WASHINGTON: When US Defense Secretary Mark Esper rang his South Korean counterpart this week, he pressed for a deal quickly on defence cost-sharing that President Donald Trump expects will translate into much higher contributions from Seoul.
Some 28,500 American troops are deployed to South Korea, in what is seen as a deterrent to Pyongyang that also sends a message to China about US influence and capability in Asia.Trump's view that wealthy South Korea, which has an economy larger than Australia's, is taking advantage of the United States is increasingly being met in Seoul by a perception that Washington has become a transactional partner with unreasonable demands.
But Seoul's proposed increase was far below even the substantially lowered expectations of the Trump administration, who had initially sought an exponential increase to as much US$5 billion from the roughly US$900 million South Korea agreed to in the last one-year, cost-sharing agreement. In one sign of just how fraught the negotiations had been at their start, Reuters has learned that South Korea last year actually presented an offer to cut its contribution.
That raised questions about whether in-person talks between the US and South Korean delegations to be held in Los Angeles would go ahead. But they did. Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel, who leads the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Twitter that Trump should be working with allies on COVID-19 and should not"extort friends."
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