Monday’s phone call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun was a coordination meeting. The thing being coordinated was the United States–South Korea alliance, twenty-eight thousand five hundred American troops stationed in Korea, a forward-deployed presence that has been the spine of Pacific defense since the 1953 armistice. The coordination happened at the diplomatic level, between two men who do not serve in the alliance. They do not crew the tankers, live on the bases, or work the refineries that the alliance’s energy-securing work protects. The costs of that coordination land somewhere else. They land on soldiers and their families, on the Korean nationals who work on American bases, on the refinery towns that depend on the Strait of Hormuz staying open, and on the dockworkers and steelworkers who carry the tariffs.
Start with what the call was actually about. President Trump last week ordered the allies to scale back the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, citing their cost and saying the drills sent an “inappropriate and hostile” signal to Pyongyang. South Korea’s foreign-policy establishment read that as a humiliation. I read it as the math. The exercises are expensive. The money comes from somewhere. When Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, paragraph twenty-four, of the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he was talking about exactly this. The cost of forward presence gets written into budgets, and the budgets get written by people who do not wear the boots. The exercise curtailment is the same logic. The question that follows is the one Rubio and Cho did not address on Monday: who pays for what the alliance does, and who pays when the alliance gets scaled back?
I came up through the all-volunteer force the same way the soldiers in Korea did. Third Infantry Division, Abrams crewman, Iraq 2003 through 2005. The men I served with were from working towns in Georgia and the Carolinas and the Rust Belt. They rotated through Korea the same way they rotated through Kuwait, with the same kind of family disruption and the same kind of base-town economy depending on the flow of dollars that follow the troops. The exercise curtailment does not end those flows. It changes where the costs sit. The soldiers and the Korean base workers bear the disruption. The diplomatic class in Seoul and Washington bears the rhetoric.
That is the part of the story that never makes the wires.
The second cost sits on the refineries. Trump criticized South Korea last week for what he described as a refusal to assist in securing the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which a substantial share of the world’s oil moves, including the oil South Korea’s refineries depend on and the oil that fuels American refineries on the Gulf coast. The Seoul readout says Rubio “explained the current situation in the Middle East” and Cho pledged a “substantive contribution.” That is the diplomatic way of saying the allies will work it out. The working-out, when it happens, looks like Korean maritime contributions to the escort mission, or Korean tankers re-routing, or Korean refineries paying higher insurance. Each of those costs flows back into the price of fuel. The price of fuel flows into the household budget of every working family in the refinery towns of Texas and Louisiana, and in the Korean industrial ports of Ulsan and Yeosu. The people who pay the fuel-price tax do not have a seat on the Cho–Rubio call. They get the bill at the pump.
The third cost sits on the dockworkers and the steel mills. The phone call also covered tariffs, investment, and security cooperation. The trade relationship between the United States and South Korea is one of the largest in the Pacific. Korean steel and Korean automobiles and Korean electronics move through American ports. American agricultural exports move the other way, through Korean ports, to feed Korean consumers and Korean livestock operations. When tariffs go up on either side, the people who feel it first are the longshoremen on the docks and the farmers waiting for the ships to load. The diplomatic class calls this “mutually beneficial outcomes on outstanding issues.” The longshoremen and the farmers call it Tuesday.
The phone call, by all available readouts, was routine. The Seoul readout emphasizes continued “close communication and coordination.” The State Department readout, from spokesman Tommy Pigott, was terse, listing only a “range of issues” and “close coordination” with nothing dramatic. Both governments reported that an in-person Cho–Rubio meeting will happen “in the near future.” That is the calendar of allied management. It works the way it has always worked, until the costs of the alliance start landing on people who were not in the room when the bill was written.
Andrew Bacevich, the retired colonel and Vietnam veteran whose son First Lieutenant Andrew Bacevich Jr. was killed in action in Salah ad Din Province in May 2007, spent his life writing about what he called “Washington Rules,” the bipartisan consensus that keeps American military power deployed across the globe regardless of whether the deployment serves the people back home. The Korea presence is one of the cleanest examples. Twenty-eight thousand five hundred troops, a forward-deployed division, a deterrent posture against a nuclear-armed adversary. The deterrent matters. The question Bacevich asked, and the question the Rubio–Cho call did not answer, is what the deterrent costs the people who provide it, the soldiers and the families and the Korean base workers and the American taxpayers, and what they get for it.
Eisenhower, in the same farewell address, said it: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” He said it because he had run the machinery. He had been Supreme Allied Commander Europe. He had managed the Korean armistice. He knew what the alliance cost, and he knew who paid. Monday’s call between Rubio and Cho is a small instance of the same machinery. The bills come due somewhere else. The citizens who pay them should know that.