Hard questions
When the U.S. intervened in 1950 to halt North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, it was viewed as an effort to halt the expansion of an allegedly monolithic communist bloc led by the Soviet Union and China.
The effort to contain international communism and defend the “free world” initially served as justification for maintaining U.S. troops in South Korea after the Korean war ended in 1953.
The U.S. decision to protect South Korea also was meant to signal that it was willing to defend friendly governments around the world as Washington sought to create a global balance of power with its communist foes.
But those calculations as they pertained to the Korean Peninsula started to change in 1969. Border clashes that year between China and the Soviet Union revealed that the threat of a monolithic communist bloc was largely illusory.
President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 reduced confrontation between Beijing and Washington in Asia. Finally, America’s defeat in the Vietnam war in the early 1970s led to questioning about whether the U.S. was still able and willing to intervene militarily in other countries.
The result was that in the 1970s, the U.S. sought to reduce its military presence in South Korea. First came the Nixon Doctrine, which contemplated the partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from Asia, while offering allies in the region the protection of America’s nuclear umbrella.
As a result, the number of U.S. troops in South Korea was cut from 61,000 to 41,000 by 1971.
Then, President Jimmy Carter pledged to bring home the remaining U.S. troops from South Korea, citing Seoul’s poor human rights record under President Park Chung-hee as one reason.
In the end, Carter did not follow through on his promise. The growing strength of the Soviet Union at that time and perceptions that North Korea was serving as its proxy gave South Korea an important role in the global rivalry between Washington and Moscow.
The public justification for the continuance of U.S. forces in South Korea was to help protect the democratic values that Seoul embraced since the early 1990s from the danger posed by the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang.
Less spoken of was the U.S. desire to maintain troops on the Asian mainland to help contain a rising China. But this did not prevent the U.S. from reducing its troop levels in South Korea from 37,000 to 28,000 in the early 2000s as Washington shifted its focus to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given this historical background, it is somewhat puzzling why U.S. President Donald Trump would consider a military strike against North Korea. The ostensible reason would be to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear-tipped ICBMs capable of reaching the U.S.
But North Korea would only contemplate their use against the U.S. if the Americans or South Koreans invaded the North.
If the U.S. wants to avoid a war on the Korean Peninsula that could possibly kill millions and cause massive destruction, the logical conclusion would be to sign a peace treaty with North Korea and withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea as Nixon and Carter considered when the geostrategic stakes were much higher.
Critics of such a move would argue that it would undermine the global alliance system that the U.S. has constructed since World War II and be viewed as weakening U.S. security commitments to its allies.
But the Trump administration is already achieving this on its own due to its erratic foreign policy. Many allies, including South Korea and Japan, would consider a U.S. preventive war against North Korea as highly destabilizing to the global situation.
Moreover, Trump has shown little regard for South Korea’s own interests, by threatening to end the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, for example.
Perhaps the best way to establish a new balance of power on the Korean Peninsula would be to allow South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons, a position endorsed by candidate Trump. Most South Koreans already support such a move as a preferable alternative to the possibly imminent unleashing of a destructive war by the U.S. against North Korea.
If you think this means abandoning an ally, think again. The defense build-up now being undertaken by the Moon Jae-in administration shows that Seoul no longer wants to rely heavily on the U.S. for protection.