Earlier this month, when the Taiwan dollar was busy staging a statistically impossible rally, officials in Taipei implausibly insisted the government wasn’t countenancing, let alone facilitating, a stronger currency at the behest of the US.

I say “implausibly” because at the time, Taiwanese envoys had just wrapped up a round of trade negotiations with Donald Trump’s team. It seemed like some coincidence that the normally sleepy TWD just happened to experience a 19-standard deviation appreciation event in the two sessions book-ending the trade talks.

At the very least, Taiwan abided the move, and exactly nobody believed Trump didn’t pressure Taipei to accept a stronger currency in exchange for favorable treatment in trade talks. Taiwan, it appeared, was a proof of concept — an ally of Washington’s which relies on US security guarantees, is strategically important and, setting aside TSMC, has almost no leverage in the event the bilateral relationship takes a turn for the contentious, was being trotted out as a blueprint.

There are other countries which fit that description. One of them’s South Korea. Seoul likewise depends on US security guarantees, is also strategically important and the bilateral relationship with Washington’s similarly asymmetric. It thus comes as no surprise that, according to an unnamed official who spoke to the mainstream financial media on Wednesday, Seoul was recently pressured by the Trump administration to accept a stronger currency as part of a trade deal.

The source didn’t use the word “pressured,” or at least not that I can tell, but every discussion with Trump’s a shakedown unless that discussion’s with Vladimir Putin, in which case it’s Trump who’s being extorted. The won on Wednesday jumped 1.5% on the news.

The figure illustrates how the won’s strengthened over the last six or seven weeks, which is to say post-“Liberation Day,” on speculation that The White House is bent on engineering dollar weakness in the interest of “rebalancing” trade, particularly in Asia.

The chat in question occurred in Italy on May 5, when Choi Ji-young, Seoul’s deputy finance chief, met with one of Scott Bessent’s subordinates. Currency talks are ongoing, Wednesday’s reporting suggested.

South Korea, like Taiwan, is on Treasury’s currency manipulator “monitoring” list. As the annotation in the figure above reminds you, the won’s near 6% depreciation in December was in no small part attributable to former president Yoon Suk Yeol‘s ill-fated attempt to seize power in a de facto military coup.

To make the obvious joke: If Trump really wants to engineer a weaker dollar, all he has to do is summon his inner Yoon. Trump could replace Pete Hegseth with Michael Flynn, declare martial law and et voila!: A sharply weaker dollar. I dare say Trump would have a better chance of pulling it off than Yoon did.

Anyway, this is just more extortion. Something like this: “Your currency’s too weak, let it strengthen to the detriment of your own exports or else I might get word to my dear friend ‘Little Rocket Man’ that America’s no longer committed to Seoul’s defense.”

Recall that last year, during an interview with Time, Trump said, of America’s military presence in South Korea, “We have 40,000 troops that are in a precarious position which doesn’t make any sense. Why would we defend somebody? And we’re talking about a very wealthy country.”

From a “pure markets” perspective, the issue here is that in order for Trump’s plan to work beyond the speculative moves triggered by media reports, he’ll need the foreign official sector in Asia to sell dollars. Or at least buy less of them. That means less demand for US Treasurys at a time when America needs to cap borrowing costs.