Opinion: Who do America’s allies want to see in the White House — Harris or Trump?

It’s a safe bet who North Korea’s Kim Jong-un will be “rooting” for in the U.S. elections on Nov. 5.

Alone among the “bad guys” Kamala Harris might have chosen to skewer at the Democratic convention, she singled out Kim. “I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump,” she said. “They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.”

That was Harris’s way of heaping scorn on the dictator with whom her opponent, Donald Trump, professed to have “fallen in love” at their 2018 summit in Singapore (notwithstanding the failure of their next summit eight months later in Hanoi).

Trump at the GOP convention in Milwaukee last month said he “got along very well” with Kim. Having confirmed their “bromance” in an exchange of letters before and since Hanoi, Trump could say, “It is nice to get along with someone that has a lot of nuclear weapons or otherwise.” For sure, he added, “He’d like to see me back too — I think he misses me…when we get back, I get along with him.”

The ferocity of the vice president’s attack on Kim contrasted with her allusion to the only other national leader she deemed worthy of mention in her speech beside Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, whose name came up just twice. Trump, she said, “encouraged Putin to invade our allies” while she had “helped mobilize a global response” to Putin’s aggression.

What about China’s President Xi Jinping? His name never came up.

The differences in stances between Harris and Trump over Kim help to show why the 2024 campaign for the next president is one of the most tense and bitter in U.S. history. Forget about renewed talks with the North Korean leader if Harris wins a promotion from vice president to president. The outcome will affect America’s relations with the rest of the world.

Harris’s outlook toward America’s Asian foes and allies is something of a mystery. She would appear so far to have imbibed “the Spirit of Camp David,” where President Biden hosted South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida a year ago. North Korea to those three was the immediate enemy, although China may be of greater overall concern, considering the North cannot wage war without Chinese support.

Harris, to America’s Asian allies, would undoubtedly be preferable to Trump, who has lost the confidence of Korea, Japan and Taiwan through his ambivalence about defending them. His courtship of Kim is upsetting to South Koreans, who fear he would engage in his “art of the deal” by making a deal to Kim’s liking. There’s no way Pyongyang would be open to anything other than Washington agreeing to pull out its forces, already down to 28,500 .

Harris, though, has problems. Aside from lack of clarity on foreign policy, it’s difficult for her to shed her liberal image while making every effort to come across as a moderate. For America’s allies, she is hard to figure out.

Take her policy toward China. We don’t know how decisive she might get about China’s enormous trade surplus with the U.S., or measures to make sure American products get into China with the same ease with which Chinese exports flood American markets. Trump has adopted what might seem like a strong attitude toward China, threatening steep tariffs to exclude heavy industrial products, including motor vehicles.

Trump, however, shows no inclination to defend either America’s allies in Asia or to honor America’s “commitment” to Taiwan, harassed by circling Chinese planes and ships ever since Nancy Pelosi led a congressional delegation to the independent island province two years ago.

Trump has not been clear on whether he would go to war for Taiwan, just as he is not promising to defend South Korea while angling for yet another summit with Kim. Japan might see his hesitation as a great excuse to abandon lip service to Article 9 of its “no war” constitution and train its “self-defense forces” for a regional conflict.

Not that we can be all that confident about Harris either. Her heritage as the daughter of a woman from India and a father from Jamaica may imbue an international outlook, but she’s had little hands-on experience in foreign affairs. What’s more, she may be less pro-Israel than Biden, whom the Israelis already criticize as too soft against Hamas . No American aspirant for national office can afford to be seen as anti-Israeli.

Harris is accused of being sympathetic to the Palestinians and critical of Israel’s persistence in prosecuting a war with no end in sight in which casualties have already soared . The fear is that Harris would push hard for a deal in which the hostages captured by Hamas terrorists last Oct. 7 would be released in exchange for a ceasefire that leaves Hamas free to rebuild for an eventual repeat attack.

Would Harris’s position on Israel and Hamas provide a clue as to where she would stand on North and South Korea? Maybe, but she would still seem more reliable than Trump. At least she has not called, as he did during his first term as president, for withdrawal of American troops from South Korea , or demand that the South pay an exorbitant fee for the costs of American bases, including Camp Humphreys, America’s largest foreign base .

In the end, Harris appears to America’s allies as a better bet than Trump as the successor to the man she’s been serving as vice president for nearly four years. She’s far more likely to want to perpetuate the Spirit of Camp David than to destroy the fledgling trilateral relationship, as Trump would do while fostering his friendship with South Korea’s worst enemy, Kim Jong-un.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.

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