President Trump Renews Call for South Korea to Pay More for US-ROK Alliance

This is really nothing new on the U.S. President’s part; he has been very consistent on South Korea paying more for the upkeep of the US-ROK alliance. The only question at this point is how much is the increase going to be?:

South Korea’s chief negotiator for defense cost-sharing Jeong Eun-bo, third from right, and his U.S. counterpart James DeHart, third from left, hold a meeting for the fifth round of the 11th Special Measures Agreement (SMA) negotiations between the countries, at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses headquarters in Seoul, Dec. 17.

U.S. President Donald Trump has publicly increased pressure on South Korea to pay more for the upkeep of 28,500 United States Forces Korea (USFK), ahead of the next round of negotiations for the ongoing defense cost-sharing talks scheduled to be held in Washington, D.C., Tuesday and Wednesday. 

The 11th Special Measures Agreement (SMA) ― as the talks are called ― between Washington and Seoul began in September last year for this year’s defense cost-sharing, but its year-end deadline has passed with the countries failing to narrow their differences. 

“These rich countries have to pay for it. South Korea gave us $500 million,” Trump said during an interview with Fox News, Friday (local time). “They’re a wealthy country. They build all your television sets, they took that away from us, they build ships, they build a lot of things. I said we’re protecting and you’ve got to pay. They paid us $500 million; they’re going to pay us a lot more.”

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x