Why Did the Trump Administration Scold South Korea in the Wall Street Journal?

Daniel R. DePetris

Security, Asia

Politics is often the death of pragmatic statesmanship.  Allow politics into the room, and you make the job of the officials sitting around the table that much harder. Either Secretaries Pompeo and Esper didn’t get the memo or they don’t understand some of the most elementary tenants of diplomacy.

The cost-sharing negotiations between Washington and Seoul have been tough, brutal, and draining. But as the months have ticked by, at least some progress was being reported. On January 8, a senior State Department official told reporters at a briefing that “I would assess that we are certainly a little further afield than we were during the last round.”  While this wasn’t exactly a popping of the champagne-like disclosure, it was a far cry from last November, when the U.S. delegation broke off negotiations in a hurry and scolded South Korean negotiators in public for being unreasonable. 

So why, despite the talks proceeding towards a muddy middle ground, did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper think it was wise to air their grievances publicly in the Wall Street Journal? Why, knowing that the issue of cost-sharing is a highly emotional one for the South Korean public, did the two cabinet officers decide to press the envelope in one of America’s major periodicals? 

The heart of the issue is not so much what Pompeo and Esper said in their joint op-ed. There was nothing terribly unusual in the piece. Most of it was a resuscitation of what the Trump administration has been saying about South Korea for the last three years: as one of the world’s wealthiest countries, Seoul has the resources to contribute more monetarily and militarily to the U.S.-South Korean alliance. It’s quite a logical and justifiable argument to make. Indeed, the stronger Seoul’s military capability is, the less Washington will have to do in the event of a conflict. You will have trouble finding any American on the street, Democrat, Republican, or Independent, who disagrees with the notion that rich countries should pay more of the tab and do embrace more responsibility on behalf of their own security.