Moon Jae-in is not Donald Trump’s kind of guy. The new president of South Korea is a former human-rights lawyer, not a businessman. Mr Trump likes to threaten North Korea with isolation and aircraft-carriers; Mr Moon is an advocate of dialogue and co-operation. The South Korean president is reserved, while the US president is bombastic.
These differences in style and policy will make for an awkward first summit, when the two leaders meet in Washington later this week. But it is crucial that the South Korean and US presidents forge an understanding. The great danger for Mr Moon is that if he cannot persuade Mr Trump to see things his way, the US president’s policy of “America First” could persuade him to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear programme — eliminating a risk to US security, at the cost of massive retaliation aimed at South Korea.
Mr Trump has repeatedly insisted that North Korea will never be allowed to develop an intercontinental nuclear missile that could threaten the US. In public and private, he and his senior aides have insisted that America will, as a last resort, use military action to counter the North Korean threat. The consequences would be horrendous. James Mattis, US defence secretary, recently predicted that it would lead to “a war more serious in terms of human suffering than anything we have seen since 1953 . . . It will involve the massive shelling of an ally’s capital.”