Donald Trump Should End America’s Defense Welfare For South Korea

Can South Korea Defend Itself? Ending America’s Risky Security Commitment

Much of the world has come to look at the Pentagon as an international welfare agency. As Trump noted in his first debate with Hillary Clinton more than eight years ago: “We defend Japan. We defend Germany. We defend South Korea. We defend Saudi Arabia. We defend countries. They do not pay us what they should be paying us because we are providing a tremendous service and we’re losing a fortune.”

That cost didn’t seem too high when World War II ended and America accounted for half of global GDP. But now, the U.S. is essentially bankrupt. The ration of publicly held debt to GDP is 100 percent, set to soon surpass the record of 106 percent set in 1946, after the greatest war in human history.

Today Washington is spending more than $1 trillion annually on interest and adding nearly $2 trillion a year in debt—without a hot war, pandemic, or financial crisis. Even the Congressional Budget Office’s relatively hopeful estimates are awful. If nothing goes wrong with the economy or in the world, Congress doesn’t increase outlays or cut revenues, and official estimates years and decades from now don’t miss reality, the debt-to-GDP ratio will be 166 percent. That is a third higher than in Greece when that nation dragged Europe into crisis. And there won’t be anyone to bail out America.

There is a popular fantasy that all Washington needs to balance the budget is to cut foreign aid and other so-called discretionary outlays. However, the real money is elsewhere—interest, Social Security/​Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, and military. The hyper hawks have an easy answer: just cut so-called entitlements. Americans should slash their social programs. No price is ever too high to fund the U.S. war machine.

Learn Self-Reliance

South Korea has no need to rely on the United States. Yet U.S. officials routinely compete to confirm the sanctity of America’s commitment. For instance, three years ago Daniel J Kritenbrink, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, stated: “The US commitment to the defense of the Republic of Korea and to strengthening our combined defense posture, consistent with the US-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty, is ironclad, including the US extended deterrence consistent to the ROK using the full range of US defense capabilities.”

In mid-December, Congress similarly endorsed the status quo when approving the National Defense Authorization Act.

Unfortunately, the newly installed Trump administration sounds the same. According to Seoul, when speaking with South Korea’s acting defense minister, Kim Seon-ho, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to South Korea’s defense and promised to work closely with the Korean side to further strengthen the alliance based on long-standing trust and friendship between the two countries.”

Some of the old-line hawks around Trump favor Pax Americana, just with different rhetoric. For instance, Fred Fleitz of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security dismissed candidate Trump’s prior position, declaring that “The situation with China, Russia, and North Korea has changed since the first Trump administration.” However, that is mostly due to the war in Ukraine, which the president is seeking to end.

Why this commitment to subsidize prosperous and populous friends? South Korea is far stronger than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, possessing more than 50 times the economic strength and twice the latter’s population. More than 70 years after the conclusion of the Korean War, Americans are still paying for the ROK’s defense, and U.S. military personnel are still guarding the country.

The division of the Korean peninsula goes back to the end of World War II. As Tokyo’s surrender loomed, Washington proposed a temporary division of Korea. However, the U.S. refused heavy arms for the Republic of Korea, whose authoritarian leader, Syngman Rhee, threatened to march north.

The Soviets lacked similar compunctions, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un invaded on June 25, 1950. After three years of bitter fighting, an armistice was agreed to, and Seoul and Washington signed a treaty under which the South agreed to allow U.S. troops stationed there to defend it. Some 28,500 American personnel remain in South Korea.

When the guns fell silent, U.S. support was essential to preserve South Korea. However, in the 1960s the ROK’s economy took off. Democracy arrived as the 1980s neared their end. Today, Seoul continues to rely on America militarily not because it must, but because it can. The South’s conventional forces are smaller in numbers, but much better in quality. Seoul is capable of matching or exceeding the DPRK’s military by any measure. South Korea chooses not to.

What Will South Korea Risk?

Trump appropriately asked during an interview with Time: “Why would we defend somebody? And we’re talking about a very wealthy country.” In 2018 he ordered the Pentagon to prepare options for withdrawing troops, which caused predictable hysteria. Reported The New York Times: “The directive has rattled officials at the Pentagon and other agencies” who believed whatever had been must forever be, at least when it comes to military deployments. Trump apparently considered ordering withdrawals as his first term came to an end. The perpetual hawks surrounding Trump naturally resisted, and urged Trump to leave it to his second term, figuring they could run out the clock.

The defense commitment isn’t cheap. The primary cost is not from basing U.S. personnel and family members overseas. Some of that cost is covered by Seoul, and Trump wants to hike their contribution from about $1.13 billion to $10 billion annually. (The Biden administration tried to “Trump-proof” the ROK’s cheap ride by concluding an early agreement.) The greater cost is in raising the units involved. Every additional military commitment requires additional force structure.

Why spend the money and undertake the risk when South Korea doesn’t need the support? Sean King of Park Strategies opined: “The U.S. should be thanking Seoul for the opportunity to forward-deploy forces and equipment only a few hundred miles from rival mainland China.” However, it is an illusion to imagine American forces using South Korean facilities in a conflict with China. The U.S. Army would have little role in such a conflict.

More important, Seoul is sovereign and would be very unlikely to commit national suicide by joining the United States in such a war. Doing so would turn the South into a legitimate military target. Indeed, a South Korean commitment to aid America would encourage China to strike preemptively in the case of war. Nor would Seoul’s problems end when the fighting stopped. China will always be a neighbor, while the U.S. will eventually come home. And Beijing, whether communist, authoritarian, or democratic, would not soon forget the South’s perceived perfidy.

An Updated Alliance

Some analysts cite a symbolic purpose: “The U.S. military presence in Asia has signaled Washington’s commitment to defend its allies and maintain peace and stability in the region.” However, that’s no reason to protect countries able to protect themselves. The American armed forces are raised to defend the United States, not provide welfare to friendly governments strewn about the globe.

The Mutual Defense Treaty between the two offers no justification for a security guarantee. Washington and Seoul have much they can cooperate on, starting with economics, where cooperation is already under threat from Trump. The two governments should refashion the alliance, ending the security guarantee and withdrawing the U.S. garrison, while creating new structures and plans for mutual benefit.

The most difficult issue is nuclear weapons. Today South Korea relies on “extended deterrence,” that is, on Washington’s willingness to engage in nuclear war to defend its military allies. The policy was believable when Pyongyang lacked any means to retaliate against a U.S. strike.

However, North Korea has developed nuclear weapons and is working on intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the American mainland. The Kim government has made steady progress in improving and expanding its missile arsenal. A few years ago the RAND Corporation and Asan Institute warned that later this decade “North Korea could have 200 nuclear weapons and several dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and hundreds of theater missiles for delivering the nuclear weapons.” The result could be even worse if Russia provides technical assistance as payment for North Korean aid in Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

A majority of Americans view the North Korean nuclear program as a “critical threat,” but that is true only because the U.S. is entangled in what is effectively an extended civil war. Kim wouldn’t waste his time denouncing Trump if American troops weren’t on his border and American planes and ships weren’t deployed over and around the peninsula.

Once North Korea has acquired the capability to destroy American cities and kill millions of Americans, extended deterrence will become unwise, even irrational. Although the United States will always possess an overwhelming retaliatory capability, going to war against the DPRK would threaten to end the Kim dynasty. The regime could threaten to unleash “fire and fury” against the U.S. in response, bringing doom to both nations.

A South Korean Deterrent

The alternative is a South Korean nuclear weapon.

Uncertain about Washington’s commitment when President Richard Nixon drew down American troops overseas, President Chun Doo-hwan began to develop nuclear weapons in the early 1970s. Only under strong pressure did he end the program. With Pyongyang’s continuing nuclear build-up, support for a South Korean bomb has surged. Governing elites are more skeptical, but a recent CSIS survey found that many of them would back an ROK program if U.S. military support wavered, as seemed likely with Trump’s return to the presidency.

Instead of waiting, Trump should jumpstart the process. In just a couple weeks he has done more than the other 13 postwar presidents combined to push the Europeans to take over responsibility for their own defense. He should do the same for South Korea.

The administration should initiate discussions with Seoul over the future of the alliance. The ROK should prepare to take over responsibility for its own defense, expanding its armed forces and military cooperation with friendly states. The Mutual Defense treaty should be revised, and U.S. troops should start coming home. And Seoul should seek dialogue with Pyongyang, indicating its willingness to forgo a major military expansion if the DPRK is prepared to build down. That may be unlikely, but the possibility should be explored.

The welcome end of the Cold War unleashed Washington’s arrogance and recklessness. The consequences were catastrophic—two decades of wars, hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, and trillions in wealth squandered. Trump should seize his opportunity to help create a new, more practical, security order.