South Korea is under pressure from Washington to send forces to the Strait of Hormuz, a move Iran warns would have serious consequences.
Under pressure
When Freedom Edge, an annual maritime exercise involving South Korean, Japanese and American forces, went ahead as planned on Monday, the government in Seoul might have been relieved. Three weeks earlier, Donald Trump ordered that the Ulchi Freedom Shield, a joint US and South Korean military exercise conducted every summer, should be scaled back and cut short.
Trump said the drills were too expensive and sent a hostile signal to North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un, with whom he wanted to preserve what he called a “very good relationship”. But he also cited South Korean president Lee Jae Myung’s failure to support the US war against Iran by deploying forces to the Strait of Hormuz.
Lee’s government has been looking at ways to support multilateral efforts led by France and Britain to guarantee freedom of navigation through the strait. But it has gone cool on the issue in recent days as US and Iranian attacks on each other’s assets in the region have escalated.
South Korea sent troops to Iraq in 2003 despite widespread domestic opposition and George W Bush’s failure to secure a United Nations security council mandate for the invasion. Trump’s war against Iran has an even weaker basis in international law and Tehran warned on Monday of “serious consequences” if Seoul gets involved.
“Any country that stations military forces in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz or participates in military operations will inevitably be regarded as directly supporting the aggressor,” foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei posted in Korean on X.
“A sovereign and responsible country should not succumb to U.S. pressure and threats and join in acts of aggression and horrific crimes against the great Iranian people.”
Trump, who has long complained that Seoul is not paying enough for its security, also wants South Korea to provide Ukraine with the Cheongung-II, a medium-range surface-to-air missile system also known as M-SAM II. Seoul says it needs the weapons as part of its own defence against the threat from North Korea and that it cannot legally sell weapons to countries involved in a war.
The latest tensions follow threats from Washington to restore 25 per cent tariffs on South Korean goods because Seoul has been too slow to fulfil the pledge Trump coerced from it to invest $350 billion in the US. Doubts about the US commitment to South Korea’s security have persuaded 80 per cent of the population of the need to develop its own nuclear weapons, according to a poll earlier this year.
Trump established a warm relationship with the North Korean leader during his first term until negotiations fell apart during a summit in Hanoi in 2019 but he said last month that he hopes they will meet again this year.
In a speech to the parliament in Seoul on Monday, Democratic Party leader Kim Min-seok said South Korea should prepare for a possible shift in Washington’s approach to North Korea’s nuclear programme.
“The United States itself is casting itself not as a generous elder brother but as a hard-nosed trading partner, and it is recommending self-reliant defence,” he said.
“Given that the United States and North Korea could achieve an abrupt improvement in relations, and that a freeze-first, resolve-later approach to the North’s nuclear programme might just be adopted, South Korea has to strengthen its own independent security capacity in advance.”
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