As a rift widens among Republicans over US-Israeli air strikes on Iran, a top Korean-American leader said Seoul must recognise that President Donald Trump is heavily influenced by a faction he calls “new neocons”.

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson broke sharply with the president in a Wall Street Journal interview on Saturday, calling him a “slave” to hawkish interventionists willing to deploy military force.

Kim Dong-seok, the 68-year-old head of the Korean American Grassroots Conference, said South Korea must stop treating Trump’s decisions as mere impulses and instead analyse the calculated strategies driving his administration.

Trump is not a traditional isolationist, Kim said during an interview in Washington on April 15.

While the president courted white working-class voters with anti-interventionist rhetoric, strategic lobbyists successfully persuaded him by rebranding military action to fit his “America first” agenda.

They engineered a “destroy-and-deal” strategy, Kim said. This approach relies heavily on drone warfare to bomb targets without committing US ground troops, forcing adversaries into negotiations without risking American casualties.