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Seoul on ice: conservatives are talking about pulling out of South Korea. Big mistake

Washington Monthly, May, 2005 by Soyoung Ho

The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations With North and South Korea By Ted Galen Carpenter and Doug Bandow Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95

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This book brings a welcome revolution to recent American scholarship about the Korean peninsula: It actually focuses on both North and South Korea. It's no surprise, of course, that most writers have chosen North Korea as their prime topic: That weird, dangerous state is simply a juicier subject, with its epic isolation, creepy and seemingly unpredictable Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, and alarming nuclear development programs. But America's relationship with Seoul--based for a half-century on a shared interest in having U.S. troops serve as a preventative tripwire against the militaristic, communist North--is evolving, too. This transformation is brought about by a rising progressive nationalism in South Korea, which seeks independence from America--partly due to its economic might in Asia and its budding democracy. In addition, a weaker North Korea, despite its current belligerent posturing, has meant the possibility of war less likely than before. And that means that the future of both our relationship with Pyongyang and our security posture in East Asia are dependent, in large part, on what we do about Seoul.

The authors of The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea would prefer that we wash our hands of the peninsula and its knotty North Korean brinkmanship politics, retreat across the Pacific and let these tense, feuding cousins sort things out for themselves. That shouldn't come as any great surprise, given their backgrounds: Ted Galen Carpenter and Doug Bandow are scholars--but not Korea specialists--at the oft-libertarian CATO Institute, a think tank known for arguing that America is committed to defending wholly unnecessary places abroad. These scholars are influential members of the conservative foreign policy establishment--Bandow, in particular, has been a prominent defender of President Bush's nomination of U.N. skeptic John Bolton as ambassador to that body--and if their audacious prescription for the Koreas doesn't match the administration's current stance, then it's a safe bet that this book is getting a hearing within the conservative elements of the Departments of State and Defense, where skepticism about the future of an American commitment to South Korea, which costs $1.38 billion a year to maintain its units based there, has been percolating.

Carpenter and Bandow argue that, even if a war breaks out on the peninsula, it would not harm America's national interest: "Today, the Koreas are a peripheral interest at best.... There are strong personal and cultural ties between Americans and Koreans; however, the [Republic of Korea] has little security relevance. War on the Korean peninsula would be tragic, but essentially irrelevant to America were it not for the U.S. troop presence." Though they also argue that the importance of Korean trade to our economy has been overblown, and cite media reports on anti-American sentiment festering in Seoul, the book's main argument for troop withdrawal is simply the savings it will bring to the Pentagon budget. They also argue that, given violent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would make sense to reconfigure troop deployments.

Carpenter and Bandow think that South Korea has benefited quite disproportionately from the presence of our troops, while the United States hasn't gotten much in return. It's certainly true that the Republic has done well under American protection: Today, South Korea has the 10th largest economy in the world and belongs to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the rich countries' club, a stark contrast to its $90 per capita GDP in the early 1960s. The Korean Conundrum rightly notes that such economic success was made possible largely by American security guarantees, which let South Korea spend comparatively little on its own defense and focus instead on civil development, building its economic infrastructure.

If our wealthy East Asian security clients, Japan and South Korea, are so worried about staying safe, say Carpenter and Bandow, let them pick up the bill. "Why can Seoul not shorten the process by acquiring U.S. weapons? And why did it not begin to develop new weapons over the last two decades, as economic growth has delivered the necessary resources for increased military investments?" they complain. It's certainly true that it lies within the means of Japan and South Korea to supply the materiel and human resources for their own defense. But American presence, hence its forward leadership, has been a stabilizing factor throughout Asia. It isn't only about simple troop numbers.

Moreover, there's a binary calculus to deterrence these days: Either you've got nuclear weapons or you haven't. North Korea, it seems, now has nukes. So do we. South Korea and Japan don't. In this crude arithmetic (the same terms in which North Korea seems to understand the fight for peninsular supremacy), fully funded South Korean army divisions and Japanese naval battalions won't be enough to deter North Korea from invading. They would need to develop nuclear weapons. Even the garrisoned communist cadres north of the 38th parallel understand the real weight of American power.

Seoul on ice: conservatives are talking about pulling out of South Korea. Big mistake

Washington Monthly, May, 2005 by Soyoung Ho

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