Centre for Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy Policy Brief: How to Manage a Patron’s Unpredictability? Japan and South Korea React to the New United States Administration

Key Issues:

• Japan and South Korea both have higher abandonment concerns, are facing greater burden-sharing pressure and are diplomatically diversifying;
• Japan’s entrapment concerns are lower than South Korea’s because Japan sees defending Taiwan as more in its own interest than South Korea does;
• The United States’ (US) unpredictability accelerates trends in Japan towards investing more in its own self-defence, and South Korea’s reaction to the US administration is constrained by the North Korean threat.

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