Under a New South Korean President, Can Peace Activists Push US Troops Out?

On June 3, South Korea will conclude a snap election prompted by the impeachment of former president Yoon Seok-yeol on insurrection charges for a failed coup. The strong frontrunner in the race is Lee Jae-myung, the Democratic Party pro-peace candidate. While Lee’s election could open the window for peace talks, progressives must learn from the last peace process that began in 2018. In the coming weeks, as the dust settles on the election, it is crucial to get out ahead of the Trump administration to call for policies that can reduce the threat of nuclear war and improve prospects for peace in Korea and the region.

The inter-Korean and geopolitical context has drastically changed since the last South Korean liberal president, Moon Jae-in, was in power. Yoon, Moon’s hardline conservative successor, further strained relations with North Korea by intensifying military exercises with the U.S., including joining a trilateral military alliance with Japan and enacting repressive policies intent on “eradicating pro-North Korea forces.” Yoon’s hawkish turn so impressed the warmongering RAND Corporation that it called him “Biden’s Perfect South Korean Partner.” In response, North Korea tested nearly 100 missiles, blew up any remnants of reunification efforts, and declared that the demilitarized zone (DMZ) was now a permanent national boundary under its Constitution. Under Yoon’s reign, South Korea sent arms to Ukraine, while North Korea sent arms and troops to fight alongside Russia, further entrenching the two Koreas in a new Cold War between the U.S., China and Russia. South Korea is already home to the largest overseas U.S. military base, Camp Humphreys, and because of its proximity to China, a U.S. missile defense system, THAAD.

In a rare redux, a liberal South Korean president could face a second Trump administration interested in resuming talks with North Korea. The cost of hosting U.S. forces in Korea — comprising 28,500 servicemembers on 15 U.S. military bases — will also be a major issue facing a potential Lee government as President Donald Trump will try to extract more from Seoul in negotiations over tariffs.

On the campaign trail, Trump signaled his desire to meet Kim Jong Un, and in March indicated that he has a “very good relationship” with Kim and would “probably do something with him at some point.” In April, a senior official told Axios that the Trump administration is quietly exploring resuming talks.

Although members of the previous Trump administration, namely John Bolton, botched talks with North Korea in Hanoi in 2019, the Biden and Yoon administrations further worsened relations. Bolton is emblematic of the entrenched, hardline foreign policy establishment colloquially known as “the Blob”; contrary to their assessment, the 2018 historic summits between the U.S. and North Korea (DPRK), and North Korea and South Korea, actually led to tangible outcomes.

After the 2018 Singapore Declaration, in which the U.S. and DPRK committed to establishing new relations toward “peace and prosperity,” North Korea released three detained Americans, repatriated U.S. servicemember remains, and self-imposed a five-year moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile testing.

The 2018 summits between Moon and Kim yielded progress, too, including reunions of separated families and a Comprehensive Military Agreement to “completely cease all hostile acts against each other” by ending military drills near the border, limiting live-fire drills, imposing no-fly zones, and establishing crucial communication lines and a buffer zone in the West Sea. North and South Korean soldiers cleared landmines together in the DMZ, the border that separates the two countries and is widely considered to be the most heavily militarized border on Earth. Additionally, Moon and Kim, along with the U.S.-led UN Command, agreed to remove firearms and guards in the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom.

Still, the Blob chastised Trump’s overtures to North Korea, including his call to cancel the U.S.-South Korea military exercises, war drills that he aptly called “very provocative.” Every spring and fall, the U.S. and South Korea hold joint military exercises, deploying B-2 bombers, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, and pre-emptive strikes simulating “decapitation measures” against the North Korean regime. The U.S. says these are for “readiness,” but North Koreans view them as rehearsals for war, which is backed by studies which show that they create a more threatening security environment and elicit greater provocation from Pyongyang.

After Singapore, instead of supporting steps to remove Washington’s permanent war footing in Korea, senior Democrats, led by Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) and Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), proposed a bill preventing Trump from withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea unless the “Secretary of Defense certifies it is in our national security interest.”

A rumor was recently leaked to the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. was considering moving 4,500 troops from South Korea to elsewhere in the Pacific as part of its realignment targeting China, which was quickly dismissed by senior Pentagon officials. But Trump has in the past called for withdrawing troops from South Korea, saying that Washington is not properly compensated for maintaining 28,500 troops and that nearly eight decades of U.S. military presence on the Peninsula had not prevented North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

South Korea allegedly pays half for maintaining the U.S. troops — more than $800 million annually — but Trump has demanded that Seoul foot the entire bill. “Only a few Americans know that the South Korean government paid about 90 percent of the $10.8 billion for the construction of Camp Humphreys, the largest U.S. overseas base built with the military rise of China in mind,” Kap Seol, a veteran Korean journalist, told Truthout, noting that at that time, China was South Korea’s largest trading partner. “Even when South Korea was still poor in the 1970s, it began subsidizing U.S. bases through free labor, electricity and water.”

According to David Vine, U.S. military base expert and author of The United States of War, an exact calculation of the costs to maintain U.S. bases and troops in South Korea is impossible given a lack of Pentagon budget transparency and audit failures. Using data from the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon, in a preliminary analysis, Vine estimates that, after subtracting the value of direct payments and in-kind contributions from the South Korean government, U.S. taxpayers pay between $3 billion and $4.6 billion every year to maintain the U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, and true costs may exceed $5.3 billion yearly.

“Withdrawing some troops as part of U.S. negotiations with North and South Korea could be a helpful gesture of goodwill and seriousness,” Vine told Truthout. A peace treaty, Vine affirmed, would both make the world more peaceful and “allow the U.S. to save billions of dollars per year by withdrawing some, and eventually all, of its troops on the Korean Peninsula.”

Lee may have more political coverage to find agreement with Trump to reduce U.S. troops since the South Korean Ministry of Justice just released a report that found that U.S. military crimes against civilians rose 70 percent from 2018 to 2023. There is a robust peace movement in South Korea that has long demanded demilitarization and opposed the construction and expansion of U.S. military bases. South Korean feminists have sought justice for thousands of Korean women who provided sexual services to U.S. troops in military camp towns established around U.S. bases in a formal arrangement between the two governments. To prevent U.S. soldiers from contracting sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), the South Korean government, under pressure from the U.S., established STD detention centers called the “monkey house” where women were forced into inhumane treatments and quarantine. They have set up an encampment at the monkey house in Dongducheon to prevent its demolition, which they say would erase and cover up this travesty.

Lee will also have the support of U.S. trans-partisan national security experts and organizations (including Women Cross DMZ, which I founded) who in April sent Trump a letter urging him to close military bases overseas to save billions of taxpayer dollars and improve national security. And last year, a coalition of U.S.-based antiwar organizations led by Nodutdol launched the “U.S. Out of Korea” campaign to stop the war drills and demand the withdrawal of U.S. bases and soldiers from South Korea. Peace movements in the U.S. and South Korea should seize the historic opening to call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea, which has occupied the southern half of the peninsula for 80 years.

Trump may be willing to buck the bipartisan consensus that engagement amounts to appeasement, but the peace movement must offer concrete solutions that can ratchet down tensions and the U.S.’s permanent war footing in Korea and the region. The Korean War is the longest standing U.S. conflict and was only halted in 1953 when the U.S., North Korea and China signed an armistice, but not a peace settlement. The war claimed 4 million lives, obliterated 80 percent of North Korean cities, and divided millions of Korean families. Central to achieving peace is negotiating a peace agreement that finally ends the Korean War.

To make peace durable and sustainable requires people-to-people engagement, especially the involvement of women, to build understanding, empathy, and trust. We need more Americans traveling to North Korea, whether it’s Korean Americans reuniting with their families, the New York Philharmonic performing a concert, Dennis Rodman engaging in basketball diplomacy, or international women peacemakers meeting with North Korean women and crossing the DMZ. In order to do this, the peace movement must demand that President Trump lift his 2017 draconian ban on U.S. travel to North Korea which has halted all initiatives of this kind.

The good news is that most Americans support cutting spending on the military and reinvesting in programs that directly improve Americans’ lives. Moreover, a recent Harris Poll found that 70 percent of Americans want Trump to meet with Kim Jong Un again. And this time, there is a coordinated peace movement and peace champions in Congress.

In 2018, as peace talks began, Women Cross DMZ launched our Korea Peace Now! Campaign and Grassroots Network to press for the first-ever congressional resolution to end the Korean War, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act in 2019. The bill, reintroduced by Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) as H.R.1841, currently has 38 bipartisan co-sponsors. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who drafted the initial Korea peace bill, says, “We should not oppose efforts to reduce military spending & work towards peace just because it is proposed by Trump.”

Although Lee pledges to reopen hotlines and dialogue with North Korea and to not “unnecessarily” antagonize China and Russia, he has campaigned to continue the trilateral military alliance. This has disappointed peace activists like Choi Sung-hee of the Gangjeong Peace Center, who told Truthout that Lee’s aims to make South Korea a leading arms exporter will “promote a killing industry.”

Still, a Lee presidency promises a new chapter for the Korean Peninsula. By taking a principled stand for peace and pursuing a policy of mutual respect for sovereignty and peaceful coexistence, Lee Jae-myung can steer the country away from developing a nuclear arsenal and redirect funds for war preparation toward improving the Korean people’s welfare. “To have a diplomatic breakthrough, President Lee should get ready to make a serious, comprehensive disarmament deal with the DPRK, while navigating skillfully through both domestic and U.S. pressure for the arms race,” says Francis Daehoon Lee, director of PEACEMOMO.

The Korean Peninsula can be transformed from the front line of the new Cold War to the site of regional and global peace, but the lesson past South Korean liberal administrations show is that for them to succeed, they need the support of the U.S. peace movements to apply political pressure on Washington. And we need pro-peace leaders like Lee Jae-myung to help us push for a less militarized U.S. foreign policy.