Donald Trump — the former president and presumptive Republican nominee who has been convicted of criminal charges for concealing hush money paid to an adult movie star — might have inadvertently caused an arms race in Asia with a recent slip of the tongue, according to a new report.
Officials were alarmed to read in April a Time magazine interview in which Trump said it "doesn't make any sense" that South Korea doesn't fund more of its own defense, foreign correspondent Nahal Toosi wrote Wednesday for Politico.
"They’re a very wealthy country," Trump said. "Why wouldn’t they want to pay?”
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Trump's suggestion stunned officials who note the tenuous situation South Korea maintains with its northern neighbor, Toosi writes.
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"Among American officials, there’s a fear that South Korea will seek its own nuclear weapons program if it comes to believe the U.S. will not protect it against nuclear-armed North Korea," Toosi writes. "That could fuel an arms race in Asia and beyond."
While Trump's supporters tell Toosi not to take Trump's rhetoric as a pledge of policy to come, foreign diplomats argue even his passing comments can create a problematic ripple effect.
"Foreign officials are now intimately familiar with the whole taking Trump 'seriously versus literally' debate, and they’re preparing for the worst-case scenario," Toosi reports.
"They see a Trump more angry than before, more bent on retribution, more surrounded by sycophants, and less encumbered by traditions or political considerations that may once have held him back."
U.S. officials have also begun to monitor Trump's rhetoric and, according to Toosi, he's managed to startle even the most seasoned of the bunch.
"How else to react when, according to one report, Trump suggested to donors that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan?"