hankyoreh

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol walks alongside ROK-US Combined Forces Command commander Gen. Paul LaCamera as they enter the operations center in Command Post Tango on Aug. 23, 2024. (courtesy of the presidential office)

It’s official: The Democratic Party’s Kamala Harris will face off against the Republican Party’s Donald Trump in the election to determine who will be the next president of the United States in November. The winner will take office in 2025. Yet both parties seemed to have erased the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula from their list of foreign policy objectives. Meanwhile, on the home front, President Yoon Suk-yeol is calling for the “end of the North Korean regime” while US and South Korean troops continue their joint exercises. Is the Republic of Korea safe? 

In the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform, published on Aug. 19, the Democrats vowed to “stand by our allies, especially South Korea, against North Korea’s provocations, including its illegal build-up of missile capabilities.”

“By bolstering our trilateral cooperation with South Korea and Japan, we are maintaining peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and beyond,” it went on.

The platform essentially vowed to contain the nuclear threat from North Korea through the US’ respective alliances with South Korea and Japan and through increased trilateral cooperation. The word “beyond” stresses that the US is looking outside the Korean Peninsula when considering the motives and effects of the trilateral alliance. 
 
It’s night and day compared to the situation four years ago. Back then, the Democratic Party platform declared, “Together with our allies — and through diplomacy with North Korea — we will constrain and contain the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear program and its regional belligerence. We will build a sustained, coordinated diplomatic campaign to advance the longer-term goal of denuclearization.”

That “longer-term goal” has since been erased. The vision of diplomacy has also been omitted. All that’s left is trilateral cooperation with South Korea and Japan and the vow to stand “against North Korea’s provocations.” 

Joining US nuclear power with South Korea’s armed forces

While the Biden administration said that it would pursue dialogue with North Korea with no preconditions, these were just empty words. In action, the Biden administration focused on bolstering its “extended deterrence,” commonly known as the nuclear umbrella. Essentially calling for the end of the North Korean regime, the Yoon administration upgraded its commitment to cooperating with the US by announcing an “integrated extended deterrence system.” 

The original “extended deterrence” involved the US annihilating the North Korean regime with strategic nuclear weapons in the event of a nuclear attack on South Korea by Pyongyang. In Yoon’s “integrated extended deterrence system,” South Korea offers its troops to aid the US strategic arsenal in achieving this objective.

In effect, Korea’s National Security Office invited this outcome. By allowing South Korean troops to be mobilized in cooperation with US strategic assets, the Yoon administration hopes to be able to give South Korea influence over Washington’s decisions on strategic weaponry. Unfortunately, the hope is one-sided, the love unrequited, based on a naive spirit of self-sacrifice. The current administration believes that the US will magnanimously protect us if we offer our troops to aid US deterrence — that Washington will take care of us if we go all-in. 

The Biden administration would be foolish to squander such an opportunity. The strategic command that the Yoon administration is building is scheduled to be under the ROK-US Combined Forces Command. 

Scheduled to launch in October, the ROK Strategic Command will be tasked with defending against North Korea’s missile launches and nuclear weapons via land, sea and air operations while employing electronic warfare and space tactics. In the event of an imminent strike by North Korea, the ROK Strategic Command will defend from the front lines by launching a preemptive strike against the North’s nuclear weapons and operational command centers. It would also employ its missile defense system to neutralize missile launches. The US would then launch a nuclear retaliation on North Korea from its command centers in the continental US. 

This is the reason why North Korea has defined inter-Korean relations as those between two “hostile” countries in a state of war. Before, Pyongyang stressed that the Koreans were a single people and that the “real enemy” was the US. The very essence of this relationship has now changed. 

If South Korean troops “integrate” with US strategic assets under the vision of the “end of the North Korean regime,” then the North cannot avoid acknowledging its war with South Korea. Once focused on developing strategic nuclear missiles that could strike the US, North Korea has shifted some of its attention to developing tactical nukes for striking South Korea. Pyongyang has deployed launchers and missiles specific to this purpose, and has increased the frequency and intensity of its military exercises near the border. 

Yet reality seems to paint a picture that differs from the Yoon administration’s vision. In accordance with the US’ wishes, we have improved relations with Japan on Tokyo’s terms and happily joined the trilateral military alliance with the US and Japan. After vowing to go against the Korean Supreme Court’s verdict on compensating victims of forced mobilization, we are now pursuing a de facto military alliance with Tokyo.  

In late July, the defense ministers of the US, South Korea and Japan formalized trilateration cooperation by signing the “Trilateral Security Cooperation Framework,” which would essentially have Seoul and Tokyo work together on military operations. The three countries are expected to hold regular, systematic trilateral joint exercises and develop a joint standard operating procedure (SOP). 

Let’s confirm something that everybody already knows. South Korea and the US have already regularly conducted systematic joint exercises. South Korean troops and US troops already have a joint SOP, and have conducted their joint training exercises accordingly. So the only thing the framework changes is the addition of Japan. Japan will hold joint training exercises directly in partnership with South Korea, and the ROK armed forces are to develop a joint SOP with the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Seoul and Tokyo already had an intelligence-sharing arrangement, so now are heading into a bona fide military alliance. 

Strategic bombers flying over the Korean Peninsula

The Yoon administration will maintain that all of such developments are necessary to counter the threat of the “irrational North Korean regime.” Yet the US does not view the trilateral alliance exclusively within the context of countering North Korea. 

In the 2023 Washington Declaration, the Biden administration announced, “The United States and the ROK are committed to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, and the measures we take together are in furtherance of that fundamental goal.” The three leaders then declared in their “Spirit of Camp David” document that “Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States are determined to align our collective efforts because we believe our trilateral partnership advances the security and prosperity of all our people, the region, and the world.”

As I write this, South Korea and the US are conducting the Ulchi Freedom Shield 2024 exercises. Some of my readers will have experienced an emergency summons by the armed forces or a civil defense evacuation exercise. Everybody who resides in South Korea has received government texts about such matters. We are rehearsing a military response to a nuclear attack from North Korea. Dialogue and diplomacy have disappeared; extended deterrence and military strategy have taken their place. Now we face the military practice to carry out that strategy.  

From July 30 to Aug. 1, US Forces Korea and the ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff gathered at Camp Humphreys to conduct their first Iron Mace tabletop exercise, based on a scenario where North Korea launches a nuclear strike. The drill imagines how US strategic assets and South Korea’s conventional weapons would be coordinated to form a defensive shield and counteroffensive. It was basically a rehearsal of an integrated extended deterrence system. 

On June 5, US B-1B strategic bombers flew over the Korean Peninsula for the first time in joint air exercises. US strategic bombers were escorted by F-15K fighters from the ROK Air Force. They practiced dropping a joint direct attack munition (JDAM) on a target center to increase accuracy of attack. South Korea’s F-15K fighters fired live munitions during the exercises. 

“Thirsty to unite Korea under a communist regime, North Korea is constantly eyeing an opportunity to attack South Korea,” Yoon said while meeting with Korean and US soldiers during the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise. 

“We need to remind them that an invasion by the North Korean regime is the end of the North Korean regime,” Yoon added.

Is such a stance from the president making the Republic of Korea safer? 

By Suh Jae-jung, professor of political science and international relations at the International Christian University in Tokyo

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]