(AFP) – South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is taking up golf after years away from the game to prepare for future encounters with US President-elect Donald Trump, his office said Wednesday. Yoon, 63, has not played in nearly a decade, an official told AFP, but in anticipation of the second Trump administration will dust off his clubs.
“In order for smooth conversations” President Yoon “needs to hit the ball properly,” a president’s office official said in a background briefing earlier this week. Yoon previously regularly scored in the 90s, the daily Kyeongin Ilbo reported, citing a playing partner.
Trump, who owns several courses in the United States and abroad, is a self-confessed golf addict who frequently boasts about his ability on social media and claims a single-digit handicap. At a press conference last week, Yoon said people had told him he would have “good chemistry” with Trump, noting both had first been elected to top office as political novices. Yoon was a former prosecutor before taking office in 2022.
World leaders have tried — with mixed results — to cultivate personal bonds with Trump through golf. Late former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe played with Trump on multiple occasions and is reported to have gifted him a set of gold-plated clubs. Video footage of Abe tumbling into a bunker during a round with Trump in 2017 went viral at the time.
Despite the golf diplomacy, Trump’s repeated vows to make Asian security allies pay a larger share of the financial burden for their protection, and his threats of tariffs to fix the US trade deficit, have sparked consternation in Seoul. Seoul’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a pamphlet on X on Tuesday titled: “Korea Matters to the US,” which featured detailed statistics on South Korea’s economic contributions to its ally.
In one section, it boasts that South Korea has created 470,000 jobs in the US, providing “the highest annual salary” among Asian foreign direct investors in the country. South Korea is also a “key importer of US weapons,” it said, and spends “2.8 of GDP” on defence.
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