Senate bill would bar unilateral withdrawal of US troops from South Korea

President Donald Trump would be barred from unilaterally withdrawing nearly 30,000 U.S. troops currently stationed in South Korea under a measure introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday.

U.S Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2019 that would require the secretary of defense to certify that a troop withdrawal would be in the best interest of U.S. national security and would not significantly undermine security of U.S. allies in the region.

“As President Trump’s actions cause us to grow more and more isolated in the world, Congress needs to show our allies that the United States won’t throw them to the wolves,” Murphy, a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said. “After a week spent humiliating our closest friends and heaping praise on Kim Jong-Un, the president is already declaring that North Korea is no longer a threat. That is an earth-shattering claim based only on a handshake agreement and a promise — a weaker promise than they’ve made and broken numerous times already.”

Murphy added that he would support bringing U.S. troops home “when North Korea no longer poses an existential threat to our friends,” but he added, “that day is a long time from now.”

The Kim regime, Duckworth said, is “as dangerous today as they were six months ago and they have done nothing to demonstrate that the threat they pose has lessened to where we should consider reducing our forces like Donald Trump has suggested.”

“Any discussion of withdrawing our forces from the Korean Peninsula must be tied to concrete and verifiable changes in the DPRK’s behavior as well as to changing security dynamics on the peninsula and throughout in the region, and it must be done in close consultation with our allies,” Duckworth said. “Unilaterally ending our military’s involvement on the Korean Peninsula would hand Kim Jong Un a significant victory and put our allies in the region at risk.”