Daily Times

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis spent four days in East Asia trying to keep on the rails key relationships — two friendly, one adversarial — that his boss President Donald Trump has thrown into confusion.

It’s now a familiar role for the Pentagon chief, not just in Asia but across Europe and the Middle East. With Trump disrupting one relationship after another, provoking rivals and unnerving friends, Mattis is the one making sure they can still work on their traditional foundations. This week, he had to tell the leaders of South Korea and Japan — close allies who have depended on the US security umbrella for decades — that Washington remains committed to protecting them. That was always understood before Trump suddenly canceled defense exercises with South Korea as an enticement to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to negotiate giving up his nuclear weapons.

And Mattis had to cut through the noise of Trump’s trade war threat against China to deliver one of the toughest warnings in recent years, that the US has grown dangerously impatient with Beijing’s military expansionism in the region.

The challenge was to get the Chinese to focus on his terse, carefully calibrated message and not conflate the US president’s trade hoopla, so that they do not overreact.

“I’m here to keep our relationship on the right trajectory, keep it going in the right direction and to share ideas with your military leadership, as well as look at the way ahead,” the Pentagon chief told Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Mattis, a 67-year-old Marine veteran of multiple wars and conflicts, and a deep student of history, insists he is only advancing administration policy. But under Trump, it is an uphill battle to prevent key relationships from souring. Japan and South Korea alike have been deeply worried about the US security commitment after Trump’s historic summit with Kim in Singapore on June 12. As they agreed to enter into denuclearization talks, Trump abruptly canceled a key US-South Korea exercise slated for later this year.

Despite their longstanding effect of keeping North Korea at bay, Trump called the war games “expensive” and “provocative.” How worried were the allies? In Seoul, Mattis had to declare bluntly that US troop levels in South Korea, the central pillar of the US defense commitment, would not change, and reiterate that the US commitment was “ironclad.”

In Tokyo, he pledged a continuing strong, “collaborative” defense stance with regional allies, and that Japan will remain a “cornerstone” of regional stability. His predecessors never had to travel to the region to make that so clear.

‘Increasingly concerned’

And yet, with US negotiations with Pyongyang hyper-secret, allies still aren’t sure.

“They are increasingly concerned and worried about the reliability of our reassurances,” said James Schoff, a former senior Pentagon East Asia specialist now in the Carnegie Asia Program.

In meetings Friday with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Japan’s foreign and defense ministers, Mattis was repeatedly reminded that if the US negotiates only to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles which can strike the United States, Japan will still feel deeply vulnerable.

Published in Daily Times, July 1^st 2018.