By Saamiya Laroia
South Korea has long since been the keystone of US defense strategy in the Indo-Pacific Region. It has sent troops to every U.S. conflict since the Korean war and since the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty, the US military has had a continuous presence on the Korean peninsula. The ROK-US Combined Forces Command is one of the most integrated and effective military systems the US controls in the world, forged by decades of bilateral cooperation. The origins of US troops in South Korea following World War II had the purpose of preventing a second attack from North Korea and a guarantor of US involvement, a ‘tripwire’ of sorts. South Korea remains the frontline against North Korea today, the US troops stationed there acting as a deterrent against North Korean aggression and blackmail. For the past two years however, there has been a growing rift in this tightly wound military alliance. The dispute has been over how much each side should pay for the 28,500 US troops present in South Korea and the US president, Donald Trump has been weighing the consideration of a troop reduction in South Korea.President Trump wants South Korea to spend $4.7 billion per year to support U.S. operations in the country, a roughly five-fold increase from previously agreed conditions that has put ROK and US negotiators at an impasse. John Bolton has written that the US president does not value the US-South Korea Alliance and believes ROK is “free-riding” off US-military spending. In 2018, South Korea already agreed to an 800 million dollar increase in spending due to pressure from the Trump Administration. South Korea refused Trump and offered to pay 1.3 billion. In his book The room where it happened, Bolton writes that both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper were receptive to this increase but Trump promptly shut the idea down. The current US troops are in furlough, with South Korea paying 200 million as a stopgap measure, and thousands of South Korean workers employed by the US military are going unpaid due to this rift. This rift is also threatening the military readiness of the forces in this volatile time of tense North Korean Nuclear negotiations, NorthEast Asia tensions and the worst Japan-South Korea relations in decades. Trump’s outright skepticism and disbelief in the US-ROK agreement has been there since the start of his presidency, he signed a widely-criticized deal with North Korea in June 2018 that suspended US-South Korea Military joint exercises without consulting Seoul or his own aides. This is all in spite of the fact that South Korea is seen by many US officials as the ‘linchpin’ of US strategy in the Indo-Pacific. Trump outright ignored the negotiation process that has been going on for the past 30 years where South Korea has been incrementally increasing its payments and is failing to see the dire importance of having South Korea as an ally. What does this mean for China? China has also realized that South Korea is the linchpin of the US-alliance network and sees it as the weakest link. South Korea has a central role when it comes to North Korea, is geographically proximate, has a flourishing economy; this makes it a powerful potential ally to China. After normalization of bilateral relations in 1992, China employed soft-power diplomacy strategies that has led to a strong trade relationship and a South Korean dependence on Chinese cooperation with regards to North Korea, in spite of the administrations worries about rise in Chinese aggressiveness. If the rift between the US and ROK grows, the threat of Beijing deferring South Korea’s interests to China’s looms larger than ever. China could potentially displace the USA as a dominant player in the Asia-Pacific region. What does this mean for North Korea? Like China, the weakening of the US-South Korean alliance would only be a benefit to North Korea. It has already tried to drive a wedge between the two with the deal to halt joint military exercises. South Korea is a cardinal player in the North Korean nuclear negotiations and President Moon-Jae In has personally invested a great deal in furthering outreach. Conclusion If Trump really does go ahead with withdrawal of troops from South Korea, as he recently did with 1/3rd of US troops in Germany, it could prove to be a fatal decision for US foreign policy. Unless negotiators mend this rift, the United States will inevitably suffer from adverse effects and reactions from actors like China and North Korea. The US has continuously been making bad foreign policy decisions for some time, with the recent German troops pull out setting back all the objectives in National Security and Defense Strategies and offering virtually no benefits to the US. Losing its military relationship with South Korea would be nothing less than fatal.
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