Washington should ask Seoul about using U.S. troops in Korea in Taiwan contingency, experts tell U.S. Senate

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Washington should ask Seoul about using U.S. troops in Korea in Taiwan contingency, experts tell U.S. Senate

Published: 27 Mar. 2025, 18:46

MICHAEL LEE
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Victor Cha, president of the geopolitics and foreign policy department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaks during a public hearing held by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in Washington on Wednesday. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

The United States should consult South Korea about the possibility of using American forces stationed on the peninsula in potential armed conflicts nearby, such as Taiwan, foreign policy experts told members of the U.S. Senate at a public hearing in Washington on Wednesday.

The hearing, titled “Shared Threats: Indo-Pacific Alliances and Burden Sharing in Today’s Geopolitical Environment,” focused on how Washington should work with allies in East Asia to maximize the effectiveness of its forces in the region in contingencies.

Oriana Mastro, a professor of international studies at Stanford University, told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that Washington should get Seoul to “agree to strategic flexibility,” or the notion that U.S. forces on the peninsula could be used for conflicts in the wider region.

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Noting that South Korea is “almost as close to Taiwan as Japan and hosts fifteen U.S. military bases and about 28,500 U.S. personnel,” Mastro argued that the United States “can improve the operational flexibility of its forces during a Taiwan crisis” by “using U.S. bases and South Korean military infrastructure, such as Camp Humphreys.”

Mastro also argued that the United States needs to implement a “denial strategy” of being able to “bring mass into the theater of conflict quickly, without any advanced warning,” in order to prevent China “from achieving its goals through force.”

She further argued that the United States “needs more flexibility in what it can do with those forces once there.”

However, Victor Cha, president of the geopolitics and foreign policy department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued that the United States could face some resistance from South Korea regarding the use of American forces on its soil in a conflict with China.

“The framing of capabilities as directed to a Taiwan contingency, however, becomes more problematic given the traditional South Korean reluctance to become entrapped in a U.S.-China conflict,” Cha said.

He suggested that the United States could engage the South Korean government “in a broad reorientation of U.S. forces in Korea moving from a peninsular mission to a regional one” to allay Seoul’s concerns about the use of American troops for purposes unrelated to South Korean security.

He also noted that increasing the U.S. troop presence on the peninsula “could mute potential South Korean self-help responses,” such as domestic calls for an independent nuclear deterrent, “but would require a difficult Korean political choice to acknowledge its role in a Taiwan fight.”

BY MICHAEL LEE [[email protected]]