Secretary of Defense Mark Esper landed in South Korea on Thursday to navigate renewed threats from an "enraged" North Korea and newly heightened strain in the alliance with Seoul that congressional aides, lawmakers and Korea experts say has been caused by President Donald Trump.
Trump is demanding that South Korea pay roughly 500% more in 2020 to cover the cost of keeping US troops on the peninsula, a congressional aide and an administration official confirmed to CNN.
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North Korea has already launched 24 missiles this year, each a violation of UN resolutions, to match the country's previous annual record for firing off projectiles that threaten South Korea and Japan, according to Bruce Klingner, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Germany, France and the United Kingdom recently condemned Pyongyang for the launches, saying they undermined regional security and stability. Meanwhile, South Korean leaders are acutely aware that Trump has downplayed the launches, saying he is "not at all" troubled by them.
"There are a lot of hard feelings," Klingner said of South Korean views of the US right now, adding that "people are questioning the viability of the US as an ally."
That's being driven in part by US acquiescence to North Korea's missile launches, which "is raising angst... about whether the US is a reliable ally," Klingner said. "The exorbitant push to further increase the US demand for the cost of stationing US forces overseas is adding to that."
Scott Snyder, director of the US-Korea policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the extreme nature of the price hike is creating "worry that Trump is doing this as a pretext for withdrawal" of US troops.
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Klingner is one of several Korea experts who suggest that Trump pulled the figure out of thin air. Officials at the relevant agencies and aides in Congress who follow Asia are similarly perplexed. "I have no idea where the President pulled this number from," said the congressional aide.
"It seems pretty clear ... that State and DOD were working to figure out how to justify the $5 billion figure... it's not like, 'We were developing a new concept that includes the following 17 categories and this is what it comes to.' It was a backwards process," said the aide characterized the reaction to be one of shock, " 'the President wants $5 billion and how do we justify that to the Koreans?' They were throwing everything in there that allowed them to argue with a straight face that this covers the burden-sharing costs of the alliance."
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Sen. Edward Markey, the leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Asia said that he was "troubled by President Trump's demand. ... If South Korea decides that it is better off without the United States, President Trump will have undermined an over 60-year shared commitment to peace, stability, and rule of law. The region is less safe when countries lose confidence in America's ability to lead."
Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Asia, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Neither did the second ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, or the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. James Risch of Idaho.
Behind closed doors though, the congressional aide echoed another colleague on Capitol Hill, saying that "there's a lot of concern up here with both Democratic and Republican staff. People ... are not happy. They think this is really dangerous."
