South Korea has ruled out sending troops to the Strait of Hormuz to support the US campaign against Iran, defying pressure from President Donald Trump and drawing a firm line between protecting its shipping and joining a war.
President Lee Jae Myung made the announcement at a news conference on Friday. “There won’t be deployment that would involve or enter war. I can tell you that very clearly,” Lee said. “We won’t deploy military assets in any form to that end.”
The decision comes amid growing friction between Seoul and Washington. Trump has criticized South Korea for what he called insufficient support for the Iran war and scaled back major joint military drills between the two countries’ armed forces this summer, a move that unsettled the US ally. Lee reiterated the position three times. “Let it be clear. There will be no dispatch of troops that will lead to involvement in a conflict. There will be no engagement or involvement in war,” he said.
Lee left the door open to a narrower mission. He said he was reviewing whether South Korea could play a greater role in safeguarding navigation in the region, noting that the country already maintains a naval presence off the coast of Somalia as part of an anti-piracy mission. South Korea would “carry out the minimum necessary activities” to protect its merchant ships and oil shipping routes, he said. The country must do “the minimum as other countries do to protect our commercial shipping and crude shipments, and also the safety of our people,” Lee added.
Domestic opposition and trade tensions
The idea of deploying military assets to the Strait of Hormuz has proven deeply unpopular in South Korea. Protests broke out in recent weeks opposing a potential deployment. Lee’s remarks on Friday appeared to settle the matter.
Tensions extend beyond Hormuz. South Korea committed last year to invest $350bn in US manufacturing in return for Washington lowering tariffs on Korean imports to 15%, but the two sides have struggled to finalize the package. Lee said concern over the commercial viability of the investment package was the main sticking point. There were elements that were difficult for Seoul to accept, he said, but the two sides were nearing an agreement. Seoul postponed a parliamentary briefing on the investment plans this week. It is expected to take place next week instead.
Offer to broker US-North Korea dialogue
Lee also raised the prospect of a meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the coming months, though he cautioned that many factors needed to align. “What’s clear is that President Trump wants talks, and I want him to as well, and we’re continuing coordination to make dialogue between the North and the US possible,” Lee said. He told reporters that “Trump clearly wants dialogue with North Korea” and that while such talks are uncertain, they are not impossible.
South Korea was continuing “preliminary coordination efforts” to facilitate dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington, Lee said, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap. “The resumption of North Korea-US dialogue would be far easier than resuming inter-Korean dialogue,” he said.
Trump, seeking to revive the bond he claims to have forged with Kim during his first term, has said he plans to meet the North Korean leader later this year. He has been pushing aides for a meeting as soon as the autumn, the Wall Street Journal has reported. The US president said it was important to “get along” with Kim and claimed that Pyongyang now had 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons. Seoul’s own assessment is higher. It puts the North Korean arsenal at about 80 to 120 nuclear warheads.
North Korea did not clearly respond. North Korean state media has remained largely silent on Trump’s repeated calls for such a meeting, and the country has secured critical backing from Russia in recent years. Inter-Korean relations reached a high in 2018 but deteriorated after talks between Kim and Trump collapsed in February 2019.
On Thursday, a court in Seoul ordered North Korea to pay roughly $32.5m for blowing up the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in 2020, a facility intended to improve relations on the peninsula but destroyed amid rising tensions. Separately, South Korea held its first-ever presidential summit with five Central Asian states on Wednesday, aiming to establish deeper economic engagement with the Russian-allied countries.