Not With a Bang, But a Whimper: Is This How the US-Korea Alliance Dies?

At this point in the presidency of Donald Trump, alliance cost-sharing tensions are old news. Tensions with South Korea, in particular, have been festering for nearly two years. Unfortunately, the onset of a global pandemic – one that had particularly acute effects as early as February in South Korea, which has since successfully contained COVID-19 – has done little to lead Washington and Seoul toward an agreement. The so-called Special Measures Agreement (SMA) the two sides were slated to have finalized back at the end of 2018 remains an open question. With last year’s one-year SMA having expired recently, South Korean workers for U.S. Forces Korea have been furloughed without pay, raising the toxicity of the ongoing dispute. The longer this carries on, unfortunately, the more it cuts at the fundamentals of the U.S.-South Korea alliance.

Speaking on April 20 at a White House press briefing, Trump discussed the state of cost-sharing talks with South Korea. He confirmed what had been reported earlier: That he had rejected what had widely been seen as Seoul’s best offer. Seoul had offered a 13 percent increase on the 2019 one-year SMA, which itself represented an 8 percent increase over the prior five-year SMA.

“They've offered us a certain amount of money and I've rejected it,” Trump told reporters. “I just said, it's just, you know, we're doing a tremendous service. ... We have to be treated equitably and fairly.”

True to form going back to his campaign for the presidency beginning in mid-2015, Trump continues to see American allies as freeloaders. South Korea faced the unfortunate burden of negotiating its new SMA in the middle of what could be Trump’s first term; while other allies, including North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members and Japan, have faced pressure from the White House, little compares to the potential long-term damage being done by the acrimonious SMA process with South Korea.

Public opinion data gathered by RealMeter in late January 2020 – when the prospect of furloughs for South Korean employees for USFK was looming – showed a deeply unfavorable political picture for the White House. A majority of South Korean respondents (59 percent) said they did not approve of acquiescing to American demands. Numbers have varied, but the United States has requested anywhere from four to five times Seoul’s previous SMA contribution – a demand that is not only offensive in the context of an alliance meant to be based on mutual solidarity, but widely out of touch with the political constraints of agreeing to a new SMA in Seoul. January’s survey data found little variance in Korean society by demographic groups. As Karl Friedhoff of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs wrote shortly afterwards, “Pluralities – and majorities in most cases – of all ages, regions, ideological leanings, and party affiliations are in opposition to Seoul giving in to U.S. demands.” An exception was the conservative Liberty Korea Party, where a slim plurality supported agreeing to the U.S. demand, with a still-robust 39 percent of identified LKP supporters saying that Seoul should hold back.

The closest the U.S. side has come to a politically realistic proposal – perhaps evidencing an initial door-in-face negotiating strategy by demanding billions – came last year. From an initial demand of $5 billion, representing a more-than-five-fold increase on the $900 million agreed for Seoul’s 2019 contribution, the U.S. came down to a take-it-or-leave-it round $1 billion (roughly 1.12 trillion Korean won). That was close, but not enough – with Seoul not ready to stomach anything above the 1 trillion won mark. This time, Seoul’s counter-offer to continued demands of billions, which Trump ultimately rejected, was a 13 percent increase. In the end, these matters of dollars and cents continue to separate the allies from coming together to conclude an SMA – even a one-year extension – amid a global pandemic. Meanwhile, the political consequences of the drawn-out process are likely to bear on what’s possible ahead. Washington is unlikely to find a way to a better number than 13 percent that Seoul recently offered and Trump swiped down.

The recent mid-term legislative elections in South Korea also offer important guidance on how the U.S. government should be thinking about the ongoing cost-sharing shakedown. Moon Jae-in’s progressive party won in nothing short of a landslide, with the South Korean president shaking off early criticism of his handling of COVID-19 and winning wide plaudits for his subsequent technocratic containment successes. Moon wasn’t on the ballot himself, but South Korean voters have ultimately given his agenda an unprecedented boost going into the final two years of his term. Korean presidents, limited to one five-year term, have historically run into serious doldrums before their time in office comes due. Moon’s conservative predecessor, Park Geun-hye, was impeached and imprisoned; her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, ran into his own controversies. Moon, meanwhile, is standing tall. The political viability of accepting an arm-twisting SMA arrangement because Trump insists on it is simply not on the cards in this environment. True, Moon may have more political capital to spend now than he did during SMA talks last year, but he won’t spend it to sustain the criticism that would follow domestically – from the Korean left and right alike – if South Korea assented to a number anything close to what Washington has demanded. Besides, in technical terms, a new SMA would need the legislative assent of South Korea’s National Assembly, making these political constraints more than a matter of mere optics.

At the core of the problem is Trump’s continued perception of U.S. alliances as a “service” and U.S. forces as mercenaries. Trump, a former businessman, continues to fail to grok the notion of an alliance forged in values, interests, and solidarity. South Korea should pay, the American president says, because the U.S. military offers a formidable defensive capability on the Peninsula – never mind the historical basis for cost-sharing in the alliance. Cost-sharing talks have been difficult in the past in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. They have been adjusted to reflect Seoul’s growing economic might and adjusted according to requirements for deterrence against North Korea. But never before has the alliance been fundamentally so at odds. The risks are great and the U.S.-South Korea alliance itself hangs in the balance.