[Yonhap News Photo ]
WASHINGTON -- North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would do a "victory dance" if the United States pulled its troops from South Korea, a top U.S. military commander said Thursday.
Admiral Harry Harris, chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, was offering his assessment of how Kim would respond in the event the U.S. succumbed to the North's longstanding demand to remove its 28,000 troops from the South.'
"I believe he would do a victory dance," Harris told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "I think he'd be a happy man if we abrogated our alliance with South Korea."
The United States has stationed troops in the South to deter North Korean aggression since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. On Wednesday U.S. President Donald Trump seemed to hint at withdrawing them if Seoul failed to address Washington's trade deficit with the Asian ally.
"We have a very big trade deficit with them, and we protect them," Trump said. "We lose money on trade, and we lose money on the military. We have right now 32,000 soldiers on the border between North and South Korea. Let's see what happens."
Harris expressed his reservations about what is likely to be a May summit between Trump and Kim on the regime's denuclearization. "We've never been in a position where our president has met with a leader of North Korea, ever. And so I don't have a way to predict the future. I just think that we have to go into this eyes wide open," the commander said.
"I don't know what Kim Jong-un actually wants out of the summit, but I do believe that in a general sense, Kim Jong-un seeks reunification of the Korean Peninsula under his leadership, he seeks respect and status that nuclear weapons give him, and he seeks security, which he believes the nuclear weapons give him," he added.
(Yonhap)
reporter
Lim Chang-won
cwlim34@ajunews.com
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