The planned reduction of U.S. troops in South Korea is an opportunity for Washington-Seoul ties to mature or decline, depending on whether ties can go beyond the narrow security issues that have driven the relationship for decades.
This transition, experts say, is the main challenge for the five-decades-long alliance between the United States and South Korea at a time when the security environment in Northeast Asia is changing.
The Cold War is long over and the United States has removed many of its overseas forces in Asia in the last decade. In 1992, the Philippines ended the lease of the U.S. largest overseas, although the United States still has 47,000 troops in Japan these days.
Today too, South Koreans no longer see North Korea – whose nuclear program remains a great concern for Northeast Asia – as that big a threat. The South and North Korean leaders met in a landmark summit in 2000, and there has been growing anti-U.S. sentiment and hostility to hosting U.S. forces.
These changes are also linked to Washington’s decision to withdraw 12,500 of the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea by 2008, as part of worldwide realignments to allow easy deployment overseas. Some troops stationed in South Korea have been moved to Iraq.
Whether South Korea-U.S. ties – for so long anchored on anti-communist aims, North Korea and heavily focused on the Korean peninsula – can go beyond security ties and become a wider alliance remains to be seen.
There are different ideas about the kind of relationship the United States and South Korea can have, but one is that “it is quite necessary to establish not a military alliance relationship but a strategic partnership between Seoul and Washington,” said Kim Sung-han, director-general for American Studies, Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of South Korea.
“It is rather realistic to search for further ways to move toward a strategic partnership rather than sticking to the status quo, the current military alliance,” added Kim, speaking at a recent seminar on U.S.-South Korea ties organized by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA.
An opportunity presents itself in November 2005, when South Korea hosts the leaders’ summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, and the two countries’ leaders can spell out a vision for bilateral ties, he added.
Some experts like Kim Chang-su of the Korea Institute of Defense Analyses, also see Washington shifting the alliance with Seoul from being one for “regional defense” rather than the current defense only of the peninsula.
In this kind of setup, the U.S. military “might seek Korea’s understanding and support in contingencies off the peninsula,” such as Central Asia, the Middle East or even a China-Taiwan conflict, Kim was quoted as saying by the Korea Herald this week.
In South Korea, perceptions of the U.S. forces’ presence have been changing.
For instance, relocating certain garrisons under the troop reduction scheme would be difficult because of likely violent protests against hosting U.S. forces, Kim Sung-han explained.
Likewise, because the inter-Korean summit of 2000 made many South Koreans think that “the two Koreas would be able to resolve their own problems independently,” the revelation in October 2002 that North Korea had a secret uranium enrichment program did not jar Seoul that much – or send it running to the United States.
Opinion polls in South Korea, however, show some conflicting sentiments and this, Kim said, is why the two countries need to clarify their future vision.
The results of a poll by the East Asian Institute and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in July this year showed 60 percent saying that South Korean security would improve if U.S. troops are cut back. This figure is up from about 49 percent in the past, Kim pointed out.
The same survey showed that 39 percent are against any preemptive U.S. strike against North Korea, but 91 percent also said that the U.S.-South Korea alliance should stay after the reunification of the Korean Peninsula.
But some U.S. academics question the assumption that ties with South Korea have been overly dependent on security issues, such as North Korea.
“It’s a mistake to look at South Korean attitudes toward the U.S. military alliance solely in terms of security considerations,” Selig Harrison, director of the Asian program of the Center of International Policy, said at the same discussion. “The economics of the situation are very important.”
He explained that South Korea gets many other benefits from U.S. military presence, a line of argument that U.S. officials also used in countries like the Philippines – which for nearly a century hosted the largest U.S. army and naval bases outside the continental United States.
The U.S.-South Korea alliance, Harrison pointed out, “creates a climate of stability favorable for foreign investment and for the preferential economic treatment by international financial institutions that South Korea has received – for example, the 1997 International Monetary Fund bailout.”
He estimated the direct cost of U.S. forces in South Korea to be roughly $2 billion a year, apart from billions of dollars in military grants and foreign military sales.
He argued that the “almost unspoken, underlying but very real reason why the prospect of an end of the alliance is unsettling to the South Koreans” is that “the U.S. military presence and the alliance commitment of the United States provides a very large economic subsidy to South Korea, an economic cushion, if you will.”
In the end, Kim Sung-han said, “I would say that South Koreans are in a dilemma – not knowing whether to choose between their brothers in the North who shed blood, and friends across the Pacific who shed blood during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.”
Still, there are signs that Seoul is trying to forge policies that it sees as being in its interest.
The South Korean government has a policy of diversifying defense suppliers apart from those from the United States, despite its close ties with its military. Likewise, China – which the United States’ alliance with Japan and South Korea is supposed to head off – has in the last year become South Korea’s largest trading partner.
(Inter Press Service)
