Seoul searching: ending the U.S.-Korean alliance.

• Author: Bandow, Doug

WHY SHOULD the United States maintain troops in the Republic of Korea (ROK)? What American interests are being served by the alliance? Officials in both capitals maintain that the alliance remains as relevant as ever. The two governments insist that the "fundamental goal is to enhance deterrence and security on the Korean Peninsula."

But Washington's Cold War security concern for the ROK has disappeared. Even if the security of South Korea remained vital to the United States--and it does not--America's treaty and troops aren't necessary to achieve that end. The South has dramatically outstripped North Korea on virtually every measure of national power and can stand on its own.

South Korean President Roh Moohyun told graduates of the Korean Air Force Academy in March: "We have sufficient power to defend ourselves. We have nurtured mighty national armed forces that absolutely no one can challenge." Within a decade, he added, "we should be able to develop our military into one with full command of operations." The ROK spent $16.4 billion last year on defense--roughly nine times North Korea's outlay--and ranks eleventh in the world in total defense expenditures. His government is increasing military spending, up about 8.6 percent this year over 2003, to create a "self-reliant defense that could help bring peace and unification to the Korean peninsula."

The Bush Administration also seems to think that South Korea is better prepared to stand on its own. Moving U.S. forces south--essentially dismantling the fabled tripwire of fifty years--and cutting the American garrison by one-third suggest that Washington no longer believes its military presence to be central to the ROK's security. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained after meeting with South Korean Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung, "the South Koreans are appropriately increasingly taking the lead in their own defense" and will be "assuming some missions and some responsibilities as we adjust our relationship going forward." Dealing with a nuclear North Korea would be more complicated but would not be aided by conventional troop deployments. To the contrary, America's force presence exacerbates the problem by creating thousands of American nuclear hostages within range of Pyongyang's weapons. Whether Washington ended up holding a nuclear umbrella over the ROK or encouraging South Korea to create its own nuclear deterrent, the United States would gain nothing by maintaining an Army division and other units in the South.

The newly inaugurated Security Policy Initiative (SPI) talks, expected to run bimonthly over the coming year, will study, as the official statement after the first meeting explained, "how the Korea-U.S. alliance should be transformed to prepare for a future in which security conditions on the Korean peninsula, such as improved inter-Korean ties, occur." Mitchell Reiss, director of policy planning for the State Department, acknowledges that "some of the assumptions that underpinned the alliance in 1953 are being re-examined." But many Koreans worry that what Washington has in mind is the evolution of the alliance from a defense pact to a Korean blank check that will support any U.S. military action in the region. Last fall Hankyoreh, a liberal daily newspaper, editorialized: "We must not let down our guard to the possibility [that] changes in the role of U.S. troops in Korea or a changed U.S.-Korea alliance could get Korea unwillingly dragged into a regional conflict."

An Alliance in Search of a Purpose

IT WOULD be a miraculous coincidence if a commitment forged in the Cold War to deter a ground invasion from a contiguous neighbor functioned equally well without adjustment to meet completely different future contingencies. One cannot help but suspect that the means has become the end for most alliance advocates, to be preserved irrespective of changes in the regional and global security environments.

Some alliance advocates, however, are vigorously re-imagining the rationale for retaining U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula. Advocates of a permanent U.S. occupation talk grandly of preserving regional stability and preparing for regional contingencies. Some South Koreans do so as well: Kim Sung-ban of the Institute on Foreign Affairs and National Security argues that "Even in the absence of a military threat from North Korea", the alliance should be revamped "to...