The Unintended Consequences of Success: U.S. Retrenchment from Korea?^*

Prudent foreign policymakers always do well to contemplate the unintended consequences of their success. That is, in meeting policy objectives, a state must also consider the secondary and tertiary follow-on effects of its achievement. Leaders must anticipate how positive or negative these consequences are in the shaping of the original foreign policy pursuit. In this article, I look at whether the unintended consequence of the South Korean government’s push for a peace declaration on the Korean Peninsula could create the conditions by which the United States, led by an impulsive American president, could withdraw U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula. I first document the rationale behind the South Korean government’s approach to peace diplomacy with North Korea, illustrating the single-minded determination of President Moon Jae-in to achieve this objective. I then examine the concept of the peace declaration, which is different from a ratifiable treaty, and the “catch-22” of this declaration as it relates to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Finally, I analyze how the peace declaration may achieve superficial objectives, but does not address core national security concerns of either ally, and how it could create unintended consequences with regard to troop drawdowns. This research features an original and unique dataset that documents Donald Trump’s transactional view of U.S. military commitments to its allies over the past three decades.

The two Koreas and the United States appear to be headed, albeit slowly, towards a peace and denuclearization agreement. Indeed, the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has declared his objective of achieving a peace declaration before the end of his presidency (in 2022), and has already held an unprecedented three summit meetings with the North Korean leader in 2018 for this purpose.¹ U.S. president Donald Trump agreed to conclude a peace agreement at the Singapore Summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and reiterated this objective in the second summit meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam in February 2019.

The rush to a peace declaration, while generating temporary political windfalls, may also have the unintended consequence of permanently weakening the U.S.–ROK alliance. In particular, the whims and impulsive nature of this U.S. president, combined with a deep and abiding skepticism about U.S. overseas military deployments, could result in his abandoning the time-honored United States ground troop commitment to the Korean Peninsula. For some Koreans and Americans, a pullout after 65 years might be a welcome outcome as South Korea develops more autonomous capabilities to defend itself. But as Joseph Nye once described, the U.S. presence on the Korean Peninsula is like oxygen. You do not notice it when it is there, but once it is gone, there is nothing else you can think about to survive.²

The South Korean government has worked feverishly towards achieving a declaration ending the state of hostilities on the Peninsula. After a tumultuous 2017 replete with missile and nuclear tests by North Korea, the Moon government utilized the February–March 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics to facilitate high-level exchanges with North Korean officials, including with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his sister Kim Yo-jong. In March 2018, Moon managed to elicit a commitment from President Trump to meet with the North Korean leader to resolve the nuclear issue.³ When Trump cancelled the meeting on May 24, Moon stepped in, meeting with the North Korean leader a second time two days later to put the summit back on track.⁴ The Singapore Summit in June 2018 was long on ceremony and photos but short on substance, producing a broad statement of principles on denuclearization and reconciliation but no tangible progress.⁵ As subsequent U.S.–DPRK negotiations to implement the Singapore declaration appeared to stall at the end of 2018 when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cancelled a trip to Pyongyang, the ROK again intervened with a third summit meeting to avoid a breakdown in diplomatic momentum and to promote a second Trump–Kim summit in Vietnam in February 2019.⁶ When that summit concluded without an agreement, Moon again stepped in to pick up the diplomatic pieces.

The peace declaration sought by the South Koreans lacks clarity as a concept. Interlocutors contend it is not akin to a formal peace treaty ending the war, but more of a modest political declaration. President Moon Jae-in spoke about the declaration and a peace treaty during his speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, where he said:

While some guard posts and mines along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) are being removed, and military exercising is suspended, the declaration appears aimed to use such measures to transform the hostile atmosphere surrounding the 66–year ceasefire to a more conciliatory one, but without a formal end to the war.⁸ Because the peace declaration does not impact the United Nations Command, the Combined Forces Command, nor the status of United States, ROK, or DPRK military forces on the Korean Peninsula, the South Korean government contends, it is a political “trust-building” device that does not threaten the U.S.–ROK alliance nor negotiate the status of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula.

As limited a measure as this sounds, the peace declaration is being pursued with white hot intensity by the two Koreas. As noted already, Moon has declared the objective of achieving it before the end of his presidency, and steps along this path, including the opening of a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea and groundbreaking on inter–Korean railway projects have been taken with grudging U.S. consent.⁹ The question naturally arises as to why the South Korean government is pursuing this declaration with such vigor, when it is a half-measure that will not fundamentally alter the military balance, and will not be accompanied by a final dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons threat.¹⁰

First, the South Korean government does not want to return to the “Fire and Fury” recriminations of 2017 when Seoul looked like it might become entrapped in a war between the United States and DPRK as President Trump and North Korean leader Kim threatened to attack each other. Kim conducted 20 ballistic missile tests and one hydrogen bomb test during Trump’s first twelve months in office.¹¹ Trump ordered heightened exercising and movement of strategic assets and munitions to the region.¹² During this period, I viewed the danger of miscalculation and escalation as very real, and never heard more talk about war inside the Beltway during my thirty years of policy. For the South Korean government, almost anything is better than another war on the Korean Peninsula; thus, it is pressing hard to prevent the loss of momentum created from the Winter Olympics through the Vietnam summit.

Second, domestic politics drives the Moon administration towards a peace declaration. Upon taking power in a popular referendum after the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in December 2016, the Moon government believes its engagement–oriented policies on North Korea truly represent the will of the people. Moreover, progressives within the Blue House feel as though they are making up for lost time after nine years of conservative governments in South Korea, under Park and her predecessor Lee Myung-bak, and eight years of the Obama administration’s “strategic patience” policy, both of which did little to address a festering situation with North Korea that eventually led to the war crisis in the first twelve months of the Trump administration. From this progressive perspective, it would not have mattered who won the presidential election in the United States; negligence of North Korea over the past decade would have led to the same outburst from Pyongyang even if Hillary Clinton had been in the Oval Office. Thus, Seoul needed to engineer a course correction.

The third reason for the Moon government’s unilateral pursuit of engagement has to do with a unique confluence of Korean ideology and American political unconventionality. Key members of the current government in Seoul are motivated by a deep, ethnic nationalist conviction that the source of all the country’s ills stem from the division of the homogenous Korean people by external powers. Achieving inter–Korean reconciliation is the priority, but this has been complicated by opposition from the security patron, the United States, throughout the Cold War and because of the nuclear threat. But with Donald Trump, an egotistical individual who takes pride in dropping all policy conventions, the South Koreans see a unique opportunity to purse inter–Korean reconciliation. Seoul can advocate an agenda calling for summits between U.S. and DPRK leaders, rebuilding of inter–Korean economic projects, and peace declarations, all the while giving credit for these accomplishments entirely to the U.S. president. For example, when ROK national security advisor Chung Eui-yong succeeded in eliciting a commitment from Trump to meet with Kim Jong-un, his public announcement in front of the West Wing was preceded by obsequious stroking of the U.S. leader’s ego—“I explained to President Trump that his leadership and his maximum pressure policy, together with international solidarity, brought us to this juncture. I expressed President Moon Jae-in’s personal gratitude for President Trump’s leadership…”¹³

The theory behind a peace declaration, advocates argue, is that only with a reduction in the North’s external threat will the regime be capable of considering the surrender of its nuclear weapons. But in reality, a peace agreement would gain little purchase on Pyongyang handing over its weapons any time soon. First, as Siegfried Hecker has argued, both the size of North Korea’s nuclear program and the adversarial nature of relations between DPRK and international inspectors compels that a disarmament process, were it ever agreed upon, would take well over a decade to fully execute.¹⁴ Second, there is a catch-22 logic behind a peace declaration—that is, North Korea will never give up its weapons for a peace declaration, which is temporary and informal; however, a formal and permanent peace treaty would not be possible without removal of those weapons. As a result, the South Koreans and the Chinese have pushed a more modest “declaration for declaration” diplomatic formula—that is, the exchange of a peace declaration by the United States for a nuclear inventory declaration by the DPRK. But even this modest denuclearization step seems unlikely, as the previous nuclear agreement with North Korea fourteen years ago, which I participated in, stalled when the process reached the point of requiring a declaration by Pyongyang. North Korea has instead put forward even more modest measures—such as allowing international inspectors to verify the decommissioning of old nuclear test sites and facilities—which are purposefully designed not to allow international access to the core extant and potential nuclear and missile capabilities of the regime.¹⁵ The point of this is to say that barring some surprise back channel negotiations that promise major concessions by the North (as President Trump has sometimes signaled—“I think what we have done behind the scenes, which nobody really knows about, and I do not blame you for not knowing… but if you saw what was going on behind the scenes, you would be impressed…”¹⁶), the United States and South Korea appear headed for a peace declaration in return for modest denuclearization measures that do not come close to approximating the goal of final and fully verifiable denuclearization.

No one is against peace. Moving away from the state of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula would be a welcome and historic development for Koreans and Americans. And avoiding a return to the mutual recriminations and threats of military attack in 2017 would be smart for everyone. When the United States was considering a limited military strike on North Korea in 2017, the situation was so tense that, according to Bob Woodward, President Trump on more than one occasion wanted to tweet that U.S. dependents should start to leave the theater.¹⁷ For anyone familiar with the military situation and plans on the Peninsula, such an act could easily have sparked a war.¹⁸

Moreover, many advocates would argue that a peace declaration offers many benefits with little downside. The peace declaration would be a pronouncement of non-hostile intent by all parties and might transform the overall atmosphere in which nuclear negotiations could take place.¹⁹ It would be in exchange for some initial denuclearization steps, which might be a less-than-perfect outcome for the absolutist “CVID–oriented” nonproliferation ideologues in the United States, but these steps would still constitute an advancement beyond achievements of any previous administration. China would support a peace declaration, as would Russia. Japan might not, but proponents argue that a peace agreement could become a new platform of non-hostile intent from which Japan–DPRK bilateral tension reduction and normalization talks could commence. Finally, a peace declaration would not be tantamount to a formal peace treaty, so it would not impact the United Nations Command or the U.S.–ROK Combined Forces Command, keeping the core of the U.S.–ROK alliance and deterrence posture firmly intact. Thus, advocates claim that this looks like a “winner” all around the table.

Not really. Prudent policymaking requires calculating the follow-on consequences of any policy achievement. In the case of a peace declaration, the unforeseen consequence could be Trump’s decision to abandon security commitments to the Korean Peninsula. Under most circumstances, an interim peace declaration would not constitute the conditions under which alliance managers would contemplate an erosion of the U.S. security presence in Korea. As noted, such an agreement would be interim, carrying with it no obligatory drawdown of troops or dismantling of the Combined Forces Command. However, there are a unique constellation of forces at work that could lead the American president to reach such a conclusion.

First, Donald Trump holds a core belief that U.S. security commitments to allies, and in particular troop commitments, are a waste of money that allows allies to free-ride off of American military beneficence while permitting them to “fleece” the United States on trade. This is a deeply-held opinion that long pre-dates Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office. According to a unique CSIS Korea Chair dataset of statements by Trump on U.S. troop commitments abroad, the then real estate mogul first revealed his thinking in a 1990 Playboy Magazine interview: “We Americans are laughed at around the world for losing a hundred and fifty billion dollars year after year, for defending wealthy nations for nothing, nations that would be wiped off the face of the earth in about fifteen minutes if it weren’t for us. Our “allies” are making billions screwing us.”²⁰ In over 110 instances in the dataset covering twenty–nine years (1990 to present) appended to this article, Trump has returned to this theme with consistency, reflecting a neo-isolationist school of thought and an antagonistic and transactional view of allies. In a 2013 interview with then Fox News’ anchor Greta Van Susteren, he said: “You look as an example, South Korea. We are spending tremendous. We spend billions and billions of dollars to protect them from North Korea. They are not giving us anything.”²¹

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump again returned to this policy principle in a sit-down interview with the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and David Sanger. Trump said “[on whether he would withdraw troops from South Korea and Japan] Yes, I would. I would not do so happily, but I would be willing to do it… We cannot afford to be losing vast amounts of billions of dollars on all of this. We just can’t do it anymore…” Later in the same interview, he described “America First” and said “So we had, so America first, yes, we will not be ripped off anymore. We’re going to be friendly with everybody, but we’re not going to be taken advantage of by anybody... I think we’ll be very worldview, but we’re not going to be ripped off anymore by all of these countries [he named China, Japan, South Korea to the Middle East earlier].”²²

While Trump has a transactional economic logic for pulling troops out of Korea, he cannot do so while in the midst of a nuclear crisis with North Korea because this would look like an unadulterated defeat, which would constitute policy failure, but more importantly for him damage his ego. Herein lies the danger of an interim peace agreement. Such an agreement would be appealing to Trump because he would inflate it as “ending the Korean War,” enhancing his self-made argument for Nobel Peace Prize worthiness. If such an agreement were coupled with the fanfare of another summit window-dressed with some modest denuclearization measures, Trump could claim he got a better deal than any of his predecessors. The sum of these measures would give him a platform for executing troop withdrawal as a policy victory—having “solved” the problem—rather than a policy defeat.

Domestically, there would be little popular opposition to such a measure. While the “inside-the-beltway” policy community would be apoplectic, for the American public a president’s message that troops are coming home after over sixty–five years in Korea would resonate deeply as a positive outcome. Trump would spin his actions as a bold, big policy victory, ending the Korean War and allowing America to shed expensive commitments overseas. The interim nature of a peace agreement, and the unfinished business of denuclearization are policy details that mean little to the President and to an electoral base that already expresses 85 percent approval rating (Republicans) over Trump’s North Korea diplomacy.²³ Meanwhile, it would not just be the Cato Institute or Koch Brothers that would support such a move; other branches of the U.S. military might support a ground troop drawdown for budgetary reasons as it might release resources for the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine projects. And American business might see a peace dividend coming from Trump’s actions. I gave a speech to 100 small and mid-cap CEOs from the Midwest shortly after the Singapore Summit. Rather than asking questions about the North Korea threat, many of them questioned why we still need troops in South Korea if Trump and Kim are meeting on such friendly terms.

American acquiescence to a major policy shift like troop withdrawal stems not from gullibility to Trump’s political spinning of his accomplishments; rather, it comes from a general lack of understanding of the Korean issue. Polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in 2018 shows that Americans have generally positive feelings about Korea.²⁴ They recognize that South Korea is an ally and support the United States coming to South Korea’s defense. 74 percent of Americans supported maintaining long-term U.S. military bases in South Korea, 64 percent supported the U.S. sending troops to defend South Korea, and 78 percent considers South Korea to be partners to the United States.²⁵ However, the vulnerability in this apparent good will is that basic knowledge about Korea is dangerously thin. That is, Americans may understand that South Korea is an ally, but when asked, “which Korea is the good one?” only about half of them get it right. Without more deeply grounded understanding of the issue, the lack of knowledge makes the public susceptible to wide swings in opinion based on events of the day.

The context of a Trump withdrawal from South Korea would be positive: stressing the achievement of peace, the natural maturation of the alliance to a more equal footing, and the continued American security commitment. The subtext would be much more negative, however, reflecting a significant and possibly irreparable erosion of the alliance. In addition to Trump’s isolationist tendencies and his transactional view of alliances, he sees no particular value in the relationship with South Korea. As noted earlier, he believes that South Korea free-rides on U.S. security while fleecing America on trade imbalances, which is why he wanted on three separate occasions during his first year in office to preemptively withdraw from the free trade agreement, impose steel tariffs on Korea, and now considering auto tariffs.²⁶ In the former two cases, the main counterarguments offered by aides were not economic, but cited the importance of alliance coordination in the face of North Korea’s threats in 2017. When Trump wanted options in 2017 for a military strike on North Korea, his aides urged against him citing the danger to U.S. forces stationed there. And when Trump wanted to pull dependents from South Korea during the crisis, his aides urged restraint because of this would be tantamount to abandoning an ally. Trump ultimately heeded these policy recommendations, but they did not comport with his sensibilities. On the contrary, they arguably reinforced his view of the transactional costs of this alliance. This is because Trump’s policy conventions are contorted—rather than moderating his policy instincts to preserve alliance equities as his advisors suggested, Trump sees the alliance as inhibiting him from acting on his instincts to the fullest. Thus, he views the alliance as a liability, not an asset in the U.S. register of power.

The problem is compounded by two additional issues. The first is the absence of a proactive policy agenda in the current alliance relationship. At the beginning of 2019 and embarking on the third year of the Trump presidency, one is hard-pressed to delineate what the issues are that constitute the mainstay of the proactive alliance development outside of North Korea. Alliance maintenance does not equate with the status quo, but with continuing to find new areas of cooperation to make the alliance better. This is absent today. By comparison, the last time there was a politically progressive government in Korea, a multitude of “alliance advancement” projects were being worked on in addition to North Korea. These included Yongsan base relocation, NATO+3 status for South Korean arms purchases, Visa Waiver program, KORUS, troop deployments in Iraq, climate change, and provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan.²⁷ All of these contributed to a positive and forward-looking agenda for the alliance that reflected both countries’ interests. Today, the alliance is entirely dominated by tension over North Korea, tension over trade, and tension over the cost-sharing negotiations (Special Measures Agreement) in which Trump wants South Korea to pay entirely for the U.S. troop presence on the Peninsula.

The second source for Trump’s dismissal of the alliance’s importance is a general lack of knowledge in the administration about the history of the alliance. Officials have a cross-sectional rather than longitudinal view of policies. The present government in Seoul is the first progressive one in nine years that may naturally want to take a different policy path on North Korea based on their perceived policy neglect of previous conservative governments. This path may succeed or fail, and that judgment will be rendered not by the Moon government but by the public in forthcoming elections. That is what we should expect from democratic allies like South Korea who have consistently been a loyal U.S. partner on the Korean Peninsula and around the world, fighting with the United States in every war since the Korean War. But Trump officials instead simplistically view the current government as “too progressive,” in bed with the North, not worthy of trust, and ultimately not a good ally. And if one does not value an ally, then there is no reason to expend time, energy, and resources there.

Could the U.S. president be stopped from withdrawing from Korea? The answer is that there is very little standing in his way. As the Commander-in-Chief, the president exercises final and unchallenged say over military matters. Congress could pass resolutions trying to restrain the president, and in the case of South Korea this past year, has passed the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act calling on the United States to develop a long-term strategic vision for the Indo–Pacific region, including reiterating our commitment to the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the ROK and strengthening our alliance, as well as amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act.²⁸ But for Congress to execute an effort to block the Commander-in-Chief from altering troop deployments in a time of peace would take the United States into uncharted waters and foment a constitutional crisis. Finally, history has shown little compunction by past U.S. presidents, let alone Trump, to alter troop deployments unilaterally without consultation with allies. Nixon pulled out one division from South Korea as part of the Guam Doctrine in 1971 even as South Korean troops constituted the second largest contingent in Vietnam. Carter considered a total withdrawal of forces from South Korea in 1977 without consulting Seoul. And during the Iraq war in 2003, the United States rotated forces off the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East. If Trump withdrew troops, he would not be the first U.S. president to act unilaterally.

The implications of a Trump pullout from Korea are unknown but would almost certainly have initially negative repercussions. The benefits of a peace agreement and positive atmospherics of U.S.–DPRK summits (and Trump’s Singapore promise to build “beachfront” condos in the North) would be offset by the security deficits incurred by a suboptimal denuclearization deal that left capabilities intact (albeit possibly capped), while the United States was withdrawing forces.

A Trump pullout would shock South Korea. It would set off domestic turmoil as conservatives would attack progressives for losing America. Others would claim long-sought Korean independence from the U.S. yoke. After the initial perturbations, the alliance could conceivably survive a Trump pullout. The United States might maintain a nominal security commitment to South Korea without the traditional physical tripwire presence. The shock of a withdrawal might spark the alliance to innovate on a more even footing, including transfer of wartime operational command (OPCON), more autonomous ROK defense spending, and the replacement of an integrated command structure with coordinated defense guidelines between the two militaries not unlike the U.S.–Japan alliance. But the credibility of the U.S. security commitment would almost certainly weaken in Korean and American eyes.

The real cost could come in longer-term U.S. strategy in Asia. In addition to a Trump pullout roiling the KOSPI, Nikkei, and Shanghai composite indexes, possibly leading to some capital flight from the region, the willingness of the United States to withdraw prematurely from the Korean Peninsula would create a crisis of confidence among U.S. allies and partners, including Japan, Australia, and Taiwan which would feed self-help inclinations in all capitals. By leaving a frontline Cold War state, a U.S. withdrawal would give confidence to China that it has achieved a watershed success in its long-term strategic objective to remove the United States from Asia. This would enhance Chinese confidence in picking apart the U.S. alliance system with economic domination of the Korean Peninsula and political alienation of Japan. Beijing would also pressure Taiwan which itself would be experiencing a crisis of confidence in U.S. commitments. By leaving South Korea, the United States would effectively be returning to a historical geostrategic orientation off of continental Asia, effectively ceding a Chinese sphere of influence, while maintaining a maritime position not unlike what George Kennan suggested of the United States after World War II and before the North Korean invasion in 1950. However, the difference is that Kennan’s view of a Chinese–dominated continental Asia was non-threatening given the absence of power projection capabilities. Today, a continental Asia dominated by China with Taiwan in tow would have major force projection implications for diminished American power and presence in Asia.

The policy implications of this analysis for the United States and its allies have several dimensions. First, future negotiations with North Korea, all the way up to the summit level, must be guided by the core principle of preservation of alliance equities. Denuclearization may require the lifting of sanctions, establishment of political offices, negative security assurances, and economic/energy assistance, but the United States should not play willy nilly with alliance capabilities, including troop deployments, their force posture, and their readiness. Second, while a peace agreement is desirous in terms of changing the environment surrounding the Korean Peninsula, negotiations over such an agreement should not carry explicit nor implicit promises about changing the disposition of forces on the Korean Peninsula. Third, through legislation, Congress must continue to maintain oversight and budgetary authority over changes of the force levels in South Korea. Fourth, any decision to draw down or pull out forces must be subject to an interagency and congressional review of the consequences—both positive and negative—of such a decision. Fifth, the intelligence community must carry out a broad national estimate of the impact on peninsular and regional security of such a plan before any decision is finalized. Finally, while the disposition of U.S. troops aboard is not subject to the approval of host nations, the United States should consult closely with regional allies about their views of the impact of such changes on security and credibility of the United States as the Asia–Pacific power most credited with maintaining stability and prosperity in the region.

The United States has had a long history of unintended consequences on the Peninsula from policy decisions that are made at one point, to be followed by second or third-order consequences that ricochet back to the detriment of U.S. interests. When the Roosevelt administration in 1904 brokered a treaty ending the Russo–Japanese war that gave the United States a sphere of influence over the Philippines, the unintended consequences of this decision was a confrontation with Japan in the Pacific decades later. When the Truman administration drew a defense perimeter in January 1950 that excluded the Korean Peninsula, this led to the North Korean invasion five months later. When President Jimmy Carter considered fulfilling a campaign promise to remove all U.S. troops, it eventually had to stop the unintended consequence of a clandestine South Korean nuclear weapons effort. This is not to say U.S. policy decisions are to blame for the outcomes, but that policymaking is not always only about the immediate timeframe, but also must consider the longer-term consequences. The Trump and Moon administrations seek a peace declaration on the Peninsula during their terms in office. While achieving peace on the Peninsula is absolutely necessary, Trump’s impulsive manner and his deeply held transactional view of alliances could lead to an outcome that would be in neither country’s interest.