US defence chief heads to Seoul to save security alliance to counter North Korea and China

South Korea is digging in its heels as the United States pressures it to renew a military intelligence-sharing pact with Japan, complicating Washington’s bid to retain a three-party alliance it considers vital to counter regional security threats.

US Defence Secretary Mark Esper, who is set to meet his Korean counterpart on Friday, faces an uphill battle to convince President Moon Jae-in to revise his decision to let the 2016 pact known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) lapse on November 23.

US officials and military leaders say dissolving GSOMIA – which among other things involved Tokyo and Seoul exchanging details directly about Pyongyang’s missile tests – would facilitate China’s increased influence in the Pacific and North Korea’s nuclear activities.

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“My message will be very clear … the GSOMIA must be maintained,” Esper said en route to Seoul.

“Let’s focus on how we partner as allies to deter North Korean bad behaviour and then in the long term deal with the Chinese.

“The only folks who are benefiting from this dispute right now are North Korea and China. And that is all the reason we need to move beyond this and get back to where we were in terms of working together as partners and allies,” said Esper, whose comments came as US and Korean military chiefs met in Seoul on Thursday.

South Korea said it would back out of the agreement amid a continued dispute with Japan over wartime labour and territorial issues, that led to Japan imposing export restrictions on materials crucial to South Korean industrial production.

“We’ve made our position very clear,” South Korean foreign ministry spokesman Kim In-chul said. “If Japan retracts its unjustifiable export restrictions, we would be willing to consider the decision to terminate GSOMIA.”

However, the administration of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has shown no signs of backing down, with a poll by the Nikkei media organisation earlier this year showing two in three Japanese respondents believe Tokyo does not need to rush to improve ties with Seoul. Tokyo has been angered by Seoul’s insistence Japanese firms must pay reparations to wartime labourers, saying that this issue was already resolved under a 1965 pact to normalise bilateral ties.

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Analysts said that although Seoul needs Washington’s backing in its efforts to seek rapprochement with Pyongyang, Moon cannot be seen to bow to US President Donald Trump as this would alienate his supporters.

Trump’s obsession with getting Seoul to pay more for their defence alliance – and recent charges by his administration that South Korea was taking advantage of its developing nation privileges at the World Trade Organisation – have angered the public.

A South Korean lawmaker said last week that US officials demanded up to US$5 billion a year, more than five times the US$924 million Seoul agreed to pay this year under a one-year deal for stationing around 28,500 American troops on the Korean peninsula.

A survey by the government-affiliated Korea Institute for National Unification released last week showed 96 per cent of South Koreans were against paying more for the US military presence.

While US officials have not publicly confirmed the number, Trump previously said the US military presence in and around South Korea was “US$5 billion worth of protection”.

Trump has similarly accused allies including Japan, Germany and Nato of not shouldering their fair share of defence costs and negotiations for new deals are set to begin next year.

Kim Suk-hyun of the Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS) in Seoul said he believed the US would address GSOMIA and sharing of defence costs “as a package”, while Shin Beom-chul, a senior fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, told Reuters he believed US demands on cost-sharing would “get more reasonable as negotiations progress, after raising alarm with extremely high numbers”.

Still, any increase would be a burden on the administration, he said.

But Yoon Sung-suk, a political science professor at Chonnam National University said Moon would rather pay more for the defence alliance rather than back down on GSOMIA.

“He can’t afford to lose face diplomatically by reversing Seoul’s decision to terminate GSOMIA. It would be less embarrassing for Seoul to agree to increase its defence burdens as Japan is also under the same pressure from the US,” he said, referring to how Trump also wants Tokyo to pay more for hosting American troops.

Nicholas Szechenyi, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, warned a prolonged deterioration in Japan-South Korea ties could “potentially embolden North Korea, Russia, and China, which would like to tilt the regional balance of power in its favour by weakening US influence”.

However, Szechenyi said continued North Korean provocations could yet persuade Seoul to change course on renewing GSOMIA.

Since the collapse of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s second set of denuclearisation talks with Trump in February, Pyongyang has launched a series of short-range missiles. It agreed to suspend nuclear bomb and long-range missile testing in 2017 ahead of the first Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore in June 2018.

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On Wednesday, Pyongyang threatened to retaliate if the US went ahead with scheduled military exercises with South Korea, leading Esper to say that these drills could be scaled back to aid diplomacy.

Esper, who was appointed in July, will subsequently travel to Bangkok for a meeting of defence ministers from Southeast Asian countries.

He is also expected to have his first face-to-face meeting with his Chinese counterpart General Wei Fenghe after the Asean meeting, and will then go to Vietnam and the Philippines, two countries involved in territorial disputes with Beijing over the South China Sea.

Additional reporting from Bloomberg and Reuters