Trump eyes reducing U.S. forces in S. Korea

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to prepare options for drawing down U.S. troops in South Korea, just weeks before he holds a landmark meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, according to several people briefed on the deliberations.

Reduced troop levels are not intended to be a bargaining chip in Trump’s talks with Kim about his weapons program, these officials said.

But they acknowledged that a peace treaty between the two Koreas could diminish the need for the 23,500 soldiers stationed on the peninsula.

Trump has been determined to withdraw troops from South Korea, arguing that the United States is not adequately compensated for the cost of maintaining them, that the troops are mainly protecting Japan and that decades of U.S. military presence had not prevented the North from becoming a nuclear threat.

His latest push coincides with tense negotiations with South Korea over how to share the cost of the military force.

Under an agreement that expires at the end of 2018, South Korea pays about half the cost of the upkeep of the soldiers — more than $800 million a year. The Trump administration is demanding that it pay for virtually the entire cost of the military presence.

The directive has rattled officials at the Pentagon and other agencies, who worry that any reduction could weaken the U.S. alliance with South Korea and raise fears in neighboring Japan at the very moment that the United States is embarking on a risky nuclear negotiation with the North.

Officials declined to say whether Trump was seeking options for a full or partial reduction of troops, although a full withdrawal was unlikely. They emphasized that rethinking the size and configuration of the U.S. force was overdue, regardless of the sudden flowering of diplomacy with North Korea.

But Trump’s meeting with Kim injects an unpredictable new element. His enthusiasm for the encounter — and the prospect of ending a nearly 70-year-old military conflict between the two Koreas — has raised concerns that he may offer troop cuts in return for concessions by Kim.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis added to those concerns April 27 when he suggested that the future of the U.S. military presence might be on the table.

For Trump, withdrawing troops would have multiple benefits, said Victor Cha, a Korea scholar at Georgetown University who was for a time under consideration to be ambassador to Seoul.

It would appeal to his political base, save the United States money and give him a valuable chit in his negotiation with Kim.

“But from the perspective of the U.S.-South Korea alliance,” Cha said, “it would represent a major retrenchment.”

Kelly Magsamen, a top Asia policy official at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, said, “U.S. presence in South Korea is a sacrosanct part of our alliance.”

The South Korean government reiterated this week that the troops were still needed and would not be pulled out as a result of a peace treaty with North Korea. But even close allies of President Moon Jae-in have raised doubts about the rationale for a long-term U.S. presence.

Kim recently declared, through South Korean officials, that he would drop the North’s longstanding insistence that U.S. troops leave the peninsula. Some experts argue that watching U.S. soldiers depart is far less important to him than winning relief from economic sanctions.