SEOUL, South Korea — En route to his first summit with President Trump, South Korea’s president has pushed back against U.S. pressure to refocus his country’s 71-year-old military alliance with the U.S. away from deterring North Korea and toward countering China.
“This is not an issue we can easily agree with,” Lee Jae-myung told reporters during his flight to Washington, D.C., hinting at the challenges waiting for him at the White House.
The Trump administration is calling for modernizing the 71-year-old U.S.-South Korea alliance, forged in the wake of the Korean War.
The U.S. has some 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea. For about two decades, it has called for “strategic flexibility” to deploy them to meet security challenges away from the Korean Peninsula. And it wants South Korea’s support, including potentially sending troops to other countries and regions.
South Korea has previously sent soldiers to assist the U.S. in Vietnam and Iraq. But it considers North Korea, not China, its main threat, and does not want to get dragged into a conflict with China over, for example, Taiwan.