US and South Korean delegations met in Hawaii on April 23 to begin talks about how much host nation support Seoul will pay toward the cost of operating US military bases in South Korea. Under a “special measures agreement” that is renewed every few years, Seoul helps pay for the land and electricity used by US bases, the salaries of Korean civilians who work on the bases and construction of new facilities.
The current agreement will not expire until the end of 2025, but the talks are beginning unusually early out of fear that Donald Trump might win a second term as US president in the November election. Both the US and Republic of Korea (ROK) governments want to lock in a new agreement before Trump could take office.
Negotiations prior to the current agreement were traumatic. They broke down in 2019 over the Trump Administration’s demand that the ROK’s annual payment increase from about $1 billion to $5 billion per year. That amount might have pushed Seoul to abrogate the alliance.
The Trump Administration left office with the issue unresolved. Under the incoming Biden Administration, the US and ROK agreed that Seoul’s payment would increase by a much smaller 13.9%, which was still the largest increase in almost two decades.
South Koreans such as Kim Hyun-wook, a professor at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy, foresee “the likelihood of another crisis emerging within the Korea-US alliance” if Trump is re-elected.
Kim Won-soo, former under-secretary-general of the United Nation, says, “We need a Plan B” if Trump returns to power.
Or, as Asan Institute researcher Yang Uk puts it, South Korea needs “to contain the Trump risk.”
A Trump II Administration might “demand an increase in defense costs sharing or the withdrawal of US forces,” warns Lee Ki-tae of the Korea Institute for National Unification.
“What happens if the US president says he’s going to pull US troops from Korea?” wonders Chun In-bum, a retired ROK Army general.
South Koreans are right to worry. Trump has famously criticized the US ally as a wealthy free-rider, demonstrating a lack of appreciation of the strategic benefits America enjoys from its alliances. But it’s worse than that.
First, Trump has expressed sympathy for parts of Kim Jong-un’s agenda. He has called joint US-ROK military exercises “very provocative” and noted that Kim “feels threatened” by them, echoing one of Pyongyang’s propaganda points.
According to multiple sources, while he was president Trump seriously considered withdrawing US troops from South Korea. He has said publicly “I want to get our soldiers out. I want to bring our soldiers back home.” Trump has also reportedly indicated he plans to end the US-ROK alliance if he gets a second term.
Second, Trump seems to prioritize the appearance of a win over substantive improvement of America’s strategic circumstances. Trump prematurely claimed in 2018 that, because of his meeting with Kim, “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
That year Trump said that “everyone” thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for his North Korea policy. Trump boasted in 2019 that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had nominated him for the honor. (Abe used flattery as a tactic to manage Trump, who had criticized Japan as another free-riding US ally.)
According to a Politico story in December 2023 based on interviews with people “briefed on his thinking,” a re-elected Trump would seek a quick deal with North Korea so he could claim success and turn his attention elsewhere.
One possibility would be a “freeze” in which Pyongyang would keep its existing nuclear arsenal but stop making new bombs. In return, the US would drop economic sanctions and provide additional financial aid.
Some analysts have argued in favor of such a deal, but it would face serious problems, such as the near impossibility of credibly verifying that North Korea was complying with the terms of the deal and the likely consequence that South Korea and Japan would seek to deploy their own nuclear arsenals.
For South Koreans and other US friends, the Trump experience has inescapably eroded America’s reputation for reliability as a security partner. Trump has shown that an anti-alliance candidate can get elected president.
That event might appear an aberration were it not for the fact that – even after Joe Biden’s presidency has restored a more conventional US policy toward the Koreas – Trump is again the Republican Party’s candidate for president and has a very good chance of winning another term.
A populist wave in US politics has birthed a Republican Party faction that prioritizes ideological purity and embraces obstructionism rather than the traditional approach of working out compromises with the opposing party to address urgent legislative issues. One of the results is a recrudescence of America’s latent isolationism.
Although the Republican Party is hawkish on China, 34 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the $8 billion Indo-Pacific Security Supplemental Appropriations Act on April 20. Their main objection was that Congress should be spending that money to fix problems at home rather than overseas. That attitude could easily spread to US-Korea relations.
The US Congress is Trump-proofing as well. In December members inserted into the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the US armed forces, a section forbidding the US president from withdrawing from NATO without the assent of two-thirds of the Senate or a separate bill by Congress approving the withdrawal.
A similar measure to protect the US alliances with the ROK and Japan might be a good idea.
Pyongyang might be preparing for Trump II in a different way. South Korean analysts believe the Democratic Pe0ple’s Republic of Korea might try to influence the US election in Trump’s favor through missile test launches, which remind US voters that the Biden Administration has not solved the security problem created by a hostile and well-armed North Korea. DPRK cyber operations might might flood US social media with pro-Trump messaging.
Thomas Schafer, former German Ambassador to North Korea, opines that Pyongyang will “continue to ratchet up tensions with South Korea” with the intent of setting up Trump to negotiate a deal that would achieve “peace” for the price of withdrawing US troops or weakening the US-ROK alliance.
South Korea has endured decades of anxiety about its dangerous neighborhood combined with the fear of abandonment by its superpower ally. Throughout pre-modern history, Korea struggled to maintain its distinct civilization against pressures and intrusions from China and Japan.
Competition for influence in Korea led to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. After World War II, while North Koreans suffered from the hardships imposed by their own government, South Koreans faced a triple challenge: staving off attempted absorption by the Kim regime, building a prosperous economy and pushing their political system to become more just and democratic.
The ROK achieved admirable success in economic development and democratization. Sadly, however, South Korea’s massive supremacy over the DPRK in economic, technological, diplomatic and cultural power have not ensured the ROK’s security. The Kim regime still menaces the South with nuclear missiles and the capability to inundate Seoul with conventional ordnance.
Trump is not the first US leader to raise the possibility of abandoning the ROK. In 1977, US President Jimmy Carter ordered his government to plan for the withdrawal of US ground troops from Korea, a goal Carter had talked about during the presidential election campaign.
ROK President Park Chung Hee considered Carter’s plan a betrayal that was especially egregious because South Korea had dispatched troops to support the US military campaign in South Vietnam.
Stiff bureaucratic opposition prevented the implementation of Carter’s plan, but Koreans took notice.
In 2003, US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld said he intended to withdraw US forces because they were no longer needed to deter a North Korean attack.
Although a full withdrawal did not happen, 3,600 US troops based in Korea redeployed to Iraq in 2004, never to be replaced.
The ROK is once again forced to confront the possibility of weakening US support – just as Korea’s always-rough neighborhood is getting scarier.
The DPRK has recently made itself more intimidating to the ROK in three ways. First, the North Korean military continues to deploy different ways of delivering nuclear weapons to its adversaries.
Second, Pyongyang alarmingly changed its official policy this year to renounce unification, reclassify South Koreans as foreigners and label the ROK as North Korea’s main enemy country.
And third, Pyongyang has enhanced its tangible security cooperation with Russia. Putin’s technicians are apparently helping the DPRK improve its missiles as payment for North Korea supplying Russia with munitions.
In addition to North Korea’s persistent hostility, China increasingly insists on controlling territory on its periphery and holding veto power over the foreign policies of its neighbors. That potentially exposes South Koreans to either Chinese domination or the flames of regional war caused by US and/or Japanese attempts to stave off Chinese expansionism.
In this year’s negotiations for a new special measures agreement, the US delegation will likely ask for another increase, and Seoul will likely agree to pay more. Seoul, still in a precarious external situation despite flourishing economically, needs to reduce the ROK’s vulnerability to further criticism in case Trump returns to the White House.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
Has Asia times sold its soul to the west? It’s flooded with disingenuous articles by people relentlessly pushing the western agenda!