US election critical for Korea too

By Troy Stangarone

Record numbers of Americans have already taken advantage of early voting or cast their ballots by mail, while millions more will head to the polls in the next few days. The electoral choice they make will be the most consequential of their lifetimes, but it will also shape future U.S. policy on the Korean Peninsula as well.

U.S. elections have always had significant implications for the Korean Peninsula. In 1976, Jimmy Carter announced that if elected he intended to withdraw U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula, while George W. Bush came into office in 2001 skeptical of the Agreed Framework. Carter eventually backed down from his pledge to withdraw U.S. troops, but Bush would go on to leave the Agreed Framework and adopted a more confrontational approach to North Korea that conflicted with the Sunshine Policy.

The case for Americans to change leadership is fairly clear cut, but the results are less clear for the U.S.-Korea alliance.

After four years with Donald Trump as president, the United States is at a crossroads. In 2016, millions of Americans felt that the U.S. political class had ignored their needs and left them to struggle with closing factories and job losses in the face of globalization. Then candidate Trump ran as an outsider who would "drain the swamp" and fight for the needs of Americans who felt they had been left behind.

Instead what America got was something different. While Trump took steps to improve the economy such as reducing regulations and lowering taxes, he also undermined the institutions that underpin American democracy and deepened the swamp he pledged to drain.

The Trump administration has been plagued by scandals, including for corruption and personal gain, while Trump was impeached for attempting to solicit damaging information against his political opponents from the Ukraine. Something even Republicans such as Senators Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney have acknowledged.

The United States' government is also becoming less competent. For a president who prides himself on his stewardship of the economy Trump has failed to do the one thing which would have protected the economy ― take COVID-19 seriously. Doing so would have entailed encouraging the use of facial masks and social distancing, the types of steps taken by countries that have been able to contain the spread of the disease and minimize the damage to their economies. But COVID-19 is not the only policy the Trump administration has mishandled.

Despite trying to cut business regulations, more than 90 percent of the Trump administration's efforts to such cuts have been blocked by U.S. courts as of last year. The WTO has ruled that U.S. tariffs on China are not legal. Hundreds of scientists have been forced out, silenced or sidelined leaving the government with critical skills gaps. Even if well intended, this is not an administration competent enough to achieve the policy goals it has set out to accomplish.

Most disconcerting, however, is that America has lost its moral center. Truth is now something to obfuscate. Conspiracy theories are increasingly common and something that Trump retweets on Twitter. Migrant children are separated from their parents at the border, while Trump supporters in Michigan chant "lock her up" only days after the FBI arrested a right-wing group plotting to kidnap the state's governor. The use of mail-in ballots are consistently undermined despite the pandemic and Trump has been reluctant to acknowledge whether he will accept the results of the election.

In my lifetime no U.S. president has sought to lead the United States by pitting American against American. None has actively worked to undermine confidence in the democratic process or to spread baseless conspiracy theories. Yet this is exactly the type of president that Donald Trump has been.

For the U.S.-Korea alliance it has also been a challenging set of years. It began with renegotiations of the KORUS FTA and tariffs to force Seoul to agree to a quota system for steel exports to the United States, while the last two years have seen disputes over the costs of stationing U.S. troops in South Korea and concerns over the future of U.S. troops in South Korea.

But it has also seen opportunities in regards to North Korea. Trump took steps no prior U.S. president was willing to take in meeting with Kim Jong-un, but it came at the cost of threating "fire and fury" and the unilateral decision to cancel joint military exercises.

If Trump is re-elected South Korea can expect the United States to continue to push it hard on burden sharing and trade, but it is less clear if a Biden administration would be as willing to negotiate as directly with Kim Jong-un as Trump.

The next few days will determine what type of country the United States will become, but for South Korea the results will weigh significantly on the shape of the alliance and the prospects for reaching a sustainable agreement with North Korea. The stakes could not be higher.

Troy Stangarone (ts@keia.org) is the senior director of congressional affairs and trade at the Korea Economic Institute.