For many South Korean viewers, the most memorable image from the 2017 Trump-Xi meeting was a small gesture in the Forbidden City.

Walking the imperial axis beside Donald Trump, Xi Jinping kept both hands in his coat pockets.

When Trump turned and their eyes met, Xi quickly pulled them out.

To Korean audiences steeped in Confucian culture, the symbolism was unmistakable: America was the boss.

The choreography reverses

Nine years later, on May 14, 2026, the choreography had reversed. Trump arrived in Beijing – the first US presidential state visit to China since 2017 – and immediately reached for praise.

“President Xi is a great leader, and China is a great country,” Trump said, describing their relationship as “the longest and greatest relationship the presidents of the two countries have ever had.”

“Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway, because it’s true,” he added.

The warmth came entirely from Trump’s side. Xi, by contrast, used the meeting to warn that mishandling Taiwan could lead to “clashes and even conflicts.”

The economic backdrop

Diplomatic symbolism alone does not reorder international hierarchies. But leaders rarely project confidence without material strength beneath it.

By 2026, Beijing’s posture reflected a growing belief that the balance of power was shifting.

While nominal GDP still favors the US, China surpassed the United States in purchasing-power-parity terms more than a decade ago and has continued widening the gap since. Beijing’s confidence rested on more than symbolism.

The alliance becomes conditional

Shifts in relative power do not automatically dissolve alliances. But they do change how alliances are perceived, especially when the dominant power begins openly reassessing costs, burdens and strategic priorities.

For decades, many South Koreans viewed the alliance with the US not simply as a security arrangement but as a relationship grounded in shared sacrifice. The Korean War and the Vietnam War gave the alliance an emotional legitimacy that differentiated it from many other American partnerships in Asia.

Trump’s first term began eroding that distinction. By treating Seoul and Tokyo as interchangeable free-riders, Washington taught many Koreans that the alliance was becoming transactional. A “blood alliance” cannot survive indefinitely once it is priced.

The deeper concern was not Trump’s rhetoric, but the strategic logic beneath it. Once alliances are reduced to questions of cost and utility, allies inevitably begin asking whether they would be protected in wartime when interests diverge.

In 2026, the Gulf provided an uncomfortable answer.

The Gulf cautionary tale

Operation Epic Fury – the February 2026 US-Israeli campaign against Iran – exposed the limits of American protection.

Iranian retaliation quickly spread across the Gulf. The UAE alone recorded 1,422 drones and 246 missiles in the first ten days.

Despite hosting US troops and air-defense systems, the UAE was not fully shielded. Patriot and THAAD interceptors were prioritized for American bases and Israel while Gulf allies absorbed the attacks themselves.

For South Korean observers, the implication was difficult to miss: If countries hosting US forces can still be left exposed under fire, what exactly does the alliance guarantee?

Korea as logistics hub

At the very moment South Koreans were questioning the reliability of American guarantees, Washington’s strategic expectations of Korea were simultaneously expanding.

At the Land Forces Pacific symposium in Honolulu on May 12-14, General Xavier Brunson, commander of United States Forces Korea, described South Korea as a future “regional sustainment hub,” arguing that sustaining a war against China from 5,000 miles away was not viable.

Lieutenant General Joseph Hilbert, commander of the Eighth Army, added that confining US Forces Korea solely to North Korean defense would be a “tragic waste” of Indo-Pacific military resources.

Increasingly, the peninsula is being positioned as a logistics base for a future US-China conflict.

The erosion of old assumptions

The striking development in South Korea is no longer that progressives question the alliance, but that conservatives increasingly do as well.

As this writer observed in April, even longtime defenders of the alliance are beginning to ask whether the US military presence in Korea serves Korean interests or American interests.

Korea has historically lived within a Chinese-centered regional order and understands how to survive within it. 

What many South Koreans increasingly confront is something far less familiar: an America that appears to value Korea primarily for its strategic utility, with diminishing regard for Korean security.

The changing regional order

The 2017 summit suggested to Koreans that the global hierarchy remained broadly intact. The 2026 summit suggested otherwise.

Beneath the symbolism lies a deeper structural shift: a Chinese economy already larger in PPP terms, an American security architecture showing signs of selective protection, and a Washington that increasingly views South Korea less as an ally than as strategically located infrastructure.

Strategic sobriety in Seoul

For Seoul, the implication is not anti-Americanism.

The alliance remains necessary. But South Korea must increasingly assess it the same way Washington now appears to assess Korea itself: as a relationship governed by interests, geography and strategic necessity rather than sentiment.

Somewhere between Xi Jinping removing his hands from his pockets before Donald Trump in 2017 and Trump praising Xi in Beijing in 2026, many South Koreans began sensing that the hierarchy underpinning the alliance had changed.

The question now is not whether the alliance survives, but what kind of alliance it is becoming.

Hanjin Lew is a South Korean political commentator specializing in alliance politics and East Asian security affairs.