Trump Should End Defense Welfare for South Korea

Foreign Affairs

Trump Should End Defense Welfare for South Korea

Maybe it’s time to let Seoul get the bomb.

(Photo by JEON HEON-KYUN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth concluded his visit to South Korea this week with praise for the nation’s planned 8.2 percent increase in military spending next year. “We face, as we both acknowledge, a dangerous security environment, but our alliance is stronger than ever,” he intoned.

Upping defense outlays is a sensible course for the Republic of Korea, which faces an increasingly hostile North Korea. However, why does Washington continue to provide Seoul with what amounts to military welfare? The Korean War ended more than 70 years ago. The ROK enjoys 50 times the economic strength and twice the population of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Pyongyang is an economic wreck, today sustained by Russia and China. Surely the ROK is capable of defending itself.

Moreover, it is the U.S. commitment to the South that creates the sort of “dangerous security environment” that Hegseth decries. Absent America’s military presence in Northeast Asia, Kim Jong-un would pay the U.S. little attention. He tyrannizes his own population, threatens South Korea, worries Japan, and irritates his other neighbors, but he has shown no interest in North America (or most anywhere else). He has no reason to risk Washington’s wrath. His predecessors might not even have developed nuclear weapons had the U.S. not for decades posed an existential threat to the North.

The U.S.-ROK alliance demonstrates the critical defects of Washington’s foreign policy. The chief failure was not that Washington protected South Korea in 1950, amid the Cold War and fears of potential Soviet aggression in Europe as well as Asia. The most important error was continuing to do so long after Seoul had become capable of taking over its own defense. Washington did much the same for Japan and especially Europe.

Foreign policy is, or at least should be, heavily prudential and circumstantial. Practice should be guided by reality on the ground. Which will change over time. There is no reason to believe that an alliance forged in the early 1950s, like that between Washington and Seoul, should remain, let alone remain essentially unchanged, in 2025.

The example of Europe is particularly dramatic. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm was not Adolf Hitler. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is not the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. A long list of foreign thugs and misanthropes who have terrorized their own people and sometimes threatened neighbors are neither Hitler nor Stalin. The arguments for U.S. entry into World War I were risible, concocted by the egotistical, even megalomaniacal, Woodrow Wilson, who was determined to reorder the entire world. Fears that Hitler and/or Stalin would dominate Eurasia were better founded and created a far more serious argument for intervening in World War II. Putin matters much less today—indeed, almost not at all to the U.S.—with Russia, a declining power, as yet unable to conquer Ukraine after nearly four years of conflict and demonstrating neither the desire nor capability to overrun Europe, let alone wage war against America. Eight decades after the conclusion to World War II, why do the Europeans remain helplessly dependent on Washington?

The ROK has followed a similar trajectory. Washington’s conduct with the isolationist “Hermit Kingdom” began badly, with the destruction of an American merchantman, followed by a punitive military expedition. Washington eventually signed a treaty of friendship and commerce with Korea but ignored the monarchy’s plaintive cries for aid when Japan turned it into a colony. Korean exiles, especially members of the country’s vibrant Christian community, often came to the U.S. to lobby for assistance, but the peninsula largely slipped from America’s consciousness.

Then the defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 left Korea up for grabs. Moscow and Washington divided the peninsula into two occupation zones, which became separate countries that fought bitterly to control the whole. The North’s Kim Il-sung won Stalin’s support for a campaign to “liberate” the South, the U.S. intervened to save the ROK, and China then entered the war to prevent the North’s annihilation. The war ended roughly where it started after inflicting millions of casualties.

Only continued allied, meaning American, support ensured South Korea’s survival once the armistice was signed. For years the ROK remained poorer and less stable than the North. Seoul did not look like a match for the DPRK until the South Korean economic take-off during the 1960s. The South soon surged past its northern antagonist and never looked back. Yet the ROK remained a security dependent of Washington, despite repeatedly suggesting that it would eventually take over military responsibility from America, but always a few years hence, conveniently requiring the U.S. to maintain its troop presence and security guarantee. At some point, Seoul’s dependence became ostentatiously ridiculous. If 50 times the economic and twice the demographic strength wasn’t sufficient for South Koreans to defend themselves, what would be?

Candidate Donald Trump once appeared to ask the same question. He observed during his first debate with Hillary Clinton: “We defend Japan. We defend Germany. We defend South Korea. We defend Saudi Arabia. We defend countries. They do not pay us what they should be paying us because we are providing a tremendous service and we’re losing a fortune.” That cost seemed necessary when the Soviet Red Army occupied Eastern Europe, the red tide engulfed the Chinese land mass, and communist revolutions exploded throughout the Third World as onetime colonies gained their independence. But not now.

In fact, Trump once seemed ready to change course, a few months ago asking, “Why would we defend somebody? And we’re talking about a very wealthy country.” During his first term he ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans to pull out U.S. troops, which reportedly “rattled officials at the Pentagon and other agencies.” Before leaving office he considered staging some withdrawals, but faced strong opposition from his own officials.

Yet now, with Seoul agreeing to pay economic protection money—though it would be surprising if the U.S. ever receives anything approaching the $350 billion in promised ROK investment—Trump appears to have morphed into President Joe Biden. Under the latter, Daniel J. Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, insisted that Washington’s commitment to the ROK’s defense “is ironclad, including the U.S. extended deterrence commitment to the ROK using the full range of U.S. defense capabilities,” which includes preparing to fight a nuclear war. Compare that to Hegseth who, shortly after taking over as secretary of defense, apparently “reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to South Korea’s defense.” As during virtually every other contact between the two governments, officials in both cases expressed their determination to “strengthen” the alliance, meaning enhance America’s protection of the South, though the ROK is capable of overmatching North Korea in virtually every measure of national power.

Some alliance advocates see Seoul as a useful, even essential ally against China. Hegseth is pushing to make America’s Korea garrison available for deployment beyond the peninsula. However, he is living an illusion. No ROK president, irrespective of party, is likely to turn his or her country into a military target and permanent enemy of the giant next door to promote U.S. ends. Indeed, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung met Chinese President Xi Jinping as well as Trump alongside the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Seoul. The two sought to warm their countries’ frosty relations and Xi reportedly invited Lee to visit next April, the same month Trump is also expected to visit.

Washington’s defense guarantees are not cheap. There are basing costs, for which the president has sought to shake down Seoul, but that isn’t the main charge. More importantly, the U.S. must increase available force structure for every commitment. Some units are dual use, but Pentagon planners always seek to maintain sufficient surplusage to allow them to fight more than one war at once. At least the Korean peninsula, in contrast to the European theater, once was nuclear free, with Washington enjoying an atomic monopoly. Thus, America’s promise of “extended deterrence,” threatening to go nuclear in the ROK’s defense, long seemed almost cost free. No longer, however.

North Korea is now a nuclear state, presumed to possess scores of warheads. Pyongyang also has put much effort into its missile program and today is developing both intercontinental ballistic missiles and multiple independent reentry vehicles, which would allow the DPRK to target the American homeland. There is no reason to believe that Kim intends to stop anytime soon. A few years ago the Rand Corporation and Asan Institute detailed the nightmare specter: Soon, “North Korea could have 200 nuclear weapons and several dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and hundreds of theater missiles for delivering the nuclear weapons.” 

Although some analysts believed this to be only a distant possibility, little is known as to what sort of technical assistance Moscow is providing Kim’s regime in return for its provision of personnel and ammunition to Russia in its war against Ukraine. Certainly the Putin government has equipped the North with modern weaponry. Pyongyang could be expected to request even more sophisticated support, and Russia might view enabling North Korean attacks on the U.S. as an appropriate response to NATO member states, especially Washington, offering missiles and other weapons to Ukraine for use against Russia.

As a result, American involvement in another Korean war could become an extinction-level event. And there is no reason that Pyongyang won’t be able to create a working ICBM force. Though impoverished and famine-ravaged, North Korea has created an indigenous nuclear weapon and has made substantial progress with other sophisticated weapons. Is South Korea worth the resulting risk to America, especially when Seoul is capable of deploying its own forces to deter attack and, if needed, win any conventional war that breaks out? 

The one area where the ROK, despite its enormous industrial base and technological sophistication, is lacking is nuclear weapons. However, the South is more than capable of going nuclear. Indeed, decades ago, after President Richard Nixon reduced American troop deployments overseas, President Park Chung-hee began developing nuclear weapons. He ended the program under strong U.S. pressure, but South Korean interest in reviving a nuclear option has grown in recent years. Indeed, public support has jumped. Political elites are more skeptical, but many of them indicate that they would back this option if Washington’s commitment ebbed.

In a world of second bests, a South Korean bomb looks increasingly like the least bad option, certainly if Pyongyang does develop the capability to incinerate American cities. Although the U.S. would retain an overwhelming capacity to retaliate, the North would have little reason to exercise restraint if it expected Washington to destroy or overthrow the regime. Then the worst case for the U.S. would be to go to Seoul’s aid, triggering North Korean retaliation. For Seoul, the worst case would be for Washington to refuse to rescue the South, leaving it vulnerable to a DPRK attack. However, a U.S. president, committed to his duty to protect Americans, should choose the interests of America over those of the ROK.

Yes, it is good to see the South spend more on its own defense. However, that is only the start. The next step is for Washington to shift responsibility for South Korea’s security to Seoul. And for U.S. officials to finally, after decades of attempting to “run the world,” as Donald Trump says he is doing, leave the future of other nations to their own peoples and governments.

The post Trump Should End Defense Welfare for South Korea appeared first on The American Conservative.