The Obama administration’s ambassador to South Korea on Monday shot back at accusations by Donald Trump that Seoul isn’t paying a fair price to keep U.S. troops in its country.
“We feel very good about the resource sharing that we and the Republic of Korea do together as an alliance,” Mark Lippert said with members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea, according to a report from Yonhap News. “It is remarkable.”
Lippert was responding to a request for comments on a “U.S. political candidate’s” accusations that the U.S. receives little from South Korea in exchange for it’s support. Lippert didn’t name Trump, but disagreed with Trump’s assessment.
“You get a sense of the alliances and how much and who contributes what,” Lippert said, recalling his past work in the Pentagon, where he was the Chief of Staff for Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. “Korea does very well in terms of its contribution.”
According to Lippert, South Korea covers 55 percent of non-personnel costs and increases its defense spending between 3 and 5 percent annually.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump said that he would withdraw American troops from South Korea and Japan unless they shoulder more of the financial costs of keeping a U.S. military presence.
“South Korea is very rich, great industrial country, and yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do,” Trump told the Washington Post on March 21. “We’re constantly sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games — we’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing.”
Currently, about 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea to prevent North Korean aggression. In 2014, the U.S. and South Korea renewed their cost-sharing agreement, and South Korea agreed to spend $886 million for the upkeep of U.S. personnel in 2014 — a 5.8-percent increase from the year prior.
