Trump vexes S. Korea with claim of $500 million charge for troops

The claim contradicted the terms of a cost-sharing deal that South Korea and the United States signed Sunday after months of contentious negotiations.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Koreans were left flustered Wednesday after President Donald Trump asserted that he had made their government pay $500 million more to help cover the cost of maintaining U.S. troops in the country.

The claim contradicted the terms of a cost-sharing deal that South Korea and the United States signed Sunday after months of contentious negotiations. Under the oneyear deal, this year South Korea will pay $925 million, an increase of $70 million from last year’s $855 million.

“They agreed to pay, yesterday, $500 million more toward their defense. Five-hundred million, with a couple of phone calls,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, adding that the increase came at his request. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you do this before?’ They said, ‘Nobody asked.’ So — it’s got to go up. It’s got to go up.”

Trump also said he would continue to press South Korea to increase its contribution in the coming years.

“And over the years it will start going up and they will be terrific,” he said.

Trump made the comments while highlighting his efforts to strike better trade and military deals with U.S. allies. But his assertions confused both South Korean officials and the South Korean news media.

Trump also said South Korea had been paying only $500 million, or one-tenth, of the $5 billion he said was needed annually to maintain U.S. military bases in South Korea. But South Korea says its contribution covers nearly half the total cost of such operations.

Both the U.S. Embassy and Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha of South Korea reconfirmed the $925 million figure Wednesday. Kang said her government needed to find out how Trump came up with different figures.

Kim Eui-kyeom, a spokesman for President Moon Jaein, pushed back at Trump’s suggestion that South Korea would have to increase its contributions in the coming years, saying that it “shouldn’t be taken as a fait accompli.”

He said the deal struck Sunday, under which South Korea agreed to an 8 percent increase in its contribution, was valid only for this year, with the possibility of an extension for another year if both sides agreed.

This is not the first time South Koreans have been flummoxed by Trump’s claims.

In an interview aired this month on CBS News, Trump complained about the “very expensive” costs of keeping 40,000 troops in South Korea. But U.S. troops in South Korea number only 28,500.

After his first summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, Trump said the North Korean nuclear crisis had been “largely solved.”

He also said on Twitter that there was “no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”

But at that meeting, held in Singapore in June, Kim promised only to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” and subsequent talks have stalled over how to implement that agreement.

During the negotiations for the defense cost-sharing deal, Washington had asked that South Korea increase its contribution by 50 percent, South Korean officials said.

South Korea successfully resisted that demand, but it would have preferred a multiyear deal to avoid having to negotiate every year. Instead, it hurried to sign the oneyear deal for fear that Trump might propose a withdrawal or reduction of U.S. troops in South Korea as a bargaining chip during his second summit meeting with Kim, which is scheduled for later this month in Vietnam.