Fact check: Trump falsely claims Biden ‘terminated’ South Korea deal Biden actually made
President Donald Trump answers a reporters question during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin in the Oval Office of the White House on April 7
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump tried again Tuesday to rewrite the history of US relations with South Korea.
Trump has repeatedly delivered false assertions about the payments South Korea has made for decades to help cover the cost of the major US military presence in the country (more than 26,000 personnel as of the end of 2024). On Tuesday, he wrote on social media that he had just spoken with South Korean acting President Han Duck-soo about economic issues and about “payment for the big time Military Protection we provide to South Korea.”
Trump then added this: “They began these Military payments during my first term, Billions of Dollars, but Sleepy Joe Biden, for reasons unknown, terminated the deal. That was a shocker to all!”
Trump’s claim is false in two big ways.
First, South Korea’s payments did not begin during Trump’s first term. The cost-sharing deals known as Special Measures Agreements began in 1991, more than 25 years before Trump took office in 2017.
Second, former President Joe Biden did not terminate a Trump cost-sharing agreement with South Korea. The only Special Measures Agreement signed by the Trump administration had expired by the time Biden took office in 2021 – and Biden’s administration then signed two such agreements, one in 2021 and one in 2024, that both included South Korean spending increases.
“There was no deal that was ‘terminated,’” Andrew Yeo, a politics professor and Korea expert at The Catholic University of America and The Brookings Institution think tank, said in a Tuesday email.
“Trump’s characterization of Biden’s deal with South Korea is inaccurate,” Yonho Kim, an international affairs professor and associate director of the Institute for Korean Studies at The George Washington University, said in a Tuesday email.
South Korea increased its payments in both of its cost-sharing deals with Biden
Here’s the truth about what happened under Trump and Biden.
Trump inherited a South Korea cost-sharing deal negotiated by the Obama administration, which ran from 2014 through 2018. Trump then agreed to a one-year deal for 2019, which secured an 8.2% increase in the South Korean contribution.
That one-year Trump deal was the 10th in the series of Special Measures Agreements that started in 1991, so “it wasn’t as if South Korea began its VERY FIRST cost-sharing payments in 2019,” Jiun Bang, a Colorado College international relations professor, said in a Tuesday email. And Trump was unable to get South Korea to agree to the standard multi-year agreement; South Korea rejected his demands for a giant spending increase in the vicinity of 400%, from less than $1 billion per year to $5 billion per year or close.
South Korea did come to a smaller deal with the Trump administration in mid-2020 to spend $200 million that year to pay the South Korean employees of US forces, who had been put on leave because Trump’s one-year Special Measures Agreement had lapsed at the end of 2019. But negotiations on a new Special Measures Agreement were still unresolved when Trump left the White House in January 2021.
The Biden administration completed the talks in March 2021, agreeing to an 11th Special Measures Agreement to retroactively cover 2020 and continue through 2025. Then, with the possibility of a second Trump term looming, the Biden administration and South Korea signed a 12th agreement in late 2024, to run from 2026 through 2030.
Trump claimed during his 2024 presidential campaign that Biden had allowed South Korea’s payments to go “way, way down” to “almost nothing,” but that’s not true, either. South Korea agreed to substantial spending hikes in both of its Biden-era deals.
The agreement signed in 2021 included a 2021 increase of 13.9% – meaning South Korea’s payment that year would be about $1 billion – and then additional increases in 2022 through 2025 tied to increases in South Korea’s defense budget. The agreement signed in 2024 is scheduled to begin with an 8.3% increase in 2026 and then additional increases tied to South Korean inflation.
Trump baselessly claimed in October 2024, as a presidential candidate, that “if I were there now, they’d be paying us $10 billion a year. And you know what? They’d be happy to do it.”
The-CNN-Wire
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