One hopes that Park Geun-hye and Shinzo Abe enjoyed their recent meeting with Barack Obama, because the show of unity that the South Korean, Japanese, and U.S. leaders displayed in opposition to North Korea's nuclear defiance would simply not be possible in a hypothetical Trump administration.
Instead, Donald Trump, the front-runner to serve as the Republican candidate in this fall's presidential election, asserts that U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea will end if the country continues on "its current path of weakness." He then doubles down on U.S. weakness by pledging to dismantle those alliances, which have provided an essential post-World War II foundation upon which the United States has been able to project its strength.
The U.S. simply cannot be made great again by defining its closest global relationships purely in transactional terms or by insisting on going it alone while making others pay. Such an approach undermines the shared values in support of international common good that have been the hallmark of the U.S. commitment to global security.