WASHINGTON — Two weeks ago, Donald J. Trump said he could live with a nuclear-armed Japan and South Korea if it meant they could defend themselves against North Korea without American aid. “I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us,” he said.
Since then he has changed his tune. After Japanese and South Korean officials raised fears of an Asian arms race, and President Obama ridiculed his remark, Mr. Trump began to say he did not actually want the two countries to obtain nuclear weapons — but that, because of American weakness, “at some point it could happen anyway.”
It was not the first time Mr. Trump has hastily added deflating caveats to his headline-grabbing trial balloons.
In a debate a month ago, he declared himself in favor of torture if it would extract information from terrorists, then issued a statement saying he would respect the law, then followed it up by saying that the law must be changed.
In a television interview on March 30, he suggested that women who have illegal abortions should face “some form of punishment,” then reversed himself in another carefully worded statement, then suggested in an interview that abortion should remain legal, then effectively clicked “undo” with another written statement.
In each case, Mr. Trump appeared to be seeking a sort of shelter somewhere between his original remark and the wave of objections it set off.
None of this seemed to matter much until recently. But the Trump style — long on gut instincts, short on briefing books — has taken a toll. His opponents have called him reckless and unfit to be commander in chief. Mr. Obama has said Mr. Trump “doesn’t know much about foreign policy, or nuclear policy, or the Korean Peninsula, or the world generally.”
Mr. Trump did not respond to repeated requests to speak with him. His aides say that he is continuing to build out a policy team and will soon give speeches.
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During the Nuclear Security Summit meeting a little more than a week ago, Mr. Obama, twisting the knife, said that foreign leaders had taken him aside to ask if Mr. Trump was really serious about pulling back from longtime alliances or effectively bidding them out.
Indeed, several foreign leaders visiting Washington for the summit meeting peppered administration officials and journalists with questions about what Mr. Trump would actually do as president. All the leaders declined to go on the record, saying that if he were elected they would have to deal with him.
But Mr. Trump’s rhetorical journey on letting Japan and South Korea build their own arsenals was instructive.
He first suggested that he was open to arming the two nations during an interview with The New York Times. He also began saying that he would pull out of NATO if European members did not pay a greater share of its costs. “If it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO,” he said at a rally in Racine, Wis.
As Japanese and South Korean officials objected to his comments, Mr. Trump may have begun to recognize that the idea of letting the two countries defend themselves against North Korean threats flew in the face of another of his stated goals: avoiding proliferation. Arms control experts pointed out that if Tokyo and Seoul sought nuclear weapons, they would violate their commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
What made Mr. Trump’s statements most remarkable was that the bedrock principles of American security were being debated at all. For the better part of 60 years, no major candidate has suggested expanding the number of nuclear-armed states, which stands at nine.
And while many have complained that America’s allies fail to carry their weight — Mr. Obama himself did so recently when he told The Atlantic that the Saudis were “free riders” — none have seriously suggested that American security would be improved by pulling back from the deployment of United States forces in Europe or Asia.
“He doesn’t understand diplomacy is not the zero-sum world of commercial real estate, hotels and golf courses,” said R. Nicholas Burns, an undersecretary of state for policy under President George W. Bush, and now a supporter of Hillary Clinton.
“Our allies magnify our power,” Mr. Burns said. “Our trans-Atlantic and Asian alliances are a significant power advantage over China and Russia, who don’t have real allies in the world.”
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