The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - South Korean and Japanese Alliance? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

We've all heard the saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," but I'm not sure if that applies to South Korea and Japan forming an alliance against China.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4hAUAYP

Hey all, Peter Zion here, coming to you from Tower Pass in the boundary between the Hoover National Forest and Yosemite going the other way. I'm out of shape. Anyway, I'm obviously backpacking. And today we're going to take a question from the Patreon crowd, specifically, do I think that the best option for the Koreans and the Japanese is to form a bilateral alliance against China? Looking at a map, you've got something there. You've got an island and a peninsula that are off the coast, and if they decided to band together, there's a lot that they could achieve strategically.

However, I don't see it as very likely. The Koreans, oh my God, they hate the Japanese so much. The Japanese have carried out a few genocides in the Korean Peninsula the most recently during World War II, and they actually forced everyone to change their names. And if there's one country in the world that the Koreans would not want to deal with, it would be Japan. There's also the problem of longevity of any sort of alliance

and complementary factors. Koreans spend a lot on defense, some of the most of anyone in the world is a percent of GDP, but it's solely focused on the North Korean threat. And so their navy is very small for a country of their size, very small for a country with their sort of defense spending, and it's not blue water at all, as opposed to Japan, which doesn't have to worry about a land invasion at all, and so basically all of their investments in defense,

which are significantly lower, have gone into having a blue water navy. In fact, there are only four supercarriers. the world that are not American flagged. Two of them are Japanese and they fly American jets. So the real problem, though, that makes it problematic for the two countries to form a meaningful alliance is that they're kind of in the same boat. They both are utterly dependent on imports for raw materials, especially energy. They're both dependent on exports of Finnish goods, Korea far more in terms of that latter factor than Japan. And so when de-globalization kicks in, they're both going to need the same things, and only one of them has a Navy to go get it.

The thing to remember about Japan is Japan has agency. So as relations change economically and strategically and politically around the world, it's one of the countries. It actually has things it can do. So if there's one country that the United States should go out of its way to try to have a positive relationship in the Asian theater, it would be Japan. Unfortunately, we're moving in the other direction. If you remember back to Trump One, the Japanese, very cognizant of their war history with the Americans, sought out. Trump one to cut a trade deal that was humiliating. Their goal was to never be on the wrong side of the United States, and they figured if they could cut a deal with Trump, Representative Maga,

then they would be good. That lasted until Trump 2 when Trump started to abrogate trade deals, even ones that he negotiated. And while negotiations with sake, the NAFTA countries really have some major economic impact for the United States, the one with Japan has always been more strategic. And so the Japanese found that if they did everything that they thought they needed to do to placate Trump, it still doesn't mean anything. And that means we have a country with agency that is evaluating options. And that takes global politics and Asian politics in a very different direction.