If North Korea is going to start a provocation cycle after the New Year as the Kim regime has vaguely indicated, it appears that the Trump administration is not going to give them an easy excuse to point at for the provocation:
U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announces the allies’ decision to postpone this year’s wintertime combined air exercises during a press briefing with South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo in Bangkok on Nov. 17, 2019. (Yonhap)
South Korea and the United States decided to put off their wintertime combined air exercises to support diplomacy with North Korea, the two sides said Sunday, with U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper urging Pyongyang to reciprocate the goodwill by returning to nuclear talks.
Esper and South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo announced the surprise decision during an impromptu joint press conference in Bangkok on the sidelines of a regional defense ministers’ meeting led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
“We have made this decision as an act of goodwill to contribute to an environment conducive to diplomacy and the advancement of peace,” Esper said after announcing that the allies decided to postpone the Combined Flying Training Event set for later this month.
As I predicted there was no way that the Moon administration was going to reverse course on withdrawing from the GSOMIA. Promoting anti-Japanese sentiment is literally the only issue his party has to run on for the parliamentary elections coming up early next year. Reversing the decision on the GSOMIA would have been a major loss of face for the Moon administration:
President Moon Jae-in (R) shakes hands with U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (L) at a Cheong Wa Dae meeting on Nov. 15, 2019. (Yonhap)
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper told South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday he will try to persuade Japan to “smoothly” resolve the dispute over the two neighbors’ military information-sharing arrangement, according to the presidential office.
During a 50-minute meeting with Esper at Cheong Wa Dae, Moon explained his government’s basic position that it’s “difficult to share military information” with Japan, which has imposed export restrictions against South Korea for a stated reason that Seoul is not trustworthy as a security partner, Cheong Wa Dae spokesperson Ko Min-jung said.
In late August, the Moon administration decided not to renew the General Security of Military Agreement (GSOMIA) and it’s slated to expire as of next Saturday.
As I have been saying the Moon administration needs an issue to run on in Parliamentary elections coming up early next year and really the only thing they got is the anti-Japan issue. From their point of view there is currently no reason to resolve this issue:
Protesters shout slogans at a press conference held in central Seoul, Thursday, to demand the termination of GSOMIA. Yonhap
Washington is putting pressure on Seoul to renew the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Tokyo ahead of the Nov. 22 notification deadline to terminate the pact, which was signed at the U.S. initiative in 2016. Washington has sent key defense officials to Seoul this week ahead of the deadline.
President Moon Jae-in will meet U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper this afternoon, according to Cheong Wa Dae. During the meeting, Moon is expected to explain the need to terminate the pact owing to Japan’s unchanged position on its trade restrictions against Korean companies. He is also expected to reiterate “equitable” cost-sharing for U.S. troops stationed in Korea amid ongoing negotiations on this issue.
With the GSOMIA termination deadline only days away, there is intense media attention particularly on whether Cheong Wa Dae, which has adamantly called on Japan to reverse its trade restrictions first, may shift its stance, given the escalating pressure from the United States to maintain the agreement for the sake of “trilateral security cooperation.”
However, it is unlikely that the presidential office will reverse its decision in light of Japan’s ongoing trade restrictions and its relentless stance on historical disagreements between the two countries, according to sources. During a Nov. 10 press conference, Chung Eui-yong, chief of the National Security Office (NSO), reiterated that Japan should make the first move and justified Korea’s decision to end the pact. “From our point of view, the recent difficulties in Korea-Japan relations were fundamentally caused by Japan,” Chung said. “I believe the Korean people understand that we could not extend the GSOMIA after Japan said that it carried out the trade restrictions because bilateral trust for security cooperation had been harmed.”
You can read more at the link, but the Moon administration is blaming Japan for the trade dispute when it was the Moon administration that threatened to seize the assets of Japanese companies to pay World War II forced laborers even though an agreement was signed in 1965 that settled this issue and normalized relations between the two countries.
I will be highly surprised if the Moon administration keeps the GSOMIA in place because they need to feed anti-Japanese sentiment for next year’s parliamentary elections. Plus the Moon administration can use the GSOMIA as a bargaining chip with the US in the ongoing cost sharing negotiations:
Civil activists stage a rally against the United States during U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Stilwell’s visit to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in downtown Seoul, Wednesday. The protesters criticized the U.S. for “pressing” Korea on security issues, including defense cost-sharing talks and Seoul’s decision to end its military intelligence-sharing pact with Tokyo.
Against this backdrop, a Cheong Wa Dae official said Sunday, Korea can’t cooperate with Japan “as long as they deem us an untrustworthy partner and continue to impose export curbs.”
Speaking before the National Assembly, Friday, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, also said Japan’s removal of the export control should be a precondition for Korea’s possible change concerning the GSOMIA decision.
On whether Beijing and Pyongyang will benefit most from the termination of GSOMIA, Kang said “Such assessment is possible.”
Shin speculated the Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) in Seoul from Nov. 15 to 16, and G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Nagoya, Japan, from Nov. 22 to 23 may be the “last chance” to settle the GSOMIA dispute.
At some point I would not be surprised if the Moon administration plays the anti-US card at some point to get the American negotiators to back down on increased cost sharing demands. In the past the usual suspects would already be out there protesting like crazy about something like this, but clearly the Moon administration has them in check for now:
Gen. Park Han-ki, chairman of Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, second from left front row, shakes hands with Gen. Robert Abrams, commander of the U.S. Forces Korea and U.S.-South Korea Combined Forces Command (CFC), second from right front row, in a ceremony commemorating the 41st anniversary of the creation of the CFC Thursday at the U.S. Army Garrison Collier Community Fitness Center in central Seoul. [YONHAP]
Alarm has started to spread in Seoul over reported demands by the United States that Korea contribute to the upkeep of U.S. military forces beyond the Korean Peninsula.
According to Rep. Yoon Sang-hyun, chairman of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee on Thursday, Washington’s chief negotiator in negotiations with Seoul over the Special Measures Agreement (SMA), James DeHart, told Korean lawmakers and government officials in a meeting that Korea should pay approximately $4.7 billion in alliance upkeep costs – around five times the amount it currently pays to keep U.S. forces stationed on its soil.
Yoon told a local broadcaster that this amount includes labor and logistics costs for the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) – which Seoul is already paying – but also maintenance and deployment costs for U.S. strategic assets on Korean soil and at U.S. military bases abroad, possibly in Guam, Hawaii and around the Indian Ocean.
Other expenses demanded from Korea include the costs of conducting combined military exercises and upkeep for civilian attaches to the USFK.
A reduction in USFK would not influence Kim. He wants all troops removed & an end to the alliance & extended deterrence. That is his definition of the removal of the US "hostile policy" and a the "security guarantee" that he desires. And removal of troops will lead to conflict. https://t.co/G1THtuBaOW
General Bell is speaking out against the OPCON transfer to South Korea:
General B.B. Bell
A former commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) on Friday expressed his opposition to the planned transfer of wartime operational control, or Opcon, from the United States to South Korea, citing significant threat stemming from North Korea’s nuclear weapons development.
Gen. Burwell B. Bell, a U.S. four-star general who commanded the USFK from 2006 to 2008, said in a written interview with a Korean correspondents club in the United States earlier this month that he opposed the wartime Opcon transfer based on recent assessments that Pyongyang has made great strides in its nuclear weapons program that has made a conventional weapons-based deterrence model obsolete.
Only the United States, he said, possessed the nuclear weapons and deployment capability to respond to the North Korean nuclear arsenal, and this capability can only be effectively planned and exercised in a wartime contingency if the U.S. command stands at the helm of the alliance. In terms of combat operations on the Korean Peninsula, the wartime Opcon transfer was unlikely to be realized, he added.
You can read more at the link, but from a military perspective General Bell is correct. Does anyone think that in a real contingency on the Korean peninsula a ROK general is going to be directing U.S. stealth bombers, space assets, nuclear weapons, and other strategic capabilities that only the U.S. has?
However, the OPCON transfer is not a military issue for the ROK, it is a political issue. All the issues that General Bell brings up, the ROK left could care less about. They don’t think North Korea would ever attack the ROK and that the U.S. military is actually a barrier to reunification. The OPCON transfer is one of the things they need to move towards the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea and seeking their confederation with North Korea.
