The Troubled US-ROK Alliance and South Korea's Nuclear Option

Relations between the United States and South Korea have become increasingly strained. We argue that the alliance is being pulled apart by two powerful geopolitical forces. The rise of China is creating a rift between American and South Korean foreign policy priorities, and the growing sophistication of North Korea's nuclear arsenal has put the U.S. homeland in the nuclear crosshairs. This creates catastrophic risks for the United States — should there be war on the Peninsula — at a time when the stakes in Korea are lower for the U.S. relative to the past. During the Cold War, NATO addressed similar extended deterrence challenges through nuclear proliferation (to Britain and France), U.S. nuclear sharing with allies, and a robust U.S. conventional force presence in Europe. We discuss these options for the Korean peninsula and conclude that South Korea is likely to move toward an independent nuclear arsenal — a result that might be best for the alliance.

Jennifer Lind is Associate Professor in the Government department at Dartmouth College, a Research Associate at Chatham House, London, and a Faculty Associate at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Professor Lind has previously worked as a consultant for RAND and for the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense. Professor Lind is the author of the book Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Cornell UP). Her research focuses on the security relations of East Asia, and U.S. foreign policy toward the region. She has published her research in numerous academic journals, and writes for wider audiences in Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is also a graduate of the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Lind is currently writing a book about competition between authoritarian and democratic great powers.

Daryl Press is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His work focuses on U.S. foreign policy, deterrence, and the future of warfare. He has published numerous articles and two books: Calculating Credibility (2005), which examines how leaders assess credibility during crises, and The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution (2020), which explores deterrence challenges of the 21st century. Dr. Press worked as a consultant at the RAND Corporation for nearly twenty years and has taught classes on conventional force modeling for two decades. His current project is a series of conventional force assessments — designed to measure the evolving balance of power in East Asia and Europe. Mr. Press's work has appeared in leading academic journals as well as in the popular press including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly.