Leftists Penetrate Key Air Base Near Seoul in Challenge to Korean-American Military Alliance

South Koreans from top-level officials to university students are challenging American control over the country’s joint military bases in a leftist-led assault on the Korean-American alliance.In the latest episode of anti-American action, eight students were arrested at the crucial Osan Air Base, 40 miles south of Seoul. Six of them had penetrated the perimeter shouting, “Let us destroy the U.S. 7th Air Force,” headquartered at the base, according to Seoul’s Yonhap News. The other two failed to get past the gate.American war planes take off daily from the base, patrolling the skies south of the heavily defended demilitarized zone, or DMZ, that has separated North from South Korea since the Korean War ended in an armistice 73 years ago.The incident, involving members of the far-left Korean Progressive University Student Union, came after a more serious incident at the same base in July of last year. At that time, Korean prosecutors and investigators raided a joint American and South Korean facility, the Master Control and Reporting Center, without the prior approval of the American command.Prosecutors for the leftist government were looking for evidence to justify new charges against the conservative ex-president, Yoon Suk-yeol, who was jailed over his short-lived attempt at imposing martial law in December 2024. They shocked their American ally by seizing records purporting to detail drone flights over North Korea that might add to the evidence piling up against Mr. Yoon and his top commanders.“Critics argue that the lack of coordination with U.S. counterparts constitutes a breach of alliance norms — particularly at a time of heightened sensitivity in trade and defense cost-sharing talks with Washington,” according to South Korea’s biggest-selling newspaper, Chosun Ilbo. “The absence of notification to the U.S. military has raised legal and diplomatic concerns.”That 2025 entry into the base showed the willingness of South Korea’s left-leaning president, Lee Jae-myung, to deviate from strict adherence to the rules and procedures that have long guided the Korean-American alliance.Leading members of Mr. Lee’s ruling Minju or Democratic Party had, as young activists decades earlier, staged anti-American protests that included occupying the American information center in central Seoul and demonstrating regularly outside American bases. Against that background, Mr. Lee’s followers sympathize with the goals of the student radicals. At the same time, Mr. Lee’s unification minister, Chung Dong-young, has been demanding, without success, that South Korean authorities take charge of the South Korean side of the DMZ, now controlled by the American-led United Nations Command.The South’s defense ministry has supported this demand, but the UN Command, under the same four-star American general who commands U.S. Forces Korea, General Xavier Brunson, has repeatedly rejected the idea as compromising basic security. General Brunson has also accused Mr. Chung of breaching security by identifying a North Korean nuclear site whose existence had not been revealed publicly.Mr. Chung, briefing Korean journalists, elaborated on his demand, calling for South Korea to stop referring to North Korea as the South’s “main enemy” — a term often repeated by Mr. Yoon during his precedency. It is time, Yonhap quoted Mr. Chung as saying, to “put an end to the chilling situation in which the commander-in-chief [South Korea’s president] labels North Korea as the main enemy.”Two conservative American commentators, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute and Lawrence Peck of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, writing in the Wall Street Journal, see the American Korean alliance as jeopardized by both the leftist shift in South Korea and the uncertainties of Seoul’s relationship with Washington. President Trump has indicated he might consider scaling down the number of American troops in South Korea, now about 28,500, and has imposed tariffs of about 12.5 percent on most of the country’s products.“The US-South Korea alliance is now grappling not only with the unpredictability of the Donald Trump administration but also with the recklessness of South Korea’s hard-left government,” Messrs. Eberstadt and Peck wrote. “Until the U.S. government wakes up, threats to liberty in South Korea and to the South Korea-US alliance are likely to grow.”America’s new ambassador to South Korea, Michelle Eunjoo Steel, a Korean-American who served two terms in Congress as a Republican representative from California, arrived last week to try to sort out and overcome the differences.She got a taste of what she’s up against soon after deboarding at Incheon airport. Protesters held up signs opposing her mission after describing her at a press conference as “a far-right politician” who has “declared overt political intervention targeting the Korean government.” The group declared she “seeks to turn the Korean Peninsula into an area of confrontation.”Ms. Steel offered a simple response. “I was born in Seoul, but I stand here today representing the United States,” she said, waving as she climbed into a waiting limousine. “Standing here again brings back many emotions.”

Leftists Penetrate Key Air Base Near Seoul in Challenge to Korean-American Military Alliance

Leftists Penetrate Key Air Base Near Seoul in Challenge to Korean-American Military Alliance

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