The recurring Trump nightmare: Can Asia manage what’s coming?

Donald Trump has regained power in the United States, riding a wave of fear and anti-incumbent desire for change. Americans now face the greatest test of the democratic and constitutional order since the Civil War.

But for the rest of the world, it is a no less traumatic moment. The United States is now poised to retreat from its leadership of the postwar liberal order.

What does Trump’s return mean for Asia and for American allies in Japan, South Korea and the Pacific?

Japanese and Korean leaders may be reassured by soothing words from some American security experts, including would-be advisors to Trump. Nothing will change in the Indo-Pacific under Trump, those experts counsel. “US foreign policy in this region is likely to remain constant,” Derek Grossman, a RAND specialist on Asian security and former intelligence official, wrote in The Diplomat just before the vote.

Trump, in Grossman’s telling, may be “a more transactional and unpredictable leader” but he left alliances in the region intact. No matter what happens, “the China factor will foster the continued development of the US alliance network.”

Such views ignore the abundant evidence, mostly in Trump’s own words, of his intention at the end of the first term to abandon a large portion of those alliance commitments.

As his former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and National Security Advisor John Bolton documented in their memoirs, Trump planned to withdraw US forces from South Korea; to complete the unfinished bargain with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, which would leave Kim’s nuclear forces intact; and to demand massive payments from Japan to pay for the American defense role.

The soothing assessments also brush past Trump’s repeated intention to impose massive