Even after Trump exits, 'Trump's U.S.' will remain

Park Won-gon

The author is a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s words continue to shake the world. On July 13, after resuming military conflict with Iran, Trump abruptly declared that the United States would become "the guardian of the Strait of Hormuz" and charge vessels a security fee equal to 20 percent of their cargo value. He withdrew the idea a day later, but the damage was done.

Washington had long condemned Iran’s attempts to collect passage fees in the strait as violations of international law. Trump undercut that position himself. The liberal international order, including freedom of navigation, was largely created by the United States after 1945.

More troubling is that this disregard for established rules in pursuit of U.S. interests appears to be more than one president’s eccentricity. At the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado from July 14 to Friday, figures from both the U.S. left and right agreed that Trump’s unilateralism and "America First" policy reflect deep public sentiment.

Penny Pritzker, commerce secretary under President Barack Obama, acknowledged that Americans want their country’s interests prioritized and that Trump recognized this mood. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said people in both parties would welcome a U.S. retreat from the world. Across party lines, many Americans are tired of serving as the world’s police officer. They want Washington to focus on household prices and allies to handle more global problems themselves.

Trump’s rise was therefore no sudden accident. It was a political eruption after decades of structural tension reached a breaking point. At least three forces produced it.

First came deindustrialization. Globalization and automation hollowed out industrial states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan after 1980. Millions of good jobs in steel, automobiles and coal disappeared. Workers who once formed the economic foundation of the middle class suffered downward mobility and accumulated deep distrust of the system.

Second came widening inequality and antielite resentment. AmeThe United States rica continued to grow richer through Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but the rewards were concentrated. The richest one percent came to control more than 40 percent of the national wealth. Educated professionals in major cities prospered while factory workers and rural residents bore the costs.

Yet many of those who lost economically continued voting for the party associated with policies that hurt them. Kansas is a familiar example. Factories closed, family farms collapsed and real wages declined, but voters repeatedly backed Republicans.

Conservatives achieved this by replacing an economic question — who took my job? — with a cultural one: who is attacking my faith and way of life? Abortion, gun rights and same-sex marriage were framed as assaults by liberal elites on Christian values. Class anger flowed into culture wars. Voters increasingly chose according to identity rather than their wallets, creating the ground on which Trump rose.

Third came demographic change and a white working-class backlash. As Hispanic, Asian and Black populations grew, the share of non-Hispanic whites declined. What looked like a statistical shift to outsiders felt to some white Americans like an existential threat: They were becoming strangers in their own country.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, spent years interviewing white workers in Louisiana. She found a shared narrative. They felt they had waited patiently in line for the "American dream," only to see immigrants, racial minorities and women move ahead with federal assistance. Whether accurate or not, this “line-cutting” story described in “Strangers in Their Own Land” (2016) converted deprivation into anger and anger into votes.

Vice President JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) depicts the same interior landscape. His Appalachia had lost not only jobs but families, communities and a work ethic. Nothing captures the connection between white working-class despair and Trumpian populism more clearly than the memoir’s author later becoming Trump’s running mate and entering the White House.

These forces transformed U.S. politics. Trump mobilized alienated voters by identifying immigrants, China, entrenched elites and mainstream media as enemies.

None of the underlying conditions can be quickly reversed. The industrial heartland has not recovered, inequality is deepening and demographic change will continue. Trump may leave the stage, but the United States that produced him will remain. Whoever wins the White House in 2028, America First will remain a powerful current.

Korea’s U.S. strategy must begin with that reality. Seoul should treat recent changes not as Trump’s personal disposition but as a structural transformation of U.S. society. Understanding why the United States changed is necessary to determine what Korea should seek from the alliance.

Korea should prepare an integrated negotiating package covering defense costs, trade and technology rather than merely responding to U.S. demands. It has valuable cards in shipbuilding, semiconductors and nuclear power that can contribute to the rebuilding of the United States. Seoul must also build diplomatic networks extending beyond the White House to Congress, state governments and industry, securing support resilient enough to survive changes of administration.

Accurately reading a changed United States is the starting point for a new Korean diplomacy.