Seoul on ice: conservatives are talking about pulling out of South Korea. Big mistake.

• Author: Ho, Soyoung
• Position: Book by Ted Galen Carpenter and Doug Bandow - Book Review

The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations With North and South Korea By Ted Galen Carpenter and Doug Bandow Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95

This book brings a welcome revolution to recent American scholarship about the Korean peninsula: It actually focuses on both North and South Korea. It's no surprise, of course, that most writers have chosen North Korea as their prime topic: That weird, dangerous state is simply a juicier subject, with its epic isolation, creepy and seemingly unpredictable Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, and alarming nuclear development programs. But America's relationship with Seoul--based for a half-century on a shared interest in having U.S. troops serve as a preventative tripwire against the militaristic, communist North--is evolving, too. This transformation is brought about by a rising progressive nationalism in South Korea, which seeks independence from America--partly due to its economic might in Asia and its budding democracy. In addition, a weaker North Korea, despite its current belligerent posturing, has meant the possibility of war less likely than before. And that means that the future of both our relationship with Pyongyang and our security posture in East Asia are dependent, in large part, on what we do about Seoul.

The authors of The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea would prefer that we wash our hands of the peninsula and its knotty North Korean brinkmanship politics, retreat across the Pacific and let these tense, feuding cousins sort things out for themselves. That shouldn't come as any great surprise, given their backgrounds: Ted Galen Carpenter and Doug Bandow are scholars--but not Korea specialists--at the oft-libertarian CATO Institute, a think tank known for arguing that America is committed to defending wholly unnecessary places abroad. These scholars are influential members of the conservative foreign policy establishment--Bandow, in particular, has been a prominent defender of President Bush's nomination of U.N. skeptic John Bolton as ambassador to that body--and if their audacious prescription for the Koreas doesn't match the administration's current stance, then it's a safe bet that this book is getting a hearing within the conservative elements of the Departments of State and Defense, where skepticism about the future of an American commitment to South Korea, which costs $1.38 billion a year to maintain its units based there, has been percolating.

Carpenter and Bandow argue that, even...