Making an Offer South Korea Can't Accept

Eric GomezLast year, the United States asked South Korea for a hefty, 50 percent increase in financial support to cover some of the costs of basing 28,000 troops on South Korean territory. American and Korean negotiators eventually settled on a $925 million, one-year deal that marked an 8.2 percent increase from the previous year. President Trump, evidently dissatisfied by this sum, upped the ante this year and is demanding$5 billion, a 500 percent increase, in the current round of cost-sharing talks.What makes Trump ’s $5 billion shakedown especially vexing is the fact that South Korea has been a very good ally when it comes to burden sharing. Trump’s insistence that U.S. allies ought to bear a greater burden for their defense, a sentiment expressed by many previous U.S. administrations, is reasonable, but some allies—South Korea in particular—do a good job of shouldering their fair share.It ’s unclear how Trump came up with the $5 billion figure, but this seems to be a first push at getting an ally to pay his“cost plus 50” formula—the full cost of deployed troops plus 50 percent extra. Currently, South Korean payments go toward the salaries of their citizens employed as workers on U.S. bases and military construction expenses, though Seoul has not covered either of these two categories in full.According to the Pentagon, the $925 million Seoul paid in 2019 represents about 41 percent of the “day-to-day nonpersonnel-stationing costs” for American forces in...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs