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Former US President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Delaware, Ohio, on April 23. (AP/Yonhap News)

When former US President Donald Trump insisted on completely withdrawing US troops from South Korea, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly told him to wait to do it in his second term.

Former US Defense Secretary Mark Esper sheds light on the details of Trump’s Korea policy in his memoir “A Sacred Oath,” published on Tuesday.

In the book, Esper writes how Trump called for the withdrawal of US troops several times, while also saying that Koreans were “terrible to deal with,” regarding the renegotiations on defense sharing costs. Esper said he tried to dissuade the president from withdrawing troops, given that the presence of US forces in Korea is also closely connected to the security of the US.

On one occasion, Pompeo reportedly offered to help and told Trump that the withdrawal of US forces from Korea should be made a priority during the president’s second term in office, to which Trump responded, “Yeah, yeah, a second term.”

Esper said he couldn't sit around and let crises be kept at bay in this way. He cited the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea as one of Trump’s most bizarre proposals, and argued that one of the reasons he did not resign was to prevent this from happening.

After serving as secretary of the US Army and leading the Pentagon since July 2019, Esper was fired in November 2020, two months before the end of Trump's term.

In the very first sentence of the book’s first chapter, Esper writes that war with North Korea was “a real possibility” when Trump first entered office. Esper writes that he did not “fully appreciate that Trump was playing carelessly with the matches that could ignite a conflict, one that the world hadn’t seen since the last war in Korea.”

Two months later, while visiting Alabama to meet with the head of the US Army Materiel Command to better gauge the country’s readiness for war with North Korea, he received a phone call from the Pentagon. Esper was then informed that the president was ordering the withdrawal of all US dependents from South Korea and that he was going to announce it that afternoon.

Shocked at the news, Esper asked: “Did Kim [Jong-un] shoot a missile at Hawaii? Were North Korean armored units moving to the DMZ? Did they sink an American ship? Did Pyongyang fire a ballistic missile at the United States? What?”

But, luckily, the announcement was never made as someone was able to talk the president out of it, Esper writes.

“Fortunately, tensions in northeast Asia with North Korea began easing in early 2018, once Trump took a more diplomatic approach toward Kim,” Esper writes. Regarding the first summit between North Korea and the US in Singapore in June 2018, Esper says that “Many people complained that Trump gave Kim what he wanted [. . .] and received nothing in return.”

Although some of this may be true, Esper adds that “Trump’s engagement did get us off the warpath and kept things under control through the end of his term. That was a good thing.”

Esper also made mention of the THAAD issue in connection with South Korea. Esper said he had “raised his voice in anger” to South Korean Defense Minister Suh Wook regarding the issue during a bilateral Security Consultative Meeting held in the Pentagon in October 2020.

Esper had been protesting about the poor environment of the THAAD base since 2017 and asked the South Korean officials if they would want their sons and daughters to live and work in those kinds of conditions. To this point Esper suggested to Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chief, that the US side conduct a study into the possible implications of a THAAD withdrawal from Korea as well as looking into options for performing the mission off of the Korean Peninsula, saying, “I’d like that in 90 days.”

Esper’s strategy of pressing the Korean side seemed to have worked and the issue was shelved.

Esper also wrote that he was concerned about Seoul “drifting closer to the PRC,” as it relies on the US for security and China for its economy. He also said that he was dissatisfied that South Korea had fallen into discord with Japan while getting closer to North Korea.

Still, he described President Moon Jae-in, whom he met during two of his visits to the Blue House, as “smart and well-informed” and as someone with “a sense of humor” that sometimes put on a quick smile during talks.

The Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin commented on the contents of the memoir in a piece titled “Trump’s Korea policy was even more reckless than we thought.”

“The clear implication of Esper’s warning is that a second-term Trump would have no restraints and nobody around to temper his reckless or thoughtless instincts,” writes Rogin.

By Lee Bon-young, Washington correspondent

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