How important is Korea to US?

By Sah Dong-seok

It is not uncommon to see Koreans who weigh how important Korea is to the United States. They mostly share the notion that Korea is vital to the world's most powerful country, enumerating America's participation in the 1950-53 Korean War, their decades-old alliance and the presence of U.S. Forces Korea.

To compare the extent of importance, Japan is often cited. However, few of them seem to believe that Seoul is more important to Washington than Tokyo. Most of them sympathize with the narrative that the U.S. will never renounce Japan in the case of an emergency, although Korea is abandoned.

Not surprisingly, this ''self-depreciation'' originates from Koreans' common perception that Japan, which has a far larger economy and bigger population, will be more crucial to U.S. interests. More important, Uncle Sam can expect Japan to play a bigger military role in deterring a defying China, especially in Asia. Some Koreans are cynical enough to discount their motherland as being less important to the U.S. than Australia, another U.S. ally, citing the two countries' racial homogeneity.

The undercurrent of Koreans' such habitual comparison is the fear the South might be communized by the North armed with weapons of mass destruction if America withdraws its troops from the Korean Peninsula.

Some conservatives were even in a state of panic in the run-up to the May 9 presidential election. They were obviously afraid that the Seoul-Washington alliance could be ruptured if a liberal candidate who claimed that Korea should be able to say no to the U.S. was elected president. (As they feared, Moon Jae-in of the liberal Democratic Party of Korea became the head of state.)

Koreans' concern about future relations with the U.S. is deepening because their strongest ally is led by Donald Trump, who created panic around the world by voicing ''America First'' even before being sworn in as president. In fact, pundits raise concern about how Trump, the former real estate magnate said to be capricious, recalcitrant and unpredictable, will treat Korea's new leader in their first summit meeting scheduled for late June. This concern has some grounds, especially given that Trump, cornered at home by the appointment of a special counsel over allegations that his campaign collaborated with Russia to sway the 2016 presidential election, may try to countervail his weak position diplomatically.

Trump seems not friendly to Korea. Upon receiving a letter from Moon through his special envoy Hong Seok-hyun last week, the U.S. leader was quoted as saying, ''It's beautiful.'' But one can speculate what is at the bottom of his heart from his remarks that the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement is a ''horrible deal.''

He also embarrassed Koreans by insisting in an interview with Reuters last month that Korea should pay for a $1 billion Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery, which has been deployed here. Trump's argument reneges on the allies' earlier agreement that Seoul provides the site and infrastructure for the missile defense system and Washington bears the cost of its deployment, operation and maintenance. From the perspective that Trump is a professional deal-maker, this is not bizarre. But Koreans cannot help but feel frustrated at a time when they are exposed naked to North Korea's escalating nuclear and missile threats.

For the liberal Moon Jae-in administration, the Trump White House could be a diplomatic disaster. In the June summit, Trump could praise the Korea-U.S. ''blood'' alliance on the one hand but force Korea to pay more for the presence of American troops and the THAAD system on the other.

If Moon is stiff, the former TV reality show host might bluntly mistreat him and shift the responsibility for exacerbating the alliance to Moon. Little wonder then their first summit could be called a failure, and Moon's detractors would raise voices, arguing that Moon's vulnerability in security has been confirmed. As anti-American sentiment in Korea, especially among Moon's avid supporters, heats up, the Seoul-Washington relations could be on the path to a breakdown. What a dreadful scenario!

At this juncture, however, we need to calm down and reweigh Korea's importance.

In the past when the U.S. and the now-defunct Soviet Union fought for global hegemony, the geopolitical importance of the Korean Peninsula could have been discounted. So several months before the Korean War, Dean Acheson, then U.S. secretary of state, might have excluded the peninsula from America's all-important ''defense perimeter.''

Things have changed completely though. Now it's China that the U.S. must wrestle with. Located closest to Beijing, the Middle Kingdom's capital, the Korean Peninsula is a forward base to deter China's southward advance. So pulling U.S. troops from the peninsula is obviously against America's interests.

It is no exaggeration to say that the peninsula is most important as far as Washington's global military strategy is concerned. The U.S. can ill afford to abandon Korea.

Given the longstanding Korea-U.S. alliance, it is going too far if we simply imagine that our bilateral relations would be dented merely because leaders have been replaced.

What is urgently needed is for us to be aware first of how important our geopolitical value is. Moon and his aides have no reason to be on the defensive in future bilateral talks concerning THAAD, cost-sharing for American troops here and other issues. They need to confidently counter anticipated strong offensives under the Trump presidency. Clearly, Korea is vital to the U.S.

The writer is the executive editor of The Korea Times. Contact him at sahds@ktimes.com.