hankyoreh

At a Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) on Oct. 2, South Korea and the US made plans to set up a team to discuss the conditions and timeline for transferring wartime operational control (OPCON) to South Korea. It appears that the Pentagon is begrudgingly acceding to Seoul’s persistent demands that the transfer be put off from its currently scheduled date of Dec. 2015. The positions of the two sides are crystal clear: South Korea forever unwilling to take sovereignty over its own military, and the US taking advantage to extract its own price.

The mood in the US right now is that there is no reason to delay the transfer yet again. Carl Levin, the Democrat who has chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee for the last seven years, bluntly criticized Seoul’s behavior during a recent confirmation hearing for incoming USFK commander Curtis Scaparrotti, saying that “sovereign nations should be responsible for their own national defense in time of war, particularly after the length of time that they have been gaining in capability.” The Washington Post also reported on Sept. 30 that some authorities and politicians there are becoming “frustrated” with Seoul continually putting off the transfer.

It certainly is bizarre to see this from South Korea, a country that has one of the world’s ten largest militaries and spends nearly US$32 billion a year - more than North Korea’s entire gross domestic product - on defense. Right now, we are the only country in the world that has left its wartime control in another country’s hands for the past 60 years.

Meanwhile, Washington has been ratcheting up its own demands in exchange for discussing the issue, leveraging it to satisfy its own longstanding wishes. These include a strong three-way alliance with South Korea and Japan. The US has been consistently pressuring South Korea to take part in the Northeast Asian missile defense system it has been building with Japan. At the SCM this week, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said South Korea’s missile defense system didn’t have to be identical to its own, but that they did have to be “interoperable.” Realistically, though, a single unified system is exactly what it is demanding. This is the context for the joint naval exercises in the South Sea on Oct. 1-3, with a US aircraft carrier and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces participating - offering a glimpse at the kind of unified South Korea-US-Japan military system Washington wants. At the same time, its attempts to shed its share of defense costs and increase weapon sales have also been gathering momentum. An illustration of this is this demand that Seoul take on a much larger burden for stationing USFK. The idea of a “share of the costs for stationing foreign troops” wouldn’t even exist if this were a country with sovereignty over its own military.

Seoul has pointed to a worsening security situation - including nuclear tests by North Korea - and the military’s lack of preparedness as reasons for delaying the transfer. With this kind of passivity, it is ill-equipped to handle its own defense, let alone lead international efforts to address the North Korean nuclear program. This is an opportunity for it to show its mettle as a sovereign state by going ahead with the transfer as scheduled, and taking action on other matters as well.

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