South Korea opposition aims to stop military’s Taiwan entanglement

Kim Joon-hyung, interim head of the Rebuilding Korea Party, told This Week in Asia in an exclusive interview that his party and the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea planned to jointly introduce the bill to parliament soon.

“There have been growing discussions in Washington among some military commanders and congressmen that South Korea and Japan should intervene in a crisis over Taiwan”, Kim said.

“This law bill aims to prevent the South Korean military from being dragged into such an eventuality and make it focus on its original mission to defend the South from the North’s threats,” Kim said.

The bill would have a good chance of being passed by the National Assembly where the two main opposition parties have 187 seats in the 300-seat parliament, Yang added.

When asked by Kim whether South Korea would intervene militarily in a conflict over Taiwan in parliament on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul flatly said: “No”.

“The US troops stationing in South Korea are supposed to focus on the Korean peninsula issue”, Cho added.

Yang Uk, a senior researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said South Korea is “too preoccupied with coping with the North to project its strength beyond the Korean peninsula”.

“But it would have no alternatives but to fight alongside the United States if China attacks the United States… as the United States would do the same if the North attacks the South”, he told This Week in Asia.

02:05

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He also said it would not make sense to dispatch American troops stationed in the South to overseas contingencies such as Taiwan as their heavy weapons were not suitable for rapid overseas deployment.

General Charles Flynn,