The Pentagon is on edge after Seoul ends an intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo.
South
Korea’s decision to end an intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan, part of a
widening rift between the two U.S. allies, has the Pentagon on edge —
and not just because it arrives amid stalled efforts to persuade North Korea
to denuclearize.
“China is
the biggest winner here,” said Rob Spalding, a former senior official on
President Trump’s National Security Council. “The biggest challenge is the fact
that the Chinese, who really want to break up the alliance structure—this just
hands them a potent weapon to chip away at it.”
An
apparently rattled Defense Department reacted with two statements on Thursday:
one in the morning “encouraging” the two sides to work together, then an
updated, much stronger missive in the afternoon professing “strong concern and
disappointment that the Moon Administration has withheld its renewal” of
the framework.
“We
strongly believe that the integrity of our mutual defense and security ties
must persist despite frictions in other areas of the ROK-Japan
relationship,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Eastburn said in the
later statement.
Although
concerns over North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal have dominated headlines
about Trump’s security strategy in the Indo-Pacific, it’s a resurgent China
that Pentagon officials say is the bigger long-term threat. “China is the
number one priority for this department,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper told Fox News on Wednesday, in his first
televised interview since taking the job. “They are clearly professionalizing
and expanding the capacity and capabilities of the military in order to push
the United States out of theater.”
China has
long sought to fracture the trilateral alliance between South Korea, Japan, and
the United States. The two Asian nations host a combined 80,000 U.S. troops—the
linchpin of the U.S. presence in the Indo-Pacific—while the United
States has been working with Seoul to urge North Korea to denuclearize. Ryan
Hass, the China director on President Obama’s National Security Council, called
South Korea’s decision “a major setback for U.S. strategy in
northeast Asia,” emphasizing that “alliance cohesion is a critical enabler” of
that strategy.
But the
relationship between Japan and South Korea is deeply fraught. The 1910 Japanese
annexation of the Korean peninsula is still a radioactive political issue in
both the north and the south, and the so-called “history wars” over Japanese
atrocities—including the taking of an unknown number of Korean women as sex
slaves for its soldiers—has raged for decades. Seoul’s decision to end the
intelligence agreement comes amid a trade dispute that has plunged relations
between the two countries to perhaps their lowest level since they
reestablished diplomatic ties in 1965.
“Under this
situation, the government has determined that maintaining the agreement, which
was signed for the purpose of exchanging sensitive military intelligence on
security, does not serve our national interests,” Kim You-geun, the deputy
director of South Korea’s presidential national security office, said in a
surprise statement.
DON'T
MISS
The
practical impact of the demise of the intelligence-sharing agreement is
difficult to judge. It’s not clear how useful the pact was to either nation.
The two nations signed it in 2016 under pressure from Washington; Seoul’s
withdrawal means the United States will return to being the hub for information
shared separately from Japan and South Korea. That information is related to a
host of transregional threats, including North Korea’s nuclear weapons, Chinese
intellectual property theft, and military activity in the South
China Sea.
“By
definition, you’re destroying combat capability,” said Spalding, one of the key
architects of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which prioritizes preparing for
potential conflict with nation-state competitors like China and Russia over
countering terrorist groups. “Just doing warfare when you have all the same
equipment and everybody agrees to treat each other as an equal [is] hard. So
imagine if one ally is not talking to the other. There’s no way you can be an
effective fighting force.”
“It’s how
Americans get killed, because we’re playing games,” he continued. “You really
can’t mess around with how the coalition functions in a war.”
Other
analysts have expressed concerns that the broader rift between Japan and South
Korea could push Seoul towards exactly the two countries that the United States
now considers its top competitors.
“South
Korea’s vow to diversify economic supply sources away from Japan could lead
South Korea to turn to China or Russia,” write Riley Walters and Bruce
Klingner, policy analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The United
States in the past has acted as a mediator between Seoul and Tokyo. The Obama
administration helped bring about a 2015 agreement under which Tokyo apologized
for the kidnapping of “comfort women”—women used as sexual slaves—and paid $8
million to Koreans thus seized; in exchange, Seoul declared the issue “finally
and irreversibly” over. That agreement has since fallen apart, sparking the
current crisis.
President
Trump has expressed ambivalence to intervening, however. In July, said he told Moon, “How many things do I have to get
involved in? It’s like a full-time job getting involved between Japan and
South Korea.”
“Xi can’t
stop laughing at all this,” tweeted MIT security studies
professor Vipin Narang.
***Katie Bo
Williams is the senior national security correspondent for Defense One, where
she writes about defense, counterterror, NATO, nukes, and more. She
previously covered intelligence and cybersecurity for The Hill, including
in-depth reporting on the Russia investigations and military detention issues.
Before her journalism career, Katie Bo worked in thoroughbred horse racing,
helping breed, sell, and prepare the next generation of Kentucky Derby winners.
She is a graduate of the University of Virginia. A native of Goochland County,
Virginia, she now lives in D.C. and can usually be found haunting one
of the various bookstores on Capitol Hill.