Carter’s Korea Gambit

Upon entering office in January 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter quickly moved to implement his campaign promise to remove all U.S. ground combat forces from the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea). Within days of his inauguration, he initiated an internal policy review aimed not at studying the options or considering whether troops should be removed, but at moving forward unilaterally with the withdrawal.

Carter’s thinking had been influenced by the Guam Doctrine and Nixon’s earlier withdrawals from South Korea. He wanted to make U.S. security commitments more flexible in a post-Vietnam era. Lastly, he wanted to inject a new morality into U.S. foreign policy, which meant valuing human rights rather than just the anti-communist credentials of U.S. allies. For Carter, the matter was settled.

Nevertheless, by July 1979 Carter’s troop withdrawal policy had come to naught. On July 20, Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, issued a statement from the president affirming that withdrawals of combat elements of the 2nd Infantry Division (2ID) “will remain in abeyance” and the timing and pace of withdrawals “will be reexamined in 1981.” Of course, Carter did not make it to 1981, losing by a landslide to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. Less than two weeks into his presidency, Reagan embraced the newly minted South Korean dictator-cum-president Chun Doo-hwan at the White House, proclaiming the end to further troop withdrawals. Under Reagan, the number of U.S. military personnel would actually increase.

During the two and half years when Carter attempted to carry out his withdrawal policy, total U.S. military strength in South Korea only decreased from 40,000 to 37,000 troops. The roughly 3,000 personnel that were removed consisted of only one combat battalion of 674 ground troops, with the remainder made up of either noncombat units or others that had previously been scheduled for departure before Carter had entered office. At the same time, an additional 12 Air Force F-4 fighters and their supporting units of 900 troops had been sent to augment the United States Forces Korea (USFK) command.

The late Don Oberdorfer, longtime Asia-Pacific diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post, was a keen observer of these events. Oberdorfer’s book, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, remains one of the most in-depth yet accessible accounts of U.S.-Korea relations in general and Carter’s withdrawal program in particular. The remarks at the end of his chapter on Carter’s policy are worth quoting at length:

In his haste and lack of finesse, an inexperienced president had transformed a general impulse to reduce U.S. military forces in South Korea into a highly controversial policy with which he was personally, and negatively, identified. Many of the American diplomatic and military officials dealing with the issue were not opposed to substantial reductions if pursued in a well-planned fashion, but they were horrified by the preemptory and damaging way the issue was pursued by the Carter White House. By refusing to heed or even hear the objections until he finally was backed into a corner, Carter undermined his own position. Even a determined president proved unable to decuple the United States from the high-stakes military standoff on the Korean peninsula.

Oberdorfer highlights two salient elements of the Carter withdrawal episode: the seemingly rushed manner by which Carter attempted to implement the policy, and the widespread opposition such an approach evoked throughout the U.S. foreign policy and national security establishment, within Congress, and among regional allies, especially South Korea but also Japan. However, although Oberdorfer does mention it, he focuses less on the fact that Carter’s policy was opposed, not just for how it was attempted but that it was even attempted at all. Indeed, if anything, Carter’s implementation style did not so much cause as exacerbate already strong opposition to the withdrawal policy itself.

This deeper opposition was based on the fact that the physical U.S. military presence in and commitment to South Korea was deeply embedded within a wider U.S. hegemonic structure in East Asia. The structure consisted of several levels (i.e. bilateral, regional, and even symbolic or psychological), each with its own characteristics. Together they formed basic patterns in the relationship, around which had developed formal institutions and informal networks of actors profoundly resistant to change. The many opponents of Carter’s policy strongly held that U.S. ground combat forces could not be removed without potentially undoing this larger structure. They gave voice to their concerns early and often.

On the bilateral level, the U.S. military presence served several immediate purposes, unique to the local peninsular environment. These included: deterrence of renewed North Korean aggression; crucial enhancements in firepower as well as logistical, intelligence, and command and control capabilities in case deterrence failed; and also maintenance of armistice responsibilities, including restraint of their smaller South Korean ally in response to North Korea’s many provocations. Many opponents of Carter’s policy believed withdrawal would undermine each purpose.

Local U.S. and ROK military officers thought that withdrawal, by decreasing deterrence, would increase the chance of North Korean adventurism and war. Moreover, the reduced American presence would leave U.S. and ROK forces less equipped and prepared to deal with such a scenario. Lastly, of necessity, the withdrawal would require passing off greater command responsibilities to the South Korean side, demonstrated by creation of the Combined Forces Command (CFC). The CFC was, among other things, a cooperative means for dealing with the troop withdrawal.

However, opponents of Carter’s withdrawal surmised the new command arrangement would lead Seoul to take back operational control (OPCON), resulting in a mismatch between a U.S. general overseeing the armistice while commanding a much reduced U.S. presence, which would lack any actual ground combat component. Since there was no plan to abrogate the U.S.-ROK alliance itself and some U.S. forces would remain, this meant the U.S. remained treaty bound to a situation over which they would maintain relatively less command and less control.

The most notable public opposition came from General John K. Singlaub, chief of staff of the USFK and UN Command. In May 1977, Singlaub publically decried Carter’s policy, saying it would greatly increase the chance of war and was based on faulty intelligence that underestimated North Korea’s order of battle. He was reprimanded by the president and relocated to a military post in Georgia, but not before giving more critical testimony in public hearings held by the House Committee on Armed Services’ Investigations Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Samuel S. Stratton (D-NY), a well-known opponent of the withdrawal policy.

John W. Vessey, the four-star commander of USFK, had already shared these same criticisms with Carter privately. In January, just after Carter’s inauguration, Vessey met with the president and made it a point to stress that he was “unalterably opposed” to withdrawal. Despite Carter’s claim that it was not yet a settled policy, a month later “it came as a shock” when Vessey learned that, in fact, it was. Vessey continued to share his misgivings in “backchannel” messages to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

In June, the Department of Defense released these messages, along with other internal JCS recommendations critical of the policy, to Stratton’s subcommittee without White House approval, adding fodder to growing Congressional skepticism. It did not help that the chairman of the JCS, Gen. George S. Brown, on July 14 told the same subcommittee that Carter’s plan, even though it included the chiefs’ cautions, “went against the chiefs in a fundamental way.”

Another element of the bilateral level was the view from Seoul itself. Park Chung-hee and ROK military and government officials found the withdrawal plan worrisome not only in terms of national security, but also economic growth. Successive South Korean governments, acutely aware of their dependence, were wedded to the U.S.-led international Cold War structure, within which South Korea successfully pursued rapid industrialization and from which the conservative ruling class derived internal legitimacy. For these reasons, South Korean policy elites were loath to change the status quo.

Even Park’s domestic political opponents and political dissidents looked askance at the withdrawal policy. While they welcomed Carter’s rhetoric on human rights, they viewed the U.S. security presence as the principal form of leverage the United States had in pressuring Park to liberalize his draconian Yushin system. If Carter removed the bulk of U.S. forces, he would forgo such leverage, thus inviting the same sort of crackdown that followed Nixon’s withdrawal of the 7th Infantry Division in 1971. Rep. Donald M. Fraser (D-MN), and other congressional critics of the Park regime, voiced this same reservation.

The second level of the hegemonic structure involved U.S. regional interests. Strategically, the Korean Peninsula was conceived of as a key outpost within the general U.S. military force structure in the Western Pacific. This was due not to any innate value so much as its relationship to wider strategic concerns. The forward, mainland deployment of peninsular-based U.S. forces offered closer access to China and the Soviet Union in the case of a larger conflict. Moreover, the immediate threat environment provided high-level preparedness and training for U.S. troops. In the mid to late 1970s, these characteristics had increased in significance insofar as Soviet Far Eastern deployments had markedly increased and the U.S. forces in Korea remained the last Asian mainland deployment following the massive post-Vietnam retreat from Southeast Asia. Military and national security officials opposed to Carter’s withdrawal policy frequently cited the factors above as reasons to stay put.

Furthermore, the regional U.S. military force structure, of which South Korea was a key node, underpinned the U.S. relationship with Japan, its most important strategic and political economic ally in the region. Indeed, the U.S. peninsular presence was almost entirely derivative of and subordinate to the security of Japan. The logic was both simple and expansive. Japan’s security was essential to its continued economic growth and to the preservation of peace and stability in Northeast Asia. Regional stability, in turn, was seen as vital to the health of the capitalist world economy and thus U.S. national security.

A substantial portion of Japan’s foreign, defense, and political establishment openly and immediately opposed the withdrawal policy. Within the United States, many opponents of Carter’s policy (following the State and Defense Departments’ own internal reports), cited two unacceptable possibilities. In the wake of the troop withdrawals, Japan might be forced to either: 1) acquiesce to external communist pressure and internal communist subversion, or 2) pursue rapid militarization and spur a regional arms race. These fears pointed to the third and final level of the hegemonic structure, its symbolic or psychological force.

For many opponents of withdrawal, their most abiding concern remained the intangible question of U.S. credibility. They perceived the local U.S. commitment to South Korea as symbolic of broader U.S. leadership and staying power; again, enhanced due to the recent ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam. Here, the physical U.S. combat units took on psychological and political significance beyond their immediate mission. This sentiment was confirmed and shared by the political leaders of numerous U.S. allies and other regional states, but also strongly held by key individuals within the Carter administration itself, who were tasked with formulating the policy.

Morton Abramowitz, deputy assistant secretary for international security affairs in the Defense Department from 1974-1978, had summed it up years earlier in 1971: “Korea is intimately bound up with the whole structure of peace in East Asia, and cannot be viewed in isolation from that structure. What happens in Korea is crucial to the development of U.S.-Japanese relations, U.S.-Chinese relations and perhaps most important for Asia in the long run, to China-Japan relations.” The embedded importance of Korea, and stability therein, only increased as the administration faced numerous additional challenges in the region, such as normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China, reassuring Taiwan after normalization, completing base negotiations with the Philippines, and bolstering the security relationship with Japan.

From early in Carter’s term, Abramowitz led an interagency task force, with components from the JCS, the Defense Department’s Defense Security Assistance Agency (DSAA), and the State Department. It focused on providing increased military assistance to South Korea to help offset the troop withdrawal. Abramowitz later remarked that they “produced a report despite the fact that all members of the group were opposed to the troop withdrawal.” He continued: “In the Pentagon, we began a rear guard action – delay it, water it down, mitigate the decision as much as possible. Brown [the Secretary of Defense] knew what the staff was doing and never interfered.” Mike Armacost (an East Asia-focused staff member on the National Security Council), Richard Holbrooke (assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs), and others joined Abramowitz in the bureaucratic opposition to Carter’s policy.

To return to Oberdorfer’s account above, he correctly shows that Carter’s rushed, even haphazard style in implementing his campaign promise to withdrawal troops from South Korea evoked considerable consternation and opposition among interested parties. Nevertheless, tracing through the events and documentary record shows the opposition quickly arose to the policy per se, regardless of how it was attempted. Furthermore, the rationale underpinning the opposition permeated the U.S. foreign policy and national security bureaucracy, key congressional committees, and was shared by regional allies.

Although Brzezinski’s statement on July 20, 1979 officially marked the end of Carter’s policy, almost two years to the day before this, Brzezinski sent a memo to Carter, informing him the withdrawal might need to be rethought. In the July 21, 1977 memo titled, “Congressional Reaction to our Korean Policy,” Brzezinski reviewed the multifaceted opposition throughout Congress. He wrote: “Not one Senator or Congressman spoke up in support of the troop withdrawal. Many expressed outright opposition or noted significant misgivings.” They were opposed both “to the manner in which the decision was made” as well as the potential impact of the withdrawal policy itself. Consequently, the administration faced several conclusions: it needed to supply substantial military assistance to South Korea; expend considerable political capital in Congress in order to get it, but without any certainty of success; and, above all, possibly pursue “some adjustment in our withdrawal policy.”

He continued: “Such an adjustment could come through a stretchout in the schedules or by making its implementation conditional upon steps by North Korea. We have preserved flexibility for such a contingency by avoiding a fixed date for the completion of withdrawals. We need not fall back now, but I wanted to alert you to the fact that we may have to face these tough choices when Harold Brown comes back from his discussions in Seoul.”

Harold Brown’s “discussions in Seoul” were the annual U.S.-ROK Security Consultative Meetings, where both sides hammered out what one participant called “an operationally viable” withdrawal program. It involved: 1) the retention of U.S. logistics, command, and intelligence assets and personnel; 2) augmentation of U.S. air force capabilities in the ROK; and 3) establishment of the CFC and enhanced combined U.S.-ROK military exercises. Most importantly, the program also included a compensatory military aid package (of roughly $2 billion in the transfer of military equipment and foreign military sales credits to Seoul) and a three-part, phased withdrawal schedule, with essential combat and support units “back-loaded” until the final phase in 1982.

The latter two conditions (incorporated due to congressional opposition and JCS demands) were notable in that they required congressional approval as well as stretched out the withdrawal in a manner that allowed for reconsideration if conditions changed. In other words, the conditions opened space for opponents of the plan to obstruct and possibly halt it, which is exactly what happened.

The first difficulty occurred in Congress, as Brzezinski had alerted Carter it would. In the fall of 1977, Carter sent Congress a request that it pass legislation funding the compensatory aid package essential to the withdrawal. However, congressional opposition obstructed the legislation. One group, represented by those like Representative Fraser and Senator George McGovern (D-SD), opposed providing Park Chung-hee military aid on human rights grounds. Another group did not want to appear to be in Seoul’s pocket, due to the ongoing controversy over the Koreagate scandal. A third group, consisting of Rep. Stratton and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), were simply against the withdrawal, period.

Consequently, Carter was forced to make his first notable alteration to his policy. On April 21, 1978, the administration announced it would extend the first phase of the withdrawal into 1979 (originally scheduled for completion in 1978) and only remove one rather than three combat battalions by December 1978. Congress did not pass the security assistance until September, which legislation also required the executive branch to consult more thoroughly before each successive phase. Meanwhile, various House and Senate Committees had held additional hearings and produced several reports critical of the policy, further hardening opposition. Simultaneously, and interrelated with these events, new and troubling intelligence on North Korea began to emerge.

Although intelligence on North Korea had been under review since late 1974, the review did not receive proper funding and manpower resources until several years later. The emerging intelligence reassessment, carried out by within the Army and various other outfits in the intelligence community, showed that North Korea possessed a larger, more heavily armored, and forward deployed military than previously thought. The full scope of the new “bean count” was leaked in late 1978 and early 1979, just as the first (and last) combat battalion was removed from the peninsula. In short, it undermined one of the core justifications for the withdrawal, that the North-South balance was favorable to Seoul, and signaled to opponents of Carter’s policy just the kind of changed conditions they needed to shut it down.

The administration announced in February 1979 it would be holding further withdrawals in abeyance until after a new internal policy review was completed, the intelligence data fully analyzed, and allies consulted. With the exception of Carter, most observers and participants now saw the policy as dead letter. Following the internal review and a cantankerous summit meeting in Seoul between Carter and Park Chung-hee, Brzezinski issued the aforementioned statement on July 20, 1979, effectively ending Carter’s policy. Indeed, in order to justify walking back from the withdrawal program, Brzezinski’s statement cited many of the same arguments opponents had been voicing since early 1977: there was an unfavorable military balance; North Korea remained threatening; and regional developments, such an U.S.-PRC normalization, increased Soviet deployments, and ongoing defense planning with Japan, required American constancy in Korea.

The key takeaway in all of this is simple yet profound. Oberdorfer was correct that Carter’s rash approach in trying to implement his underanalyzed campaign promise fostered intense opposition to his troop withdrawal policy. However, the reason for Carter’s failure to execute his policy goes beyond the details of its implementation or the near-term variables of congressional obstruction and new intelligence on North Korea, to the deeper stickiness of the U.S. military forces in South Korea. As Richard Holbrooke remarked: “If the bean counting had gone the other way, we still would have found a reason to suspend the withdrawal.” Simply put, the physical U.S. presence on the peninsula represents a crucial node in a larger hegemonic structure. As such, it is not easily undone. The forces aligned against it were diverse and effective, and they still exist today.