Trump would allow Japan, S Korea to build nuclear arsenals

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said, if elected, he would consider allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals instead of depending on America’s “severely depleted” military for their protection against North Korea and China.

The Republican frontrunner said in an interview with The New York Times on Saturday that the US military cannot protect Japan and South Korea for a long time, adding that the US cannot always “be the policeman of the world.”

“There’ll be a point at which we’re just not going to be able to do it anymore,” he said. “We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape. They don’t even know if they work.”

“If the United States keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway with or without me discussing it, because I don’t think they feel very secure in what’s going on with our country,” he said of Japan and South Korea.

Trump said North Korea “probably” has nuclear weapons. “And, would I rather have North Korea have them with Japan sitting there having them also? You may very well be better off if that’s the case.”

“We have a nuclear world now,” he declared.

Trump also criticized America’s 1951 security agreement with Japan, officially known as the Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan.

“If we are attacked, they don’t have to do anything,” he said. “If they’re attacked, we have to go out with full force… That’s a pretty one-sided agreement, right there.”

The billionaire businessman from New York went on to say that he would consider withdrawing American forces from Japan and South Korea if these countries do not increase their own contributions significantly.

"The answer is not happily, but the answer is yes. We cannot afford to be losing vast amounts of billions of dollars on all of this," he said. "I have a feeling that they’d up the ante very much. I think they would, and if they wouldn’t, I would really have to say yes."

The United States still has 28,500 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines deployed to South Korea, more than six decades after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice. No peace deal has been signed since then, meaning that Seoul and its ally, Washington, remain technically at war with Pyongyang.

Additionally, the United States has stationed more than 50,000 troops in Japan as part of the security treaty between the US and Japan, which was first signed in 1952, and was later amended in January 1960.

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