Throughout the history of the US-ROK alliance, the initialism for the official name of South Korea, US Forces Korea (USFK) has served as a central pillar of stability on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia. Yet USFK has also been the subject of polarising debates in both countries, often driven less by deterrence or shared strategic interests than by politics and ideology.
There were close calls. George Kennan, the architect of America’s Cold War strategy, strongly opposed a US military presence on the peninsula even after North Korea’s attack in June 1950. He favoured a restrained offshore balancing approach derived from 19th-century strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s emphasis on sea lanes and maritime power as the proper focus of United States strategy. That vision later echoed through isolationist-leaning circles in Washington, including the Quincy Institute, some of whose people now have positions inside the current Donald Trump administration.
The self-proclaimed realists’ aversion to a US military commitment on continental Asia gained force after the Vietnam War. The American left warned that defence commitments to authoritarian allies in Asia, with Park Chung Hee’s South Korea as a central target, could lead to further quagmires like Indochina. That push helped drive President Jimmy Carter’s unsuccessful attempt to withdraw US troops from South Korea in the 1970s.
The right later pressured USFK during the George W. Bush administration. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was sceptical of heavy US ground deployments in “Old Europe” and South Korea and sought greater “strategic flexibility” as part of a more nimble global military posture. When the Iraq War consumed ground forces, Rumsfeld ordered one brigade out of South Korea. It never returned.
On the South Korean side, opponents of USFK made mirror arguments to the American right, though from the left. The 386 Generation conflated authoritarian politics in Seoul with the claim that the North Korean threat was false and that the US military presence was an imperialist occupation force sent to prop up conservatives in South Korea. Experience in government schooled many former democracy advocates in geopolitics, but the desire to remove US forces and reclaim South Korean sovereignty lingered.
Twenty years ago, the American right and the South Korean left met in a strange-bedfellows moment when Rumsfeld agreed with President Roh Moo-hyun that wartime operational control of the US-ROK Combined Forces Command should be transferred to South Korea within a short time frame. For both Roh and Rumsfeld, this would have been a first step toward USFK withdrawal by knocking out the keystone of the arch that holds together the US commitment to ground forces on the peninsula.
With Donald Trump back in the White House and a progressive government in Seoul, experts such as Victor Cha at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have warned of another perfect storm in the alignment of left and right between Washington and Seoul. During his first term, Trump mused in front of Kim Jong-un about withdrawing US forces someday. President Lee Jae Myung initially appeared to surround himself with earlier advocates of expedited wartime operational control (Opcon) transfer who retained scepticism toward the US military presence.
History and recent developments in Seoul suggest that the USFK debate could return with a vengeance. In this calm before the storm, thoughtful policymakers should frame the question around deterrence and regional strategic interests, not the ideological and binary arguments that clouded strategic thinking in the past. Two recent perspectives deserve attention.
Rather than return to well-worn political arguments from the past, the allies should examine the emerging geopolitical context... There is no strategic reason to rush this.
The first is the statement of USFK Commander Xavier Brunson, who told the US House Armed Services Committee that wartime Opcon transfer should occur only when conditions for readiness and deterrence are met, not on a political timeline. Korea’s Defense Ministry took a surprising shot at Brunson, saying the general was expressing USFK’s view and that the decision belonged to the ROK-US Security Consultative Meeting. The Lee government appears to hope Pentagon leaders will agree to a 2028 transfer before a more cautious US administration arrives. Republican leaders on the Armed Services Committee may try to put the brakes on the process if they see it being rushed.
The second perspective comes from a new Atlantic Council report proposing a US-ROK Multi-Domain Task Force that would strengthen deterrence against North Korea and help counter broader regional risks, including aggression by China. Such a force would not replace the Combined Forces Command or answer the Opcon question, but it is the kind of innovative strategic thinking that should shape future USFK debates.
Rather than return to well-worn political arguments from the past, the allies should examine the emerging geopolitical context, especially the closer alignment of North Korea, China and Russia, the changing nature of warfare and command-and-control arrangements that can deliver strategic effects in this new environment. There is no strategic reason to rush this.