FPI / January 12, 2025
Geostrategy-Direct
In the second Trump administration, U.S. troops in South Korea may be expected to focus primarily on defending against the threat from China, rather than North Korea analysts say.
Elbridge Colby, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, is skeptical that North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons and believes that U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) must instead be used to contain China’s military threat, transferring to Seoul primary responsibility for defending against North Korea.
Traditional defense officials in Trump’s previous administration advocated for the USFK’s role in responding to North Korean threats with a more hawkish stance against its nuclear and missile development.
In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that Colby would work closely with Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth to “restore” Washington’s military power and achieve a policy of “peace through strength.”
Colby has been calling for U.S. military resources to be concentrated on a denial strategy against China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific, instead of dispersing U.S. defense resources to other regions such as Europe, aligning with Trump’s campaign pledge to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
In his 2021 book “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict”, Colby contends that South Korea is likely to “grow increasingly challenging to defend from a determined Chinese assault” because of its proximity to China, but that including South Korea in the U.S. defense perimeter against Beijing would be “worth the challenges.”
“[South] Korea is important to the effective defense of Japan; if China were able to use South Korea as a base of operations, it would greatly complicate the defense of Japan,” Colby wrote.
“Particularly given that the conventional military threat from North Korea has substantially receded in recent decades, if that from China grows, then South Korea and the United States can increasingly redirect their defense preparations toward defending against a potential assault by China.”
Conservative protesters defending impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol have charged that the Chinese Communist Party played a role in fraudulent elections which gave the leftist Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) an overwhelming majority and is threatening the U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance.
Colby repeated his position in an interview with the South Korean news agency Yonhap in May 2024, when he said U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula “should not be held hostage to dealing with the North Korean problem” as it was not the primary issue for Washington and that the U.S. should be “focused on China and the defense of South Korea from China over time.”
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