Episode 57: South Korea & US Asia-Pacific Interests with General Vince Brooks and Ambassador Mark Lippert Part I

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy (00:00): From the American Academy of Diplomacy, this is The General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders to talk about how they partnered in working a major international crisis or challenge affecting US national security. I am Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, the producer and host. The General and the Ambassador is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy in partnership with UNC Global at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today, we will focus on the US- South Korea security relationship. Our guests are General Vince Brooks and Ambassador Mark Lippert. General Brooks served as the Commander of United States Forces Korea, the US-South Korea Combined Forces Command, and the United Nations Command from 2016 to 2018. He previously served as the Commanding General of United States Army Pacific and as Commanding General of the Third Army. He also served in many other leadership positions during his 38 year Army career. Ambassador Mark Lippert served as the United States Ambassador to the Republic of Korea from 2014 to 2017. During his long government career, he served in a number of other senior positions, including as Chief of Staff to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs at the Department of Defense and as Chief of Staff to the National Security Council. He also served as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy. General Brooks, Ambassador Lippert, thank you so much for joining this endeavor to talk about how our military and diplomatic leaders work together overseas. We're going to talk about the time when you worked together in South Korea in 2016. But before I jump into that, I wanted to ask a little bit about your relationship. When did you meet and how did you meet?

Amb. Lippert (02:11): Well, thanks Ambassador. It's great to be here. Big fan of the show, love the posts on social media, it always whets the appetite for further engagement. We met, I think formally for the first time out at Pacific Command at a dinner hosted by then Admiral Locklear. I had the pleasure of being seated next to General Brooks and his wife, Carol, who is an accomplished educator in her own right. I was the Assistant Secretary for Asia Pacific Affairs, at the time. I had known who General Brooks was, is, at the Pentagon. His reputation was outstanding. And so when he announced, was announced to be Commander of United States Forces Korea, it was a logical fit for us. It made sense. We got off to a fast start and it was really, I think, an excellent partnership and an example of how a General and Ambassador should work together. But that's just speaking for me. I don't know if he has a more dim view of my role in the partnership.

Gen. Brooks (03:07): Oh, I absolutely agree. It was a great partnership. We did have a contact from early on as Ambassador Lippert described. And as I recall, there was another trip during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Ministers Conference that Secretary Hagel convened. I think it was the inaugural one, to actually do that, and he convened it in Hawaii. Same sort of thing. And so we had a chance to see each other again at that event. And then of course, as Mark Lippert went on to become Ambassador Mark Lippert in the Republic of Korea, I was following him closely since Korea was one of the countries that I was interacting with at US Army Pacific. And we of course were horrified when he was attacked in downtown Seoul in 2015. Our connection began early and it became very, very deep once I was assigned there in April of 2016. I do agree, I think it was an excellent partnership and a great example of what the diplomatic and military cooperation can look like in places where we have a significant military presence like we do in Korea.

Amb. McCarthy (04:04): Well, you have such broad and extensive backgrounds in the region. I thought for our listeners, we'd start with the bigger picture and then move to the work you did together in South Korea. President Obama launched the rebalance to Asia and the Pacific. President Trump launched the concept of a free and open Indo-Pacific. While the tactical approaches and the communication strategies differ greatly between administrations, both of them focused on the importance of the Asia Pacific region for US prosperity and security. Can each of you explain to our listeners how and why the region became so important to the United States?

Gen. Brooks (04:43): The recognition that our future was really going to be tied to what happened in the Indo-Pacific region, I think became evident and certainly manifested during the Obama years in a very concentrated way. You know, we had a little bit of hiccup, you know, language matters, especially in international relations, even words like pivot had consequence. I was in the Middle East and then in the Pacific. The Sense in the Middle East, and even in Europe, in some cases, was that the US was about to turn its back, a physical pivot turning away from, and then the language got softened to a rebalance, which I thought was much better because we always had a foot there, but we shifted our weight. We didn't pick up a foot if you will. A lot of our energy was actually spent trying to explain what it really meant. What does this rebalance mean? How will it be visible? What will tell us that the US is really following through on what it said. And I spent certainly my three years in US Army Pacific focused on that matter all throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

Amb. Lippert (05:46): And let me just add to the excellent overview that General Brooks provided. I would just add that, I think if you ask President Obama, who really was the driving force behind all of this, he felt that we were over weighted in the Middle East and it wasn't a drawdown to zero, but it was a reallocation or rebalance, as General Brooks, rightly outlined, of our resources, our focus, our time, our energy to a region in the Asia Pacific, where our strategic interests were greater and would be greater over time. And you look at four or five things that would factor into that. You look at your economic interests. You look at the fragility, but importance of the rules-based international order in the Asia Pacific, you look at the five treaty allies, plus our friends and partners in the regions, nascent multilateral institutions, and then three massive rising powers. Everybody wants to talk about China, but people also forget about India and Indonesia as well, coming into sharp focus there. So I think that was a driving piece. And then I would just say, I think the Obama administration approach, which I think really has been picked up on by the Biden administration as well, was an alliance-first strategy, get the alliances right to engagement in the multilateral institutions like ASEAN, like the East Asia summit and then engage the rising powers as well, which I just described, all of that through different lenses, not just security, but also there was a trade piece, TPP, and there was important diplomatic pieces establishing a mission to ASEAN so on and so forth. So I think what you're seeing was a multifaceted, whole of government approach to try to rebalance and reshift our focus to a region that was, I would think arguably more in our strategic interest and would be over the foreseeable future.

Amb. McCarthy (07:36): Well, I wanted to turn now to South Korea. We have a mutual defense treaty, which commits the United States to help South Korea defend itself, and it dates to the end of the Korean War. We have about 28,500 troops based in the country. And as you mentioned, Mark, we have a robust economic relationship that includes a major free trade agreement. A key component of our security relationship is dealing with North Korea. And during the period you spent together in South Korea, Seoul and Washington coordinated closely on North Korean policy following what has been called a policy of strategic patience. Can you comment on this strategic patience policy and explain your role in implementing it on the diplomatic and military side?

Amb. Lippert (08:29): First, what I would say is strategic patience became a bit of a misnomer. That was a term used by then- Ambassador Bosworth at the outset of the Obama administration. It was essentially to break the provocation cycle we had been in where North Korea would provocate, they would be rewarded, there would be a silence, we would start over again. Bosworth always set out to break that cycle. That was his term, but what happened is presidential politics and Secretary Clinton used the term and we went from there. Let's put it that way. On the approach, I think a lot of people overlook that the Obama administration actually got a deal with the North Koreans early in the first term, or was on its way and finalized it sort of late first term, early second term, the leap day deal. That of course was short-lived which we now know why it was short-lived. It was the rise of Kim Jong-Un and his efforts to consolidate domestic control and or a reaction against this deal. So that deal fell apart and more or less for the rest of the Obama administration, the door was open for the North to come back to the table, but there really wasn't any interest from the North Koreans. I'll end here and simply say, this is not for lack of trying on the Obama administration. If you look back, the Obama administration was busy negotiating with Iran, with Cuba, with Myanmar, Vietnam, so on and so forth. What became apparent, and I think we were ultimately able to convince our friends in Beijing that the North was really not overly interested in talking at least at this point. They were interested in undertaking a number of provocative actions, and that led to Security Council resolutions in 2016, which were sector wide sanctions. And I'll just, one note to get off the stage, that was significant in that for the first time you had the Chinese signing up to multilateral sanctions at the Security Council that went beyond the narrow scope of missiles or weapons of mass destruction. Prior to that, they would only agree to narrow UN security sanctions. 2016 was the breakthrough and a large driver was the diplomacy, I think, of the United States and its allies, but also the actions of North Korea, as well.

Gen. Brooks (10:47): As I was coming into position from US Army Pacific into US Forces Korea, I would say that there was a sense of strategic frustration and it wasn't just belonging to the United States, the frustration with North Korea, because the efforts to engage were not yielding fruit and the efforts to deter were also finding some deficiency as North Korea continued to move forward with missile technologies, and as we saw in January of 2016, with a fourth nuclear test, and then again, a nuclear test in September of that same year. So the deterrent actions were falling short and in many ways our diplomatic and our military responses were becoming a bit regular, a bit predictable. And so much of our effort during the time that Ambassador Lippert and I were together was talking about how do you break that cycle? How do you send a different signal to North Korea when you don't have an open channel of dialogue? How do you try to craft actions and communications in such a way that it sends a message that the circumstances are changing? And let me add to this, the dynamic of the alliance is worth mentioning in this also, in terms of how the political leanings of one administration related to the other will go, certainly by the 2015-2016 timeframe with the President Park Geun-hye, there was a degree of concern that she would react very quickly and perhaps overly aggressively, particularly after the shelling of Yeongpyeong Island, that happened a few years before that, early in her term. And thus she would have to take a very strong stand against North Korea to restore a sense of deterrence. So from one perspective that very aggressive conservative government in South Korea was being balanced by a more progressive government in Washington. And that creates an interesting tension in the alliance, which flipped 180 degrees, right at the end of Mark Lippert's term, as we saw the impeachment of President Park Geun- hye and ultimately her removal from office in 2017, followed by the election of President Trump. 180 degree shift in terms of the poles that are associated with the two capitols, very interesting dynamic. And so there's a degree of patience that has to come with working through the realities and working through the frictions and frustrations that North Korea often leaves in its trail.

Amb. McCarthy (13:07): Well, this leads me to explaining a bit to our listeners, the significance of these nuclear tests and launching of ballistic missiles to South Korea. Can you explain the significance of them and how it played into our strategy in the region?

Gen. Brooks (13:23): Certainly from a military perspective, the combination of improving missile technologies and nuclear testing in some demonstration of miniaturization of nuclear weapons, that might be able to fit inside of the warheads of the missiles that are being tested. So we have these two parallel tracks of nuclear development and missile development and a potential of mating the two of them that significantly changed the military threat, and thus the reach in some ways the audience, for North Korea. It fundamentally took the issues of North Korean military dangers and expanding it from a peninsula issue to a regional issue, certainly with the reach that could get to Guam, out to Okinawa, into Japan, and then as ICBM's began to develop, all the way out to every ally of the United States. So the military dynamic was changing rapidly in 2016, and our efforts to try to get some degree of deterrence reset inside of that, all the while, the actions being taken by North Korea also began to solidify the international community. Initially, as I arrived there and I'm sure Ambassador Lippert remembers this, China was really saying, hey, United States, you need to do something about North Korea. And the United States was trying to get China to do more about North Korea, both expressed frustration with North Korea in the meantime. We saw now solidifying actions that created this unanimity in the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, there were still some deficiencies in how the countries reacted to one another. I think South Korea had a higher expectation of China after the fourth nuclear test in January, 2016. And the absence of a strong response led in part, combined with the missile development, to President Park Geun-hye and President Obama approving the decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense System, the THAAD system. So that decision was taken in 2016, implemented in 2017.

Amb. Lippert (15:21): Let me just add a couple more points on the diplomatic dimensions. First, I would say in terms of the implications in domestic Korean politics, the steady provocative actions by the North, including the exponential growth of the nuclear missile programs, really winnowed the difference in domestic South Korean politics in terms of how to approach the North. It's not that the differences are gone, there's still some differences of approach, but you did see the current President, Moon Jae-In, link inter-Korean talks, the talks between the North and South, to progress on the nuclear and missile programs. And that was new. Previously that had really been a conservative position. Moon Jae-In, a progressive, came in and linked the two, to consternation of some of his party, but that was a significant development in domestic Korean politics that I think was a clear result of the North Korean actions. Second, as General Brooks touched on, the relationship with China, I think it improved actually the US argument in terms of needing to take action at the UN Security Council. It also effectively ended, I think, an interesting gambit by President Park Geun-hye to improve the relationship between Seoul and Beijing in an effort to triangulate on North Korea, in that you'll recall Xi Jinping visited Seoul before he visited Pyongyang, significant in that part of the world. Second, Park Geun-hye reciprocated this by going to really a highly controversial end of World War II celebration that Beijing held. Park Geun-hye put political capital into that effort. But once the nuclear test that we had mentioned previously occurred, the Chinese essentially did not take sufficient action in the Koreans eyes. And I think rightly so, that led to the pullback that General Brooks described. THAAD was one implication of that. The other implication I would say is that the Koreans and the Japanese got closer together. So there was much tighter Japan- Korea-US trilateral cooperation from that point on going forward, that also led to some interesting results. Finally, I think it did enhance and improve the diplomatic efforts at the security council where all of a sudden you had the Koreans, the P5+1, the Japanese, the US, all in lock step and a more pliable China that led to sectoral sanctions for the first time in 2016 that were added on to by subsequent administrations.

Amb. McCarthy (17:42): Well, I wanted to ask in terms of the decision to deploy the THAAD missile defense system, what was the role of our diplomats and what was the role of our military, Department of Defense representatives, in negotiating that deployment?

Amb. Lippert (17:58): This was all underway, at least in the public sphere, before I ever arrived on the Korean Peninsula. There was a lot of heat and noise around this in the press, but it wasn't an issue of great conflict in the bilateral relationship. I think this was more of an issue of the Korean side needing to take a decision whether they wanted this or not, and it's in their country, obviously. And within the consultative mechanisms of the alliance, figuring out how this would work. The other thing that was always interesting about this, and let me just make this point, is that there was a lot of heat and controversy in the open source media, but public opinion poll after public opinion poll showed high popular support for the deployment of the THAAD battery. I mean, it was in the sixties and seventies percent consistently, and even after Park Geun-hye was impeached and every single issue that she was closely associated with went down well below 50%, THAAD was the one issue that was still fairly resilient and was in the high fifties after that. So, interesting popular dynamics that I thought that the press reporting, the heat around this, the international tension, just didn't line up with some of the machinations that were actually going on in the peninsula.

Gen. Brooks (19:15): It really was an interesting dynamic and a worthy journey into political, military, and diplomatic interactions. First, I would say that we should view the THAAD deployment as not just a bilateral matter between the United States and the Republic of Korea. That is where the decision was taken. And that was a very important part of us pressing forward, that only the alliance could decide how the alliance would defend the Republic of Korea. And the alliance decided that based on these emerging missile capabilities, particularly medium range ballistic missiles and lofted intermediate range ballistic missiles, that would fly to a very high trajectory. There was a stronger defense that was absolutely needed militarily for their security, but there were other players involved. And so China was active early about THAAD. Candidly, I believe that the Chinese military advised Xi Jinping that the threat to their own security, their second response capability was now in danger with the deployment of THAAD. It's totally surprising as well, as China knows all US military weapons systems and reverse engineers most of them. Why they got that wrong, I don't know, but that caused Xi Jinping to go out early to try to preempt the deployment of THAAD. But there had been efforts before that to try to seed doubt into the South Korean population about the effect of the radar on fertility and everything else, on cattle, on the growing of crops, it was a concentrated effort to create disinformation and public distrust to erode that sense of need that was out there and that still persists to day. So it's not a bilateral matter. It's a multilateral matter in terms of the effect. And China was certainly trying to create drag on that. The decision being taken by the two countries is very important here and that China was not going to get to change the outcome. And of course China's reaction to that was, "all right, then I'll just punish you." And they were very precise in their economic punishment of South Korea. A very interesting message, when you think about the geopolitics of the region. But South Korea stood firm and they didn't waiver on the commitment. The discussions about the actual deployment were running parallel with the procurement of land decision and that was done by the South Korean government. So it was quite a bit of conversation as militarily, we made sure to keep the embassy well-informed on what we were hearing from the Ministry of Defense and the Department of Defense and the embassy was talking to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had concerns in this, the Blue House, and also back into Washington in the National Security Council. I thought it was a pretty good bubble of coordination and communication where we tried not to surprise each other, not to overestimate or underestimate our ability to actually get the systems in there.

Amb. McCarthy (21:55): Well, out of curiosity, this was taking place in a time of great upheaval in South Korea. I mean, millions of people took to the streets, the President was accused of corruption, you know, eventually impeached and removed. How did that interrupt your efforts on the deployment if it did?

Amb. Lippert (22:12): Well, the decision was taken prior to the impeachment, as I recall, I think that's the first point. So it was well in the tracks, I think General Brooks alluded to some things that became more caught in the wake of that political turmoil, which is there was a decision taken to move the location and purchase land versus move it, I think off of an old Korean Air Force base, if memory serves me correctly. That became more problematic in that there was also a decision to waive an environmental study to accelerate the deployment that then got caught in the domestic politics and the subsequent election of the progressive President Moon Jae-in. And I think that's sort of the implementation phase, became more embroiled in that than the actual decision-making, but I'll defer to General Brooks over there because part of that was after I had departed post.

Gen. Brooks (23:03): That's certainly correct. The decision was taken in the summer of 2016 and the political turmoil facing President Park Geun-hye really happened in the fall of 2016. Oddly enough, after the fifth nuclear test, then it really just unraveled through the December timeframe of 2016. In the meantime, we were doing the analysis of where to deploy. We had already had a plan in place as Ambassador Lippert described. It was a former South Korean Air Defense base on top of a mountain that was no longer in use. It's an old air defense system called the Hawk missile and they don't use Hawk missiles anymore. So the space was there. We were asked by the Ministry of Defense, "would you consider other locations?" And I thought we were locked. We were trying to minimize the number of variables at that point in time. And the answer was, "Yeah, sure. We'll take a look." And they offered a golf course that was not being used very much in the Southern portion of South Korea. The military analysis of that, which is where we kept our consideration, recognizing there would be some informational issues that were associated with going into a golf course. And obviously as it unfolded domestic political issues, our analysis was would it enhance the deployment and the actual defense, and the answer was yes. And so our military advice, after bouncing it back off of Washington, to make sure they were aware was that this is a better place to go. And in fact, from a technical perspective, it's a significantly better place to be than where we previously were located. You can only get two out of the six launchers, for example, on the mountain top. You can get all six properly deployed, it's the only place in the world where all six missiles are properly deployed as a functioning unit because of the space that was associated with the golf course. But that came with frictions and we continue to see those frictions now, domestic political and international frictions. But the defense has been in place since April of 2017.

Amb. Lippert (24:52): And just one quick footnote, the golf course was owned by the conglomerate Lotte. As a result Lotte's business, there's a big consumer retail component of that business in China, was the first target by the Chinese for economic retaliation and boycott.

Gen. Brooks (25:12): That's another one. We were working very hard to try to get China to actively engage against North Korea with some precision and with some bite and China was reticent to do so as though they didn't know how. And then they demonstrated that they are extremely effective and very, very precise in their use of economic instruments and leverage as they addressed it against South Korea. So it was an odd circumstance that their approach was more effective against South Korea than it was against North Korea at the time.

Amb. McCarthy (25:40): Because they conducted what was essentially like an economic boycott of sorts, right?

Gen. Brooks (25:42): Yes. And all the while claiming that this is not the central government, which we could see right through immediately. What they were doing was saying that local provinces had the authority to enforce fire codes, and those fire codes were fundamentally focused on Lotte stores, which are numerous throughout China. And so I think it was some 50 or so locations were suddenly now under a fire code violation and in Chinese law that requires compensation of the workers. It creates essentially a cessation of business until the fire code is resolved and a hemorrhage of funds to pay. And it was at the highest rate, so the amount of days that they were going to make this last matched the highest rate of compensation. It was very, very precise. And in the meantime, they also attacked the tourism industry of South Korea, very directly, not central government, it was just the tourist agencies on their own who decided this. That's the approach that China takes. And it was very clear and in some ways that helps the geopolitics of the region that China reveals its hand this way and causes countries to take notes, but it's still very difficult to overcome.

Amb. McCarthy (26:53): This is the end of Part I of The General and the Ambassador Podcast with General Vince Brooks and Ambassador Mark Lippert. Stay tuned for Part II. This has been a new episode in the series The General and the Ambassador: A Conversation. Thank you for listening. Our series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy in partnership with UNC Global at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites and on our website generalambassadorpodcast.org. Do follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and we welcome all input and suggestions. You can mail us directly at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com. Thank you for listening.