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US President Donald Trump during a White House COVID-19 task force briefing on Apr. 21. (Yonhap News)

US President Donald Trump is once again overtly pressuring the South Korean government to pay a “big percentage” of the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea, after acknowledging that he’d rejected a South Korean offer in the two countries’ stalled cost-sharing negotiations. This effectively confirms that it was Trump who torpedoed a tentative agreement that negotiators from the two sides had reached in a bid to prevent US Forces Korea (USFK) from putting its South Korean employees on unpaid leave.

Some media outlets have reported that South Korea offered to increase its cost-sharing contribution by at least 13% from last year. With Trump doubling down on his unreasonable demand, observers think that negotiators are unlikely to strike a deal in the short term.

With Trump against the ropes because of his botched response to the coronavirus outbreak, he apparently hopes that his base will be duly impressed if he can force the “wealthy nation” of South Korea to ratchet up its cost-sharing contribution before the presidential election in November. The negotiations entered a rocky patch after Trump made the excessive demand for South Korea to quintuple its contribution from last year’s amount of 1.04 trillion won. Once again, Trump said that the US is “doing a tremendous service” and that “before I came aboard, [South Korea] paid very little, if anything.”

Trump is reiterating the argument that the US is doing a favor for South Korea, ignoring the fact that an alliance, by definition, is a reciprocal concept, benefiting not only South Korea but also the US. He also ignores how much South Korea has contributed to USFK in addition to its financial measures: it provides USFK with land for its bases free of charge and footed the construction bill for USFK’s new base at Pyeongtaek. Furthermore, Seoul is the third-biggest buyer of US weaponry in the world. And amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis, South Korea is working hard to provide the US with supplies to combat the outbreak, including diagnostic kits.

Trump has revealed, once again, that he hopes to squeeze as much as money out of possible from South Korea in the cost-sharing agreement and then to use that as leverage to force Japan and the EU to consent to a similar increase. Trump views the cost-sharing negotiations as a bill he can lay on his allies’ doorstep, with the hope of improving his performance at the polls this fall.

At this rate, many fear it won’t be easy to strike a deal before the US presidential election. The South Korean government needs to stay firm in the negotiations and hold to its original principles of the cost-sharing arrangement. Since the two sides won’t be holding many joint military exercises this year anyway because of the coronavirus, there’s no reason to buckle to American pressure in a rush to reach a deal. The government and National Assembly need to quickly draw up a special bill to provide aid from the government budget to the USFK’s South Korean employees that the US has furloughed in a cynical attempt to improve its position in the negotiations.

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