This shouldn’t be surprising news to anyone following the US-ROK cost sharing negotiations:
The Pentagon has offered the White House options to reduce American troop levels in South Korea, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Citing unnamed U.S. officials, the paper said the options were presented in March following a broader review of options for withdrawing troops from around the world, including in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Asia.
The White House requested the review last fall, and by December, the Pentagon had come up with broad ideas, it said.
No decision has yet been made to reduce the number of U.S. forces stationed in South Korea from the current 28,500, according to the WSJ.
Yonhap
You can read more at link, but President Trump has already reduced U.S. troop levels in Germany over cost sharing issues and he has been having the same monetary disagreements with South Korea. This report I suspect was leaked to the Wall Street Journal in order to pressure the Korean side that Trump is serious about USFK troop withdrawals.
However, this all may be playing out as Korean President Moon Jae-in wants it to play out. Moon is a very skilled politician that needs to keep the Korean right at bay and public anxiety down. If he openly advocated for a USFK withdrawal, that would give the South Korean right an issue to strongly attack him with and cause much public anxiety after decades of security guarantees provided by US forces.
This is why President Moon has been saying all the right things that USFK should remain, to include claiming Kim Jong-un understands this as well. However, if troop withdrawals do happen he has political cover to not be blamed for it by claiming President Trump’s monetary demands were unreasonable which is a position likely a majority of Koreans believe.