views Korea as one of the foremost beneficiaries of the U.S. security umbrella, the administration may not immediately pursue troop reductions as it did with Germany," Park added. "But it is nonetheless likely to weaponize the strategic flexibility of U.S. Forces Korea and continue presenting Seoul with an ever-rising security bill in one form or another.”

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.

BY YOON JI-WON [chea.sarah@joongang.co.kr]