What Good Are US Troops In Korea?
The logic of US troops in South Korea has become threadbare.
You might’ve seen that Trump just announced a reduction in US military exercises in Korea, hinting that it’s really because South Korea would not join America’s illegal, inflationary, imperialist war against Iran:
This triggers many thoughts about a subject I’ve tried to avoid the past several years.
People knew me as a “Korea hand” before they knew me as anything else. I started life as a Korean linguist in the Air Force. I was stationed in South Korea, twice. I was the director for Korea policy in Obama’s Pentagon. I’ve written more about North Korea than I care to remember.
During all that time, I reflexively defended the US-South Korea alliance and all that came with it…US boots on the ground, military exercises, and nonstop talk of “deterrence.”
But I knew, and occasionally said publicly, that the US military presence was not keeping North Korea from invading the South. We often spoke of “deterrence”—ie, the threat implied by our presence prevented the renewed outbreak of war. But that hadn’t been true since the 1970s and even most war hawks have been willing to acknowledge that North Korea has been too desperate economically and inwardly focused politically to gamble its existence on a futile war against a technologically superior South.
The truth is, since the Obama years, the US presence in Korea has served two-and-a-half purposes: