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Members of the Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea hold a rally Thursday in front of the Blue House fountain to protest the 11th Special Measures Agreement. (Yonhap News)

Around the autumn harvest festival, called Chuseok, three years ago, a professor at Seoul National University named Kim Yeong-min wrote a much-discussed column called “What Is Chuseok?” His column was embraced by young people who were tired of fielding nosy questions from relatives over the holiday about whether they’d gotten a job or when they planned to get married.

In the column, Kim contended that people typically pay little attention to fundamental questions of identity, questions about who they are. But when faced with a unique situation that threatens their own existential definition, they’re forced to ask those fundamental questions anew.

I think that such fundamental questions of identity should also be asked about South Korea and the US’s defense cost-sharing agreement, known as the Special Measures Agreement (SMA).

The two countries recently agreed that South Korea would contribute 1.18 trillion won (US$1.04 billion) to US Forces Korea (USFK) this year and would increase that contribution over the next four years proportionally to the increase in South Korea’s defense spending in the previous year. South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had “defended the principle of reasonable and fair burden-sharing.”

The biggest debate in the cost-sharing negotiations was how much South Korea should pay — that is, the total contribution. The US wanted a larger amount, and South Korea a smaller one.

But are we really obligated to contribute to the cost of defense? Many people assume we do, but they’re mistaken.

“Considering that the US used ‘special’ measures to force South Korea to cover expenses that the US had originally promised to cover, the very term ‘defense burden-sharing’ conceals the inequality of the South Korea-US alliance,” wrote Park Gi-hak in his book “A Correct Understanding of the Defense Cost-Sharing Contribution in the Age of Trump.”

The legal status of USFK is detailed in the US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which was concluded in 1966. Article 5 of SOFA explicitly describes how the financial cost of USFK should be shared: South Korea is supposed to provide the USFK with land and facilities free of charge, and the US is supposed to cover all costs pertaining to USFK operations and maintenance. Under SOFA, the US covered the entire cost of stationing troops on the Korean Peninsula until 1990.

The US had concluded this kind of agreement not only with South Korea but also with other countries where US troops were stationed, including Japan and European states. In all cases, the US was responsible for covering the cost of maintaining American troops. It’s customary around the world for countries that station troops overseas to cover the expenses of their own troops.

In the late 1980s, the US began asking South Korea to split the cost of stationing troops in the country. Cold War tensions had faded after the US and Soviet Union ended their grim standoff, and the US was facing economic difficulties because of trade and fiscal deficits. Another factor was that the American public thought South Koreans should pay for their own security now that their standard of living had improved.

But for South Korea to split the cost of the US troop presence would clash with SOFA Article 5, which stated that the US must bear the full cost. As a workaround, the two countries devised the Special Measures Agreement (SMA). The term “special” appears in the title because it constitutes a special measure that temporarily suspends the validity of SOFA Article 5. South Korea and Japan are the only countries that split the defense cost with the US through such a special agreement.

Negotiations to renew the SMA were supposed to wrap up in March 2020, but they were stalled because then-US President Donald Trump demanded that South Korea increase its contribution by an absurd degree. That led to a one-year hiatus in burden-sharing.

Anxious because funds were drying up, the USFK commander asked the South Korean government for an advance on its cost-sharing contribution, which was already allocated in the South Korean government’s budget for 2021. But Seoul couldn’t pay that money because the expiration of the 10th SMA in 2019 eliminated the legal grounds for overriding the original SOFA provisions.

The SMA is a time-limited agreement, repeatedly extended, that temporarily defers the application of SOFA provisions. That deferment has lasted for 30 years now, from the 1st SMA in 1991 until the 11th SMA this year. A temporary agreement eventually came to be treated like a permanent one, reinforcing the misunderstanding that South Korea is obligated to contribute to the cost of defense and that the US is entitled to receive that contribution.

In an economic context, people are typically more excited about getting paid than paying others. But the weird thing about the defense cost-sharing negotiations is that South Korea is so eager to hand over this money.

Sharing the cost of defense is ostensibly supposed to create the conditions for the stable deployment of US troops in South Korea. But the US military uses South Korea’s financial contribution to maintain airplanes stationed outside of the Korean Peninsula, in Japan. The US has spent a total of 108.8 billion won (US$96.18 million) maintaining those airplanes between 2014 and 2019, or about 18.1 billion won (US$16.01 million) a year.

In a loose interpretation, the US says that maintaining the planes helps defend the Korean Peninsula since they’re among the forces that would be used to reinforce the peninsula in the event of war. But if the US starts to spend South Korean funds on American troops outside of the Korean Peninsula like this, there will be no end to it.

When the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Blue House brag about having reached a “reasonable and fair” division of the cost of defense, I find myself wanting to ask two questions. What is our defense cost-sharing contribution? And were we originally obligated to pay that money?

By Kwon Hyuk-chul, editorial writer

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