[The White House said Friday that Trump and Kim would meet in late February. The location was not immediately announced. Trump met earlier for about 90 minutes in the Oval Office with Kim Yong Chol, a former spy chief who has served as Pyongyang’s lead negotiator.]
By
Simon Denyer
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U.S. soldiers during Warrior
Strike VIII, a bilateral training exercise between the
U.S.Army’s 2nd Armored
Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, and
the South Korean army in Paju,
South Korea, on Sept. 19, 2017.
(Seong Joon Cho/Bloomberg
News)
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SEOUL
— President Trump’s demands
that South Korea take on far more costs for hosting U.S. troops is straining
the alliance and potentially playing into North Korea’s hands ahead of a second
summit with Kim Jong Un, South Korean lawmakers and experts say.
South Korea has about 28,500 U.S. troops on
more than 20 sites and paid $855 million last year toward the cost. But the
cost-sharing pact expired at the end of last year after 10 rounds of
negotiations that left — in the words of one foreign ministry official in Seoul
— a “huge gap” between both sides.
South Korean lawmakers and experts worry that
Trump is so obsessed with Seoul paying more that he could take the previously
unthinkable step of withdrawing some troops if a deal is not reached.
That would be an indirect gift to North
Korean leader Kim, undermining one of the most important cards the United
States has during negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program, experts say.
The White House said Friday that Trump and
Kim would meet in late February. The location was not immediately announced. Trump
met earlier for about 90 minutes in the Oval Office with Kim Yong Chol, a
former spy chief who has served as Pyongyang’s lead negotiator.
“We are experiencing difficulties because the
U.S. side abruptly brought up a condition totally unacceptable to our side at
the last stage of negotiations,” Chung Eui-yong, national security adviser to
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, told reporters earlier this week.
Chung said he still believed the two sides
could reach a “reasonable deal,” and many experts still expect a crisis to be
averted.
But there is no doubt the risks are growing,
especially if a deal isn’t reached before Trump’s potential summit with Kim.
[Analysis: American support for South Korea
remains firm]
“I am very concerned,” said Chun Yung-woo, a
conservative former national security adviser. “The danger of failure of the
negotiations is, I think, broadly underestimated.”
Lawmakers from the Foreign Affairs and
Unification Committee, which need to approve any deal and have been briefed on
the negotiations, said the United States first demanded South Korea nearly
double its contribution, to $1.6 billion, but later scaled that back to $1.2
billion. Confusion persists over North Korea’s definition of denuclearization.
When that demand was also rejected,
Washington lowered the money demands but suggested the deal be extended for
only one year, instead of the usual five.
The United States has also proposed that
South Korea cover some “operational costs” for the U.S. military presence in
the region, including deploying aircraft carriers. South Korean lawmakers
called this demand unacceptable.
Lawmakers from both the liberal ruling party
and conservative opposition said South Korean public opinion is sensitive to
any impression that the United States is bullying them. Moon’s government,
meanwhile, cannot afford to look weak in the eyes of its own people.
“One trillion won is a psychological
barrier,” said Lee Soo-hyuck, a ruling-party lawmaker, referring to an amount
in South Korean won equivalent to nearly $890 million.
“It would be very difficult to get the
consent of the National Assembly if it is over 1 trillion,” Lee added. “We
would need some very persuasive argument or logic.”
Ruling-party lawmaker Song Young-gil called
Trump’s demands “unreasonable and groundless,” while Won Yoo-chul, a
conservative member of the foreign affairs committee, fears a backlash that
will fuel “anti-American sentiments among the Korean people.”
Timothy Betts, the U.S. deputy assistant
secretary of state for plans, programs and operations, is leading negotiations.
But instructions appear to be coming directly from the White House.
Trump has said the United States gets
“practically nothing” toward the cost of the troops, while complaining bitterly
about South Korea’s trade surplus with the United States — until the two sides
signed a new trade deal last September.
In “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s account of the
Trump White House, the U.S. president is described as being obsessed with the
cost of the U.S. troop presence, angrily threatening to pull them out on more
than one occasion.
At various times, he was talked down by a
host of insiders, including former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former
secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Today, only Dunford remains in his job, with
Mattis’s resignation — over the plan to withdraw troops from Syria and the
treatment of U.S. allies in general — seen as especially damaging.
[Trump evolution from calling Kim “Little
Rocket Man” to partner in talks]
“It'll make it much harder,” said Victor Cha,
a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“There'll be nothing to filter what Trump wants to do, nothing to filter a very
uniformed view on how he wants things done.”
Cha said the Trump administration is looking
for a “paradigm shift” in military burden sharing and is particularly keen to
establish a precedent with South Korea ahead of similar negotiations with Japan
and NATO next year.
Many members of Moon’s administration began
their political careers as left-wing pro-democracy student activists, who were
inclined to see the U.S. troop presence as more motivated by American strategic
interests than South Korea’s views.
“I don’t think they will ever ask the U.S. to
withdraw,” said Chun, the conservative former national security adviser,
referring to officials in Moon’s entourage. “But if President Trump decides to
withdraw because of this cost issue, I don’t think any of them will cry over
that kind of decision.”
The question of the share South Korea is
paying depends on your vantage point.
The United States says Seoul pays $855
million out of a total cost of about $2 billion. South Korea says that doesn’t
account for the large amounts of land supplied rent-free and calculates it pays
more like 70 percent of the cost.
Seoul also paid almost the entire cost of
building a massive new U.S. base at Pyeongtaek and spent $13 billion between
2013 and 2017 on U.S. military hardware, training and services.
Talks have overrun the deadline before. After
the last agreement expired in December 2013, a new deal wasn’t implemented
until the following June.
But Kim Jong-dae, a lawmaker with the
left-leaning Justice Party, said the risks are higher this time, given Trump’s
“isolationist” tendencies and clear desire to bring more U.S. soldiers home.
Many South Koreans, he said, were pleasantly
surprised by Trump’s sincere attempt to make peace on the Korean Peninsula but
are perplexed by his “coldhearted dealmaking” over the troop-cost issue.
In Pyongyang, though, Kim Jong Un is likely
happy at any hint of a possible reduction in U.S. forces.
“The withdrawal of U.S. troops is the most
important card to play in getting North Korea to denuclearize,” Chun said.
“What I am most concerned about is that [Trump] will waste the card without
using it. If he decides to withdraw troops out of exasperation without thinking
of how to link to denuclearization negotiations, this becomes a dead
card.”
Min Joo Kim contributed to this report.
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