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President Donald Trump tried once more Tuesday to rewrite the historical past of US relations with South Korea.
Trump has repeatedly delivered false assertions in regards to the funds South Korea has made for many years to assist cowl the price of the foremost US navy presence within the nation (greater than 26,000 personnel as of the end of 2024). On Tuesday, he wrote on social media that he had simply spoken with South Korean appearing President Han Duck-soo about financial points and about “payment for the big time Military Protection we provide to South Korea.”
Trump then added this: “They began these Military payments during my first term, Billions of Dollars, but Sleepy Joe Biden, for reasons unknown, terminated the deal. That was a shocker to all!”
Trump’s declare is fake in two massive methods.
First, South Korea’s funds didn’t start throughout Trump’s first time period. The cost-sharing offers referred to as Special Measures Agreements began in 1991, greater than 25 years earlier than Trump took workplace in 2017.
Second, former President Joe Biden didn’t terminate a Trump cost-sharing settlement with South Korea. The solely Special Measures Agreement signed by the Trump administration had expired by the point Biden took workplace in 2021 – and Biden’s administration then signed two such agreements, one in 2021 and one in 2024, that each included South Korean spending will increase.
“There was no deal that was ‘terminated,’” Andrew Yeo, a politics professor and Korea skilled at The Catholic University of America and The Brookings Institution suppose tank, mentioned in a Tuesday e mail.
“Trump’s characterization of Biden’s deal with South Korea is inaccurate,” Yonho Kim, a global affairs professor and affiliate director of the Institute for Korean Studies at The George Washington University, mentioned in a Tuesday e mail.
Here’s the reality about what occurred below Trump and Biden.
Trump inherited a South Korea cost-sharing deal negotiated by the Obama administration, which ran from 2014 through 2018. Trump then agreed to a one-year deal for 2019, which secured an 8.2% increase in the South Korean contribution.
That one-year Trump deal was the 10th in the series of Special Measures Agreements that began in 1991, so “it wasn’t as if South Korea began its VERY FIRST cost-sharing payments in 2019,” Jiun Bang, a Colorado College worldwide relations professor, mentioned in a Tuesday e mail. And Trump was unable to get South Korea to comply with the usual multi-year settlement; South Korea rejected his demands for an enormous spending enhance within the neighborhood of 400%, from lower than $1 billion per yr to $5 billion per year or close.
South Korea did come to a smaller deal with the Trump administration in mid-2020 to spend $200 million that yr to pay the South Korean workers of US forces, who had been placed on go away as a result of Trump’s one-year Special Measures Agreement had lapsed at the end of 2019. But negotiations on a brand new Special Measures Agreement have been nonetheless unresolved when Trump left the White House in January 2021.
The Biden administration accomplished the talks in March 2021, agreeing to an eleventh Special Measures Agreement to retroactively cover 2020 and continue through 2025. Then, with the potential for a second Trump time period looming, the Biden administration and South Korea signed a twelfth settlement in late 2024, to run from 2026 through 2030.
Trump claimed throughout his 2024 presidential marketing campaign that Biden had allowed South Korea’s funds to go “way, way down” to “almost nothing,” however that’s not true, both. South Korea agreed to substantial spending hikes in each of its Biden-era offers.
The settlement signed in 2021 included a 2021 increase of 13.9% – that means South Korea’s fee that yr would be about $1 billion – after which extra will increase in 2022 via 2025 tied to will increase in South Korea’s protection funds. The settlement signed in 2024 is scheduled to start with an 8.3% increase in 2026 after which extra will increase tied to South Korean inflation.
Trump baselessly claimed in October 2024, as a presidential candidate, that “if I were there now, they’d be paying us $10 billion a year. And you know what? They’d be happy to do it.”