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To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” – Samuel Johnson

Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s defenses, and later by ruling it through an inter-Korean confederation that it will use to suppress dissent, neutralize it as a political and military threat, and loot its resources without the burdens of war, occupation, or cultural pollution. The Panmunjom agreement will fuel Pyongyang’s expectations of collaboration by a government in Seoul that prioritizes ethno-nationalism and appeasement over the protection (much less the propagation) of liberal democratic values.

To be clear, if the democratically elected South Korean government asks us to leave, we must respect its wishes, although I doubt that Moon Jae-in wants us to leave just yet. If that were to happen prematurely, it might provoke a political backlash that would derail his agenda. For now, he’s using Moon Chung-in to hint at a U.S. withdrawal while publicly denying it for three reasons: first, to push back in negotiations over South Korea’s financial contribution to the cost of keeping U.S. forces on its soil; second, to reassure Pyongyang that Seoul will honor the Panmunjom agreement by ejecting U.S. forces once it has the political cover to do so; and third, to reassure moderate and conservative voters that it intends to do no such thing, to prevent that political backlash.

That is to say, the Blue House wants to have it both ways — and it can, because as all good politicians know, most people believe what they want to believe. So it tells Washington that Uncle Moon was speaking only for himself but signs a deal assuring Pyongyang that he wasn’t. It lets its (sometimes, violently) anti-American base think that their cherished goal of a Yankee-free inter-Korean confederation is near, while reassuring moderate and conservative voters, who are apprehensive about a U.S. withdrawal, that our troops will stay in Korea forever.

Moderates and conservatives will feel Uncle Sam’s warm security blanket covering their feet again, roll over, and go back to sleep. Moon will continue his gradual, stealthy censorship of his critics. And if current trends continue, South Koreans will eventually give Moon a supermajority in the National Assembly and hand Im Jong-seok, the world’s most misleadingly labeled “democracy” activist, unchecked power to rewrite their Constitution and advance my hypothesis toward an irrevocable reality. If so, the Korean War will be lost before most of us even know it.

A Blanket of False Security

Let’s start by stating the obvious. A secure Korea serves everyone’s interest. An insecure Korea would plunge the world into recession and create a refugee crisis in a region that is an engine of the global economy. It would be catastrophic for America’s influence as a protector to its allies around the world. It would cause a humanitarian crisis that would dwarf the one in Syria and the one that has been ongoing in North Korea since Kim Il-sung consolidated his rule. It would mean that America is no longer great.

The questions I’m raising, however, are different ones — questions that I’ve been asking since I arrived in South Korea as an Army officer in Korea 20 years ago: does the presence of the U.S. Army in Korea do more to serve that common interest or disserve it?1 Is South Korea still a poor, beleaguered, freedom-loving nation facing the threat of conventional invasion from a crack North Korean army or a human wave of Chinese volunteers, or are our forces defending Korea from an anachronism? Does the current posture of U.S. forces in Korea still reflect present-day threats to its security, or is it stuck in a 1970s model of that threat? Does the security blanket that America throws over a prosperous South Korea give its people a false sense of security that actually enables its most frivolous policymaking, which has become a greater threat to its security than a conventional invasion?

The most obvious reason for our presence in South Korea is to deter a North Korean attack by telling Pyongyang (and Beijing) that an attack on South Korea would mean war with us – except that it hasn’t meant that since 2010, when Pyongyang carried out two major attacks on South Korea, killed 50 of its people, and got away with it. A second answer is to fill gaps in South Korea’s defense, although South Korea has since become a wealthy OECD nation with a sky-high Human Development Index that spends a lower portion of its GDP2 on defense (2.6 percent) than the United States does (3.3 percent), and much less than what Israel, another small state surrounded by larger foes, spends (5.7 percent).

Some commentators suggest a third reason — to restrain South Korean retaliation against the next provocation, which is exactly the opposite of deterrence. A fourth (usually unstated) reason is to give investors in South Korea enough security to prevent a collapse of the stock and real estate markets and prevent capital flight. Also, all those American paychecks are an important benefit — and also, a scourge — to the towns and neighborhoods near U.S. installations.

Should we view Uncle Moon’s talk of a U.S. withdrawal as a threat to our interests? A trope I sometimes hear from left-of-center Koreans is that our troops are in South Korea to help us sell weapons to its government – an argument Donald Trump recently conceded to them. Like most tropes, the harder you think about it, the dumber it sounds. If the U.S. withdrew from Korea, and if Korea raised its defense spending to the same percentage of its GDP that the U.S. currently spends on its armed forces – to say nothing of the percentage Israel spends – the result would be a massive windfall for General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Only America (and Israel)3 make the technology South Korea needs to protect itself from North Korea’s missiles, rockets, and artillery. Without the firepower that U.S. forces add, Moon would also have to tell his young voters that their conscription periods will be longer. Maybe it’s a theory we should test, right after I call my broker.4

Of course, it’s also possible that the current South Korean government would not raise its defense spending at all, counting on the appeasement of North Korea to substitute for a credible national defense. But America does not have enough soldiers to protect such a government from itself.

A Widening Disunity of Interests

The maintenance of such a large U.S. military presence in South Korea has institutionalized an unhealthy security dependency in one capital and an unhealthy financial dependency in another. In Washington, a well-funded Korea lobby exists to influence our policy debates and above all, to suppress questions about any disunity of interests between the U.S. and South Korea. Particularly when left-wing governments are in power in Seoul, it can cost a think tank its funding to allow its scholars to raise such questions. In my capacity as a guy with a blog, I’m increasingly grateful that I have no entanglements with this lobby. If think tanks can’t raise questions about that widening disunity, at least I can raise them here. An emerging one is how Moon Jae-in is grasping at financial lifelines to throw Kim Jong-un to undermine sanctions, and with them, America’s strategy for disarming him and protecting ourselves from him without resorting to war. Moon Jae-in is dangerously blithe about the risks of this strategy.

Supporters of the status quo will point to polls showing that most Americans support a large U.S. presence in South Korea. But the less people know about an issue, the more malleable their views tend to be, and Americans’ depth of knowledge isn’t comforting.

A point that even many Korea experts underappreciate is that the presence of so many young Americans in South Korea also carries a high cost in the political support of its people. It is true that polls have consistently shown that most South Koreans want there to be Americans in South Korea. My own observation is that most South Koreans also want our soldiers to be somewhere else in Korea, preferably confined to a post in someone else’s neighborhood, and dating someone else’s sister. Since the end of my four-year tour — which I extended twice and would gladly have extended again — I’ve been a skeptic of the consensus supporting a large U.S. military presence there. But then, I tend to see conflicts in political rather than strictly military terms. It’s a tendency I share with our enemies.

Toxicity, the Companion of Dependency

When I think back to my own experiences in South Korea and put myself in the place of the Koreans, I can empathize with why, on a rational level, they would want us to stay, while on an emotional level, they’d prefer that we didn’t. Given these conflicting feelings, is it any wonder that the relationship between the U.S. and Korea is complex, conflicted, and vacillating? Some of Korea’s anti-Americanism is politically cynical, violent, and occasionally racist. Some of it is the natural and understandable reaction of an advanced, well-educated society to the boorish (and occasionally, also racist) behavior of young soldiers who, at the end of every pay period, descend on their neighborhoods with more money than sobriety. Toxicity is always the companion of dependency. Is it possible that South Korea’s uneven political development — its toxic nationalism, its easy default to censorship, its untamed security establishment, its dangerously frivolous and impulsive vacillations of national security policy5 — are partially the products of our own good intentions, executed as they are with such characteristically American clumsiness?

No matter how immeasurably my own four-year tour with the Army in Korea enriched my life, as a matter of policy, I’ve long wondered if a large U.S. presence was doing us more political harm than military good. I spent my work days as an Army Trial Defense Counsel in Korea listening to young Privates, Specialists, and Sergeants tell me about the checks they couldn’t cover and the fights they couldn’t quite remember over Russian bar hostesses who seldom seemed to be worth fighting about. In the last of my feral years, before I met my wife and succumbed to her civilizing influence, too many of my own nights were spent prowling the same delectably tawdry alleys, getting turned away from “Korean-only” clubs, watching in shame6 as drunken soldiers shouted abuse at the elderly women selling them soju shots and takkoji, and wondering which of those soldiers I’d see in my waiting room on Monday for Article 15 advice. It isn’t hard to see how such experiences cause bitterness among both Koreans and Americans.

My experience doesn’t qualify me as a military expert, but I also wonder if the structure of our forces in Korea — one that contemplates the immediate involvement of U.S. soldiers in a ground war — should adapt to new political realities and technologies. Is it really wise for us to let Pyongyang decide the terms on which we become involved in a ground war in Asia? Having large numbers of ground forces in Korea almost guarantees high losses during the first week of a conflict, to say nothing of the civilian dead on all sides. If losing 4,000 dead in Iraq was a politically unsustainable loss, imagine how long the American appetite for a ground war in Korea would last.

Maybe having a particularly faithless ally in the Blue House is a particularly good opportunity for a long-overdue reevaluation of that structure, to tailor it to face the contemporary threat, to reduce its costs and amplify its benefits, or to ask if South Korea might even be stronger without it. As long as I’ve watched Koreans elect men who make frivolous national security policies, I’ve wondered if our presence is, in addition to instigating the frictions that lonely young men inevitably stir in foreign lands, retarding Korea’s political and social development.

That’s why I welcome a careful reconsideration of U.S. Forces Korea’s structure, size, and purpose, with two important caveats. First, whatever the right structure may be for USFK — if any — it’s not a matter that we should negotiate with Pyongyang under any circumstances. Second, the push to restructure USFK must not be a bargaining tool or an act of exasperation, but a strategy to help South Korea achieve military and psychological self-confidence, a sense of nationhood, and its graduation from a dependency into a mature democracy.

South Korea Needs Missile Defense & Sisu

But if the U.S. withdrew, wouldn’t South Korea fall like South Vietnam did? Not necessarily. First, a historical corrective: if the whole South Vietnamese Army had fought with the courage that General Lê Minh Äảo and his 18th Division showed in their desperate, last-ditch defense of Xuân Lá»™c, there would still be a South Vietnam today. Yes, Saigon was undercut by the oil shock of the 1970s and the cutoff of U.S. military aid, but in the end, it fell because it lacked self-confidence and national cohesion. In wars, a superior will to fight almost always beats superior firepower.

[A highway on the outskirts of Saigon, April 1975]

I could cite other examples of nations that were just as beleaguered by hostile neighbors as South Korea, yet still managed to defend themselves despite their small populations and land areas, and without the assistance of foreign troops. Although we speak today of “Finlandization” as a qualified surrender to a stronger neighbor, Finland’s courageous defense against the U.S.S.R. in the Winter War of 1939 to 1940 is my favorite historical example of this.7 It undoubtedly saved Finland’s national independence and spared it from Stalinist terror. The Finns have a word for the grim determination of their outnumbered, poorly equipped soldiers: sisu. Yes, we should talk about how to give the South Korean Army the firepower it needs, because firepower inspires confidence in soldiers. But the historically determinative question is whether South Korea’s society has sisu.

A more relevant example may be Israel — a tiny, outnumbered, democratically fractious yet nationally cohesive, and well-armed country that has successfully fended off multiple invasions by larger neighbors, without U.S. troops and before it acquired nuclear weapons. Israel could be a model of how a self-sufficient and self-confident South Korea can defend itself.

Nuclear weapons certainly help Israel defend itself, of course, and the more I think about the possibility of South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan nuking up, the more comfortable I become with it. British and French nuclear weapons never endangered the security of the world. On the contrary, they helped restore a post-war balance of power against a mighty and predatory U.S.S.R. and preserve the peace in Europe for decades. What strikes me as far more dangerous is the rising imbalance of power in Asia, where the least democratic and most aggressive states have a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, and where the most democratic and least aggressive ones are increasingly vulnerable, both militarily and politically.

If, as the pundits now urge us, we must accept that North Korea is irreversibly a nuclear state, doesn’t it follow that we must acknowledge the legitimate interests of South Korea and Japan in acquiring their own nuclear deterrents?

China dwarfs Asia’s democracies geographically and demographically, but economically and militarily, they’re theoretically capable of combining with us into an alliance that would be more than a match for Beijing. They’re practically incapable of this because they make frivolous national security policies over emotional issues of ancient history and trivialities like Dokdo, rather than uniting against clear and present dangers. I can’t help thinking that Korea’s rhetorical aggression against a pacified Japan is psychological compensation for its insecurity about its history and nationhood. Isn’t all nationalism really an expression of insecurity about nationhood? If nuclear weapons help North Korea’s leaders imbue their subjects with a sense of national pride, wouldn’t the same be true of South Korea?

A Bang, Then a Whimper

Today, the greater military threat to South Korea today isn’t a conventional invasion, but artillery, rockets, missiles, and other limited war-of-skirmish attacks designed to nibble gradually at its strategic position and economic vitality, and terrorize it into submission. That strategy can’t work if South Korea is politically mature and cohesive. Unfortunately, from where I sit, it looks to be neither.

Take recent polls showing that 89 percent of South Koreans called the recent summit with Kim Jong-un a success. A full 78 percent of them now say they “trust” Kim Jong-un. I am reminded of the last sentences of 1984, words that could be an epitaph for humanity itself: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

In fact, the deal was a lopsided capitulation that gained South Korea nothing tangible and turned South Korean police into North Korean censors. It promised significant economic concessions that would undermine U.N. sanctions, scuttle any hopes for the North’s peaceful disarmament, and thus make war almost inevitable. It put off the North’s denuclearization indefinitely, which guarantees that South Korea will be at the North’s supine mercy in “peace” talks without so much as a safeword to whimper at their new dominatrix. Contrast that with the results I cited here ten months ago, in which most Koreans favored THAAD, opposed Kaesong, and strongly opposed resuming humanitarian aid to the North.

Such a massive shift suggests a capriciousness that borders on mass neurosis. Moon may not have had a mandate to revive the Sunshine Policy ten months ago, but the polls suggest that he has one now, and the June 13th elections that will decide 11 seats in the National Assembly seem likely to back that up. Conservatives cling to evidence that Moon’s party has manipulated online comments, and by inference, public opinion. Experts may argue that Korean pollsters aren’t known for their rigor or integrity, or point out that their results aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison that necessarily predicts election results, parliamentary approval of the Panmunjom agreement, constitutional “reform,” or an inter-Korean confederation that North Korea interprets as one-country, two-systems.

But in most cases, arguments that the polls are wrong or misleading are the arguments of people who are about to lose elections. The polls aren’t that wrong, although it’s always possible that they could shift back with remarkable swiftness for unpredictable reasons. And as much as I claim credit when my predictions (even terrible ones) are validated, I may have overestimated Koreans’ rational judgment of a “peace” process that is objectively certain to end badly for everyone on the peninsula except Kim Jong-un. Maybe even I was not pessimistic enough. I did not predict that highly educated, intelligent people would fall for a ploy so transparent, or would entrust their fate to a conniving psychopath.8 A democracy is only as strong as the capacity of its people for self-government. In the next few months, we may learn which Korea’s political system will collapse first.

The problem this presents for Americans is that “everyone” on the Korean peninsula presently includes approximately 29,000 of our soldiers and airmen, and tens of thousands of civilians and family members. Our challenge, then, might not be whether to disengage from Korea, but how to disengage on terms that serve our own interests. It is only prudent for us to plan accordingly.

Korea: The Israel of Asia, or the next Cambodia?

Should America let Korea fall, then? I hope not. I’d hope the prospect of U.S. disengagement would concentrate South Koreans’ minds and cause them to think more rationally about what it means to share their national resources and system of government with a nuclear-armed, totalitarian state that openly advocates the extermination of its critics.

Those on the political left who assume the storm will pass over them should remember the fate of Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Andres Nin. Those who dismiss this as empty rhetoric should remember the fate of millions of Jews, many of whom had dismissed the genocidal intentions Hitler expressed in Mein Kampf. Pyongyang has warned us, and so has history. Ample evidence tells us that Pyongyang’s threats are not empty talk.

It may also be possible to restructure USFK to allow a more self-confident Korea to stand up and assert its independence and nationhood. A modernized alliance would expose fewer Americans to risk and protect more Koreans from the threat of bombardment that has hung over them for decades. Promising studies from the Congressional Research Service suggest that within a few years, a combination of laser weapons, hypervelocity projectiles, and railguns could give Korea a layered defense against North Korea’s artillery, rockets, and missiles. That defense wouldn’t stop every rocket, but it would stop enough to make a first strike both ineffective and suicidal. It will be costly, but Korea is a rich country, and if it’s willing to protect itself, it should have no better friend than us.

But in the end, the factors that will determine the outcome of Korean War II and the fate of Korea are political ones – a belief that South Korea is the rightful standard-bearer of Korea’s nationhood,9 a sense that its political system and society are worth fighting and even dying for, and the certain knowledge that surrender to totalitarianism means eventual extinction. A nation cannot survive without confidence in its nationhood, and that sense must come from within. It cannot be borrowed from or outsourced to a foreign guarantor.

Give South Koreans a referendum on their future

If the arc of Korean history bends toward capitulation, the continuing presence of American forces is less likely to bend it back than soothe into passivity those Koreans who can still bend it back. Our presence would only create a false sense of security and quell any sense of alarm that the Blue House is consenting to a quiet capitulation of the freedom and prosperity their parents and grandparents won at such a terrible cost. Maybe the U.S. presence is contributing to the clearest and most present danger to Koreans’ security by obstructing the concentration of their minds, by retarding their development of a confident sense of nationhood, and by excusing them from the grim burdens of sisu.

Can America do anything to bend that arc back? One answer might be to present Koreans with a stark choice and a referendum. So let President Trump go to his summit with His Porcine Majesty, and soon. Let him hear Kim Jong-un’s offer. Then, let him — and John Kelly, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, and Mike Pompeo — explain to us why those terms are tantamount to surrender, why Moon was a fool or worse10 for agreeing to them, and that while South Korea is free to surrender itself, we would rather retrench ourselves in Japan than subsidize frivolous policies that undermine our own security. Leak those plans to downsize or withdraw U.S. Forces Korea (but deny them, naturally!). Awaken those South Koreans who still fear totalitarianism and genocide, and who still value liberal democracy. It is their choice to defend or discard it, not America’s duty to impose it on the unwilling or the unworthy.

To paraphrase LBJ, we ought not station American boys and girls nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian voters ought to be doing for themselves. Alliances must serve the shared interests of both nations. They must not become occupations. Nor should they become suicide pacts.

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Photo credit: Flickr

1. We also have two major air bases in Korea. A better argument can be made for keeping them in Korea, at least until South Korea can upgrade its own ballistic missiles and air power.

2. figures from 2016

3. usually, in partnership with U.S. defense contractors

4. The trope works both ways. An American nationalist might argue that we’re in Korea to prop up the stock prices of Samsung and Hyundai, and to prevent capital flight and a crash of the inflated real estate market north of Seoul. If I had extra money to play with right now, I’d go long on U.S. defense contractors and short on Hyundai, Samsung, and LG.

5. even worse than our own

6. Yes, I did try to intervene once. The soldier was very drunk and very large, and I was not. Even pulling rank was useless. There wasn’t a Courtesy Patrol in sight. It almost ended very badly for me. Alas, God made me to do my fighting in courtrooms and over statute books.

7. Finland accepted German soldiers and weapons in 1941, during the subsequent Continuation War. It kicked them out in 1944.

8. I have an equally perfect record with U.S. politics. In every presidential election since I reached the age of majority, I’ve voted against the winning candidate in either the primaries, the general, or both. Given the performance of the winning candidates, I wear this as a badge of honor and only hope I’ll have the opportunity to pick about nine or ten more losers. Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.

9. The absence of Chinese forces may be North Korea’s last (and potentially determinative) propaganda advantage over the South.

10. Because of Moon’s popularity and Trump’s unpopularity, they should not criticize Moon personally; rather, Trump’s most respected cabinet secretaries should criticize Panmunjom’s terms.