At a cabinet meeting on Feb. 12, President Trump said the U.S. spends ‘$5 billion worth of protection’ for South Korea. (The Washington Post)
“South Korea — we defend them and lose a tremendous amount of money. Billions of dollars a year defending them. And working with Secretary Pompeo and John Bolton, they agreed to pay, yesterday, $500 million more toward their defense. Five hundred million, with a couple of phone calls. I said, ‘Why didn’t you do this before?’ They said, ‘Nobody asked.’ … But South Korea is costing us $5 billion a year. And they pay — they were paying about $500 million for $5 billion worth of protection. And we have to do better than that. So they’ve agreed to pay $500 million more.”
— President Trump, in a Cabinet meeting, Feb. 12, 2019
“You saw South Korea, they were paying us $500 million a year. I say, ‘You got to do more. You got to give more.’ Anyway, now they’re up to almost $900 million. That was, like, two phone calls.”
— Trump, at a campaign rally in El Paso, Feb. 11, 2019
“You know it’s very expensive to keep troops there. You do know that. We have 40,000 troops in South Korea. It’s very expensive.”
— Trump, in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Feb. 3, 2019
The United States does keeps a large military presence in South Korea, spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but Trump’s figures are wildly inflated. Let’s dig in.
The Facts
The United States and South Korea signed a mutual defense treaty in 1953, after the United States led a United Nations force that helped repel an invasion from North Korea. U.S. troops have been stationed in South Korea for more than a half-century, and the two countries began to share costs under agreements dating to 1991.
The American contingent in South Korea acts as “a vital security guarantor that helps to ensure that the more than 51 million Koreans and over 200,000 Americans living and working throughout South Korea are protected from real and present North Korean threats,” according to a 2018 report from U.S. Forces Korea.
View the complete February 25 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.