The threat from North Korea has not diminished, but the United States’s commitment to South Korea has, says the Heritage Foundation, as reports indicate some U.S. forces may be withdrawn if South Korea doesn’t dramatically increase basing payments.
“The way you get them to pay more is you threaten to remove some of the troops,” Heritage Foundation Korea expert Bruce Klingner told the Washington Examiner, describing President Trump’s transactional approach to alliances and troop basing.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the White House asked for a plan to withdraw troops from the peninsula as negotiations stall on a new basing agreement. Trump has demanded as much as $5 billion a year for stationing the troops.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper tried to shore up the U.S. ally with a Monday call to his counterpart and comments on Tuesday, hedging against any imminent changes.
“I’ve issued no orders to withdraw forces from the Korean Peninsula,” Esper said at a Monday webinar hosted by the London International Institute for Strategic Studies. “We will continue to look at adjustments at every command that we have in every theater.”
The Pentagon also hinted Tuesday that an adjustment was under consideration, with rotational forces possibly replacing permanent troops.
“The secretary’s goal is to remove some of the footprint of having forces forward deployed,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said at a press briefing.
The U.S. military currently maintains 28,500 troops on the Korean Peninsula to ward off a threat from the North and maintain a forward-operating presence in the Indo-Pacific theater, which was deemed the top defense priority for confronting great power competition with China.
In 2019, stalled basing negotiations with South Korea led to a one-year deal and an 8.2% payment increase to $926 million.
Recently, Trump’s demand dropped to $1.3 billion per year — a margin that is still believed to yield a profit for the U.S. The figure was still far beyond the five-year, $5 billion counteroffer from the South.
Klingner said that forward deployment is not about making a profit but rather protecting national security.
“We deploy forces there to try to prevent bad things from happening — or responding more quickly,” he said. “If you reduce your force there before there’s been any degradation in the threat, it makes your allies nervous, and it really raises questions about your viability as an ally.”
South Korea also recently played 93% of the costs for a new, $10 billion U.S. base south of Seoul, the largest U.S. base outside of the continental U.S.
“People have been trying to come up with different ways to package it so that Trump can say he got a historic deal,” Klingner added. “People will rightly point out that Korea is paying more for its own defense than any member of NATO, including the U.K.”
With last year’s Special Measures Agreement already expired and the U.S. negotiator soon leaving his post, the expert believes the South is playing a waiting game.
“South Korea is kind of waiting for the U.S. election to see what happens,” Klingner said, noting that South Korean President Moon Jae-in enjoys popular support and a recent poll found that 93% of South Koreans do not want him to give in to U.S. demands.
Nevertheless, Trump has shown he’s willing to up the ante.
“It’s not happening until it does,” said Klingner, nothing that any day, Trump could announce the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula, as he did last month with 9,500 troops based in Germany.
The Pentagon said Monday that Esper and the South Korean defense minister, Jeong Kyeong-doo, expressed their “unwavering support for a conditions-based” transition.
Still, Klingner said the commander in chief has the full authority to reposition troops globally regardless of the condition on the ground, and the Army’s combat brigade in South Korea could be a prime target.
“That would be one way of just reducing a big number,” he said of the 4,000-person fighting force. “By making the brigade more rotational, it lends itself more easily to one brigade comes home, and the next brigade doesn’t go.”
Klingner said that even if Trump or Esper were to announce a troop withdrawal this year, there is still a chance a pullout could be rescinded if Joe Biden is elected president.
“If Biden wins, he may say we’ve got a lot on our plate, one of which is repairing America’s relations with our military allies as well as our friends,” he said. “It could very easily be undone by Biden if he’s elected.”
