Day: September 17, 2025

In the wake of the very public grilling of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, a trip to the White House holds new trepidation for world leaders. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s tactic was gifts and flattery during his Aug. 25 meeting with his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump, who was presented with MAGA hats, a model boat, and a customized golf putter engraved with his name. Still, Lee thought better of seeking 18 holes with his host.

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“I know that President Trump is a great golfer, so if I play a round of golf with him, I might lose even more!” Lee, 61, told TIME on Sept. 3.

Yet there was an awkward moment in the Oval Office when Trump suggested that in addition to the swag proffered that Lee should give ownership of South Korean land hosting American military bases to the U.S. “I believe he was joking,” says Lee. “Because the U.S. is already using the bases and land without any cost. And actually, if the U.S. owns the land, it must pay property taxes. We cannot give exemptions for that!”

Lee’s deft courting of the U.S. President is one of several takeaways from TIME’s exclusive interview at his Yongsan Presidential Office in Seoul for a new cover story. Lee took power in South Korea on June 4 following snap elections called in response to the impeachment of his predecessor Yoon Suk Yeol, whose December declaration of martial law plunged the East Asian nation of 50 million into political crisis.

Here are five takeaways from Lee’s wide-ranging conversation with TIME.

1. Gone are the days of ‘U.S. for security; China for economy’

Lee’s Democratic Party has historically been standoffish towards the U.S., hostile towards former colonizer Japan, and favored links with Beijing. However, Lee made Tokyo his first foreign visit en route to Washington and says the current geopolitical environment has shifted so drastically that “we cannot go back to the traditional equation of relying for security on the U.S. and economically on China.”

Lee says that South Korea can instead act as a “bridge” between the rival superpowers to prevent relations spiraling in this new era of Great Power competition. “Our values of democracy and market economy are based on our U.S.-South Korea alliance,” says Lee. “But because of our geographical proximity to China, and our historical relationship, economic ties, as well as people-to-people ties, we cannot completely sever our relationship with China. So we need to manage our relationship at an adequate level, and I believe that the Western world has to be understanding in this regard.”

2. Lee is not opposed to sanctions relief for North Korea

Regarding South Korea’s estranged brethren across the DMZ, Lee favors a policy of measured engagement with the Kim Jong Un regime to halt its nuclear weapons development in exchange for some sanctions relief. “If we tell North Korea to just stop, would they stop their programs?” he asks. “I believe that if we continue to apply the current pressure then … North Korea will continue to produce more bombs.”

“In world affairs, there are sometimes conflicts between what is right and what is beneficial,” says Lee. “And for the North Korean nuclear issue, we often think of this as a choice between all or nothing—whether we tolerate North Korea’s nuclear weapons or attain complete denuclearization. But I believe that there is a middle ground [and] … we can negotiate with North Korea to stop their nuclear and missile programs.”

Still, prospects for engagement appear slim given North Korea’s economic situation has fundamentally changed following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with Kim believed to have reaped an estimated $20 billion from selling weapons and munitions to Russia and more lucre gained from the 12,000 or so troops he has dispatched to fight for Vladimir Putin. (Some 2,000 are believed to have died.) While Kim would be open to no-strings South Korean aid, he doesn’t need it, and especially not at the cost of appearing weak while the Russian cash spigot keeps flowing. Still, Lee is undeterred.

“I believe that we should distinguish our short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals,” he says. “As our short-term goal, we should stop their nuclear and missile programs. And we might be able to compensate them for some of these measures and afterwards then pursue disarmament and then complete denuclearization.”

3. Lee believes he can develop a rapport with Trump despite their divergent worldviews

The leaders of the U.S. and South Korea appear odd bedfellows. Trump was born with a silver spoon; Lee’s gambling addict father was too poor to even provide crayons. Trump has been repeatedly sued for alleged worker rights violations; Lee was a labor rights lawyer who gleefully brought exploitative tycoons to book. While Trump espouses a populist brand of conservatism, Lee’s Democratic Party adheres to a leftist, progressive orthodoxy.

Still, Lee believes he can build a personal rapport with the 45th and 47th U.S. President based on their unconventional upbringings and a mutual determination to succeed. “I believe that we share a commonality in that we both have a strong desire to accomplish many things and want to leave a legacy that people will remember,” says Lee. “We also share that we did not live a mainstream life like other people.”

Lee is also not cowed by the former reality TV star’s mercurial streak. “President Trump has led a successful life as a businessperson and, although he might look unpredictable on the outside, I believe that he is a very performance-oriented person and a very realistic person,” adds Lee. “He would not like to reach a conclusion where he would come out as a loser, and so he would not make an irrational choice, and because of this I believe that we were able to connect better than I initially anticipated.”

4. National reconciliation is Lee’s priority despite controversies

Ex-President Yoon’s martial law declaration brought tens of thousands of ordinary South Koreans onto the street and rekindled dark memories of military rule. However, the subsequent manner of Yoon’s impeachment was divisive in an already highly polarized society—a fact made plain by a politically-motivated 2024 knife attack on Lee that almost cost him his life.

Lee came to power vowing to heel South Korea’s riven society though has come under fire for pardoning some controversial allies, such as former Justice Minister Cho Kuk, who had been serving a two-year jail term for forging documents to facilitate his children’s admission to prestigious schools and unlawful interference with a government inspection; as well as former lawmaker Yoon Mee-hyang, who was convicted of personally using donations meant to help so-called “comfort women” forced to work in Japanese wartime brothels.

Asked about these pardons, Lee responds, “all things have two sides,” while describing them as “an inevitable choice.”

“I knew that public opinion would be divided on this issue but … it’s something that was necessary,” he says. “The current political landscape in South Korea [means] confrontation and divisions have become normalized and even just my breathing will draw criticism from some parts of society. I believe that my duty and my responsibility is to change this culture.”

5. Lee hopes to cash in on the K-culture boom

The so-called “Korean Wave” spread of South Korean popular culture—including K-pop, dramas, films, fashion, food, and technology—began in the 1990s and accelerated with government support following the 1997 Asian financial crisis as a way to galvanize national identity. Today, K-culture keeps breaking new ground with pop sensations like BTS and Blackpink commanding fanatical international fanbases, while the hit film KPop Demon Hunters just overtook fellow Korean export Squid Game to become Netflix’s most watched release ever.

Lee references an ancient Chinese work about Northeast Asian culture that references “a very courageous people with great power to wreak havoc who enjoy dancing and singing.”

“This is a reference to the Korean people,” says Lee with a smile. “Korea’s cultural capabilities were not created overnight [and] … have been there through the ages.”

Lee believes a key factor is that Korean society has no predominant religion but a smattering of similarly sized faiths that maintain a balanced following without chafing against each other.

“I believe that this shows the inclusivity of the Korean people, and this in modern days is being realized in the cultural realm,” he says. “I believe that South Korea will continue to surprise the world through its cultural capabilities and that Korean soft power will be further enhanced through K-culture. And I have hopes to utilize Korea’s cultural industry in connection with our industrial aspects to benefit the economy.”

It was not how Lee Jae-myung envisioned his first day on the job. Following his election as South Korea’s President on June 3, Lee’s staff arrived at their new offices in central Seoul the next morning to find rooms strewn with trash and desks equipped with monitors but bereft of computers, which had all been piled in a corner. It was a struggle to get doors unlocked and find even basic stationery.

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“It was a very busy and chaotic period,” Lee, 61, tells TIME in his only Western media interview since taking office. “I thought that we had done much preparation in advance, but it was not sufficient.”

Behind the chaos was his disgraced predecessor, Yoon Suk-yeol, whose December declaration of martial law plunged the East Asian nation of 50 million into six months of political paralysis that concluded with Yoon’s impeachment—and, after a snap poll, Lee’s election. 

Just over 100 days on, the new leader has moved with such speed that the chaos he encountered on his first day seems like a distant memory. In Seoul, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, he has imposed a 600 million won ($430,000) cap on mortgage loans for property purchases to quell an overheated housing market. A new labor law, meanwhile, has reduced legal liabilities for striking workers, and some $10 billion of cash vouchers ranging from $110 to $330 have been distributed to every citizen, depending on income, to boost local businesses. 

“One of my biggest accomplishments is that South Korea’s domestic political situation has been stabilized,” he says.

For all the action at home, perhaps his greatest challenge was external: the turbulence caused by Yoon’s martial law declaration meant that South Korea languished half a year behind other nations in negotiating a new trade deal with the Trump Administration. Seoul and Washington have had a free-trade agreement since 2012, and last year South Korea sent cars worth $34.74 billion to the U.S.—accounting for about half of the Asian nation’s auto exports, a figure that plummeted when the Trump Administration imposed levies of 25%. On July 31, Lee negotiated a reduction to 15% in exchange for pledges to invest $350 billion in the U.S. and other concessions.

It was a critical milestone—and one that is central to Lee’s plan to reenergize a moribund economy. The home of world-leading firms such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG spent decades at technology’s vanguard, but fortunes have wilted in recent years because of a stifling regulatory environment, demographic pressures, and fierce competition from China. After years of steady decline, South Korea’s GDP grew by only 2% in 2024, less than half the Asia-Pacific average.

Lee, who has hiked spending on science and technology by almost 20%, wants to turn things around by creating a “super innovation economy.” His government, he says, will invest $71.5 billion over the next five years to transform South Korea into one of the top three AI nations worldwide. And in July, Tesla inked a $16.5 billion deal to produce AI chips at Samsung’s new semiconductor foundry in Texas. 

Geopolitically, Lee wants to position South Korea as a “bridge” between East and West. Leaders of Lee’s progressive Democratic Party have traditionally been closer to China, hostile toward former colonizer Japan, and kept the U.S. at arm’s length. Lee, however, pointedly made Tokyo his first foreign visit en route to Washington and pledged to work “as partners” with Japan’s Prime Minister in the neighbors’ first joint statement in 17 years. 

Lee’s actions are meant to reboot South Korea. The West may think of his nation in terms of space-age technology and zeitgeist-defining cultural phenomena like KPop Demon Hunters, though in truth South Korea battles the lowest birth rate, top suicide rate, and highest youth unemployment of any developed nation. Lee is clear-eyed about the stakes. South Korea is in “a very serious crisis,” he says. “To address these issues, we need to bring our economy back on track for growth and increase opportunities for our people.”

His pitch is that securing South Korean prosperity and boosting its role in sensitive supply chains can help regional security too. In October, South Korea hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation for the first time in 20 years, and Lee hopes the event—due to be attended by the leaders of both the U.S. and China—can catalyze his nation’s return to Asia’s top table.

However, threading the needle will not be easy. On the same day Lee sat down with TIME in Seoul, less than 600 miles away Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to Beijing to commemorate 80 years since the end of World War II. Other dignitaries included the leaders of Iran, Belarus, and Myanmar—a motley cohort dubbed the “axis of upheaval” by the Western press—in a clear rebuke to the U.S.-led order. “I think China wanted me to attend, but I didn’t ask further,” laughs Lee.

Against this backdrop, critics say Lee may be tilting too close to historic ally the U.S. But there are also questions whether Washington remains a reliable partner, not least since the arrest by ICE officials of over 300 South Korean workers at a Hyundai Motor–LG car-battery factory in Georgia on Sept. 4, which prompted Lee’s Foreign Ministry to express “concern and regret.”

Lee, however, insists South Korea remains well-placed to act as a “bridge of exchanges and cooperation” in the region by cementing ties with the White House. “We will stand together with the U.S. in the new global order, as well as supply chains centered on the U.S., but there is a need for us to manage our relationship with China so as not to antagonize them.” Otherwise, Lee concedes, there’s “a risk that South Korea could become the front line of a battle between two different blocs.”

Lee is no stranger to a challenge. Born the fifth of seven children in a poor farming family in South Korea’s rural east, he would trudge daily for two hours each way to elementary school before returning home to plow fields. Lee quit school at 13 and lied about his age to work in factories, where shady bosses would often withhold workers’ wages. At one job, Lee’s wrist was crushed in a pressing machine, an injury that left him officially designated as disabled. In constant pain, the young Lee even attempted suicide. Asked about his ascent from that nadir to his nation’s top job, Lee breaks into a bashful grin: “It was hard to die, and if I can’t die, why not live better?”

Much like his nation, rising from among the world’s poorest following the Korean War to ninth biggest economy in 2020 (it is 13th today), Lee’s life was poised for a remarkable turnaround. Despite no formal secondary education, he was accepted to law school and passed the national bar exam immediately after graduation. Following a period immersed in human- and labor-rights cases, he entered politics, serving first as Seongnam city mayor, and then later as governor of Gyeonggi province. He ran for President in 2022—but lost to Yoon by 0.7%. 

Now finally in office, he faces economic headwinds. Alongside lackluster growth, South Korea’s national debt has surged to $930 billion over the past year, raising questions about his ambitions to transform his nation into an AI superpower. Next year’s budget includes funding for 150,000 GPUs, or processors specialized for AI. But it isn’t even clear that South Korea’s creaking electricity grid, which is struggling to meet the country’s current needs, can keep up with Lee’s ambitions. 

Lee has also courted criticism for pardoning controversial allies, and over a formal apology for the 2016 shutdown of the Kaesong Industrial Complex—where South Korean factories could access North Korean labor by the shared border. Though South Korea’s then President Park Geun-hye halted operations in response to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, the new statement explicitly absolves Pyongyang of any responsibility, and has been framed by conservatives as kowtowing to the Kim regime.

A combination of these and other factors led Lee’s approval rating to fall from 63% in late July to 51% in mid-August. It has since rebounded to its previous high. The trigger? Lee’s successful courtship of—and negotiation with—Donald Trump. 

The South Korean leader played his hand deftly, arriving at the White House on Aug. 25 with a golf putter customized for Trump’s stature and engraved with his name, two cowboy hats emblazoned with make america great again, as well as a foot-long model of an ironclad turtle ship to symbolize Korea’s shipbuilding traditions. When the U.S. Commander in Chief took a liking to Lee’s pen, that was proffered too.

Then there were the compliments: about the Oval Office’s gaudy new decor, a surging stock market, Trump’s diplomatic prowess. “Many wars in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and in the Middle East are coming to peace because of the role that you are playing,” Lee gushed.

There had been a sense of trepidation going into the meeting, with Trump posting on Truth Social just hours earlier: “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA?” and hinting at a “Purge or Revolution,” in reference to investigations into ex-President Yoon. Lee’s team feared they might be walking into the kind of ambush sprung on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky or South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa. In the end, things were cordial, with Trump praising Lee as “a very good guy.” It helped, of course, that other than encomiums Lee brought hard cash—half a trillion dollars of it. Aside from the $350 billion already agreed to, Lee unveiled an additional $150 billion of investments in the U.S., including Korean Air Lines’ buying $50 billion in Boeing.

But behind the scenes Lee faced tough questions about the $350 billion investment fund he had put together for the U.S. Would it be all cash? And who would swallow any losses from the investments? The U.S. demands were so strict that “if I were to agree then I would be impeached!” says Lee. “So I asked the U.S. negotiating team for a reasonable alternative.”

With no agreement on these issues, it was perhaps unsurprising that Lee focused on praising Trump for his prior diplomatic success with Kim Jong Un, while urging him to re-engage with Pyongyang. Trump met three times with North Korea’s leader, including at the demilitarized zone that has split the peninsula since the 1950–53 Korean War. However, his budding bromance with Kim exploded dramatically at a summit in Hanoi in 2019, when both leaders left early while blaming each other for the failure to build on an earlier consensus on “denuclearization” achieved at a prior summit in Singapore. 

For Lee, pushing for South Korean engagement is not without risk. Public opinion turned against his Democratic Party predecessor Moon Jae-in precisely because he appeared preoccupied with concessions to their Stalinist neighbors. Yet rekindling diplomacy’s greatest soap opera with Kim is something that does interest the U.S. President, who told reporters “I’d like to meet him this year.” And indulging Trump on Kim could help Lee downplay bugbears with Seoul. “Lee probably brought up North Korea to take Trump’s attention away from the trade and investment issues,” says Naomi Chi, a professor at Hokkaido University. 

Trump’s yearning after a Nobel Peace Prize is no secret—Israel, Pakistan, and Cambodia have nominated him so far—and Lee may use that chimera to keep Trump onside. It’s also a diplomatic push that would necessitate engaging Pyongyang’s chief sponsor Beijing, possibly lowering the temperature between the world’s top two economies and elevating South Korea’s global standing as Lee’s “bridge.” Asked whether he would nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for rapprochement with the North, Lee replied that “if there is concrete progress on this issue … there is no other person who would deserve that prize.”

The problem is defining progress. Few believe Kim would countenance relinquishing his nuclear deterrence, given the fates of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, both toppled after abandoning their weapons programs. “The best the U.S. could hope for is nuclear arms talks, not denuclearization,” says Kim Chol-min, a Seoul-based North Korean defector who used to handle the leadership’s secret funds and uses a pseudonym for security. “All sanctions lifted in return for partial destruction of nuclear weapons.”

But rolling back the strict U.N. sanctions regime imposed in 2017, which has rendered economic cooperation between Seoul and Pyongyang virtually impossible, would be hugely controversial. Still, a focus on arms control makes sense. North Korea is estimated to wield at least 50 nuclear bombs and may have the capacity to produce 10 to 20 annually. Lee points out how North Korea agreed in 1994 to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for heavy oil and light water reactors. (The deal collapsed in 2003.) He advocates “negotiations to partially ease or lift sanctions” on North Korea in exchange for a three-stage process: arms suspension, reduction, and finally denuclearization. “And I believe that President Trump would be on the same page.” 

Of course, any deal depends on North Korea’s willingness to sit down. But today the regime is flush with an estimated $20 billion reaped from arms sales to aid Putin’s war in Ukraine, and Lee’s conciliatory measures have been met with scornful ripostes. Last year, Kim symbolically demolished the Arch of Reunification in Pyongyang while his influential sister Kim Yo Jong dismissed Lee’s remarks about restoring inter-Korea trust as “a fancy and pipe dream.” 

In the end, even failure may serve a purpose. While Trump’s previous North Korea engagement flopped by any objective measure, it probably didn’t in the mind of the former reality-TV star, for whom success is measured in column inches, breaking-news alerts, and shattered protocol. We live at a moment when flattery is strategy, and Lee’s providing Trump the stage he craves may be a canny act of distraction diplomacy from a leader who knows more than most about beating the odds. 

“Korean people have an indomitable will,” says Lee. “My life trajectory has similarities. Although there are many difficulties in front of us, I believe that we will be able to prevail.” —With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul