Washington is reportedly moving missile defense platforms from South Korea to support the Israeli/US attack on Iran. As it does, Seoul is counting the increasing costs of the alliance.
First, there is the obvious and headline grabbing financial costs. The United States has progressively sought greater burden-sharing from partners, including higher host-nation support payments, expanded defense procurement, larger contributions to joint military infrastructure – and confusing, dynamic and legally questionable tariff induced investments. These demands are routinely accompanied by racketeer-like intimidation that can hardly be called diplomacy.
Second, there is the strategic cost. Being a front line pivot state in an emerging Cold War puts South Korea back to where it was in 1950. Facing China as a U.S. alliance partner for most states involves the potential of economic retaliation or entanglement in distant conflicts. On the front line it also means direct engagement.
These two costs crash together in discussions on moving missile defense platforms. The U.S. is moving Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries from South Korea to the Middle East. In South Korea, THAAD is a sore spot.
In 2016, largely at the request of the U.S, Seoul deployed THAAD batteries across South Korea. China reacted with coercive measures, imposing major economic costs. Informal economic coercion impacted tourism, retail, including consumer products and cosmetics, and cultural exports – some of the strongest performers in the China market. China accounted for over 25% of South Korea’s exports. Annoying a customer of that size produces significant multi-billion-dollar economic losses.
For many, THAAD came at a greater impact because while framed as a response to Pyongyang’s missiles, the system’s powerful radar integrated South Korea into the wider U.S. missile defense network to monitor Chinese missile activity. In this sense, THAAD served broader U.S. efforts to constrain China, served only a limited and peripheral purpose vis-a-vis North Korea, and openly invited political and economic costs. Opponents at the time argued it was a means to correct South Korea’s increasing coziness with China. And now, after all that – THAAD is being removed.
Lastly, on top of the pointlessness and profound human impact spread across news screens on a nightly basis, Washington is pulling down the tent pole on the global economy.
South Korea depends on the Middle East for around seventy percent of its crude oil imports. Over the last ten years, the alliance cost South Korea its imports of Iranian and then Russian energy. The cost of the alliance keeps increasing. Sooner or later, the cost will be too much.
An international relations professor once told me that for every problem in the field, there is either a Star Trek or Star Wars corollary. Undoubtedly, for most South Koreans the scene that would most come to mind at the moment is from the original Star Wars series – the Empire Strikes Back.
As Darth Vader imposes ever more conditions, his junior partner, Lando Calrissian, breathes to the side: “this deal is getting worse all the time.” Soon after, and in spectacular form, Lando joins the rebellion.
South Korea is still far from joining the rebellion. Some supporters will never give up on the U.S.
Conservative think tanks in South Korea churn out as many publications on reforming and strengthening the alliance as their counterparts in the U.S. The political economy of academic life means that there’s always someone ready to go on a junket and write a paper on how helpful a stronger alliance will be. Of course, this kind of support is strongest just before it collapses.
A more meaningful question that should be debated is whether there are actually any alternatives.
South Korea’s options are in no way simple or without cost. The three broad long-term strategic options of pacifism (securing at any cost a final end to hostilities on the Korean Peninsula), acquiescence (accepting China’s role in maintaining peace within the region) or armed independence (securing an independent nuclear weapons and defense capacity) all come at a huge financial, political and arguably sovereign cost.
Yet, at some point of time in the future, one of these alternatives or some mix of them, will approach the increasing cost of sustaining the U.S. alliance.
Middle powers in a changing world order need to be dynamic. Historically, the last states holding the apron strings of a declining power lay on the floor for the longest. The cost of THAAD and now its removal in the midst of a momentous strategic blunder is forcing Seoul to not only count the increasing costs of the alliance but to also think about the alternatives.
Jeffrey Robertson previously worked for the Australian Government in the fields of foreign policy and diplomacy with a focus on East Asia. He now writes from the other side of the line – as an academic, consultant, and sometimes spy fiction ghostwriter. He writes and updates research at https://junotane.com.
