Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

- Arthur C/ Clarke

"If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have a half century before you die – what makes this any different from a half hour?

- Leo Tolstoy

"Self education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. he only function of a school is to make self-education easier, failing that, if does nothing."

_ Isaac Asimov

1. North Korea conducts first long-range missile test in months, likely firing a solid-fueled weapon

2. North Korea fires ICBM after condemning US 'war' moves

3. North Korea's Missiles: Liquid To Solid Fuel

4. Next steps for North Korea: How successful is Yoon’s inter-Korean policy?

5. How to Kill a Country (South Korean Demographics)

6. Yoon orders joint response with U.S., Japan following N. Korea's ICBM launch

7. N. Korea fires ICBM at lofted angle into East Sea

8. Nuclear envoys of S. Korea, U.S., Japan condemn N. Korea's missile launches

9. U.S. condemns recent N. Korean ballistic missile launches: State Dept.

10. Unification minister says human rights violations 'status quo' in N. Korea

11. Israeli Military Reveals Tunnel It Says Hamas Built for Large-Scale Attack

12. North Korea’s Missiles Can Reach the U.S., Japan Says, but Kim Jong Un Wants to Perfect Them

13. Activists cast bottled rice into West Sea in hope of reaching North Koreans

14. Police clamp down on carrying cell phones in public (north Korea)

15. Defense chief warns N. Korea against ICBM launches

16. N. Korea slams S. Korean military chiefs' warning of retaliation

17. Fort Cavazos soldiers to deploy to South Korea under winter rotation plan

18. Alliance Commitment in an Era of Partisan Polarization: A Survey Experiment of U.S. Voters

1. North Korea conducts first long-range missile test in months, likely firing a solid-fueled weapon

I guess there are some "I told you so's" out there. Kim is doubling down on his failed strategy. He will get nothing for this unless appeasement arguments win out (and as Syd Seiler said (borrowing one from Sir Lawrence Freedman) - deterrence works until it doesn't, and appeasement works until it doesn't. But I will place my trust in deterrence. Appeasement is more likely to lead to conflict than deterrence.

North Korea conducts first long-range missile test in months, likely firing a solid-fueled weapon

BY HYUNG-JIN KIM AND MARI YAMAGUCHI

Updated 4:55 AM EST, December 18, 2023

AP · December 17, 2023

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Monday conducted its first intercontinental ballistic missile test in five months, likely launching a developmental, more agile weapon, as it vows strong responses against U.S. and South Korean moves to boost their nuclear deterrence plans.

The South Korean government described the missile tested as a solid-fueled weapon, a likely reference to the North’s road-mobile Hwasong-18 ICBM whose built-in solid propellants make its launch more difficult for adversaries to detect than liquid-fueled weapons. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un previously called the Hwasong-18 the most powerful weapon of his nuclear forces.

South Korea’s military said the North Korean missile flew about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) before landing in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. It said the missile was launched on an elevated angle, an apparent attempt to avoid neighboring countries. Japanese lawmaker Masahisa Sato, citing Japan’s Defense Ministry, said the missile rose as high as 6,000 kilometers (3,730 miles).

The reported flight details matched those of North Korea’s second test of the Hwasong-18 missile in July. The North first test-fired the missile in April.

Since 2017, North Korea has carried out a slew of ICBM tests in a bid to acquire the ability to launch nuclear strikes on the U.S. mainland. But all of its previous tests before April’s Hwasong-18 launch involved liquid-propellent ICBMs, which need to be fueled before launch and cannot stay fueled for long periods.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts on the phone and condemned the North Korean launch as a violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban any ballistic activities by the North. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol separately ordered officials to maintain a solid South Korean-U.S. joint defense posture and respond “swiftly and overwhelmingly” to any North Korean provocations against South Korea.

The North’s ICBM test was its second weapons firing in less than a day. On Sunday night, it launched a short-range ballistic missile designed to strike South Korea that also splashed in the water off its east coast, according to its neighbors.

Observers said the back-to-back launches were likely to protest announcements by South Korea and the United States that they will bolster their joint nuclear deterrence capabilities in the face of North Korea’s evolving nuclear threats.

Senior U.S. and South Korean officials met in Washington on Friday for their second Nuclear Consultative Group meeting. They agreed to update their nuclear deterrence and contingency strategies and incorporate nuclear operation scenarios in their combined military exercises next summer, according to officials in Seoul.

The consultative body is responsible for sharing information on nuclear and strategic weapons operation plans and joint operations, though the U.S. will retain operational control of its nuclear weapons. U.S. officials said the group’s establishment and other steps to solidify U.S. security commitment were meant to ease South Korean worries about North Korean provocations while keeping Seoul from pursuing its own nuclear program.

North Korea’s Defense Ministry on Sunday called its rivals’ decision to include nuclear operation scenarios in their joint drills an open threat to potentially use nuclear weapons against the North. It said any attempt by enemies to use military force against North Korea will be met with “a preemptive and deadly counteraction.”

Park Won Gon, a professor at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, said North Korea’s latest ICBM launch was seen as an effort to improve its military capability to attack the U.S. mainland because it views the South Korea-U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy as a security threat.

Park said the launch was also likely designed to boost Kim Jong Un’s military credentials at home ahead of a key ruling party meeting next week as he appeared to lack economic achievements.

Since last year, North Korea has performed about 100 ballistic missile tests in what experts say is an attempt to enlarge its arsenal and wrest greater U.S. concessions. The U.S. and South Korea have responded by expanding their military drills and increased the temporary deployments of strategic U.S. assets such as aircraft carriers, nuclear-capable bombers and a nuclear-armed submarine in and near South Korea.

Du Hyeogn Cha, an analyst at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said North Korea is expected to continue weapons testing to pressure the U.S. to change its policy on the North.

“No matter whether the Biden administration stays or steps out (of the White House) after the presidential election next year, North Korea will raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula to bring change of the U. S. government’s policy on it,” Cha said.

Animosities between the Koreas further deepened after North Korea launched its first military reconnaissance satellite into space on Nov. 21 in violation of U.N. bans. South Korea, the U.S. and Japan strongly condemned it as an attempt by the North to improve its missile technology as well as establish a space-based surveillance system.

The U.S., South Korea and Japan are pushing to put into operation the sharing of real-time missile warning data on North Korea within days, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said Monday. Ministry officials said the three countries closely shared their information about Monday’s launch.

Meeting with reporters in Tokyo, Adm. John Aquilino, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, expressed concerns about North Korea’s increasing missile capabilities. But he said that the United States, Japan and South Korea are working more closely than ever and that they were even ready for Monday’s launch and had mobilized their missile defense ships forward earlier this week.

“The fact that we were able to predict a launch and then posture forces in advance that was pretty, pretty impressive,” Aquilino said, adding that it was not the first time but hard to do.

__

Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo. Associated Press writer Jiwon Song contributed to this report.

AP · December 17, 2023

2. North Korea fires ICBM after condemning US 'war' moves

The more missile firings the regime conducts, the stronger ROK. Japan, and US cooperation will be. These activities actually weaken the regime's position because the allies continue to improve their military capabilities to deter an attack. Again, the regime is doubling down on its failed strategy.

Note that the regime wants to try to blame the US and the alliance for its actions in the hopes of motivating the appeasers to put pressure on the Biden and Yoon administrations to make concessions. I do not believe either the Biden or Yoon administration will give in to the appeasers.

Asia Pacific

North Korea fires ICBM after condemning US 'war' moves

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korea-fires-ballistic-missile-south-korea-says-2023-12-17/?utm

By Soo-Hyang Choi and Kantaro Komiya

December 18, 20233:00 AM ESTUpdated 4 hours ago

Summary

ICBM has range of more than 15,000 km -Japan officialMissile fired from near Pyongyang, flew about 1,000 km -SeoulNorth Korea's second missile launch in matter of hoursU.S. submarine visits South Korea this week

SEOUL/TOKYO, Dec 18 (Reuters) - North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile on Monday that has a range to hit anywhere in the United States, said South Korea and Japan, marking its second launch in hours as Pyongyang condemned a U.S.-led show of force as "war" moves.

The missile has a potential to travel more than 15,000 km (9,300 miles), meaning it can reach anywhere in Japan and the mainland United States, Japan's Parliamentary Vice Minister of Defense Shingo Miyake said.

South Korea's National Security Council said it was a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), labelling the launch a destabilising act that ignored international warnings and multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions.

President Yoon Suk Yeol had ordered the upgrading of the effective operation of "nuclear deterrence" by South Korea and the United States, it added.

Coinciding with the North's fifth ICBM launch of the year, China and North Korea held a high-level meeting in Beijing on Monday. Beijing, which is Pyongyang's closest ally, reaffirmed a commitment to deepen cooperation and said discussions covered issues of "common concern", without elaborating.

As a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, China supported all resolutions imposing sanctions on the North up to 2017 for its weapons development, but has since refused to back further sanctions saying these would only raise tensions.

Monday's missile was fired from an area near the capital Pyongyang towards the sea off the North's east coast and flew about 1,000 km, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

Japan's defence ministry reported the flight lasted 73 minutes, just short of the 74 minute flight by an ICBM North Korea fired in July. It reached a maximum altitude of more than 6,000 km and fell into the sea west of Hokkaido outside Japan's exclusive economic zone, Japan said.

The area near the international airport serving Pyongyang is where the North previously launched ICBMs and is suspected to be the location of a missile assembly facility.

The North's latest, solid-fuel Hwasong-18 ICBMs have been launched from near Pyongyang, at a grass field that analysts said is likely reinforced with concrete for the heavy launch vehicle.

Monday's missile launch came after North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile on Sunday night, flying about 570 km and falling into the ocean.

North Korea followed up that launch with a fiery statement condemning the United States for orchestrating what it called a "preview of a nuclear war," including the arrival of a nuclear-powered submarine in South Korea on Sunday.

[1/2]People watch a TV broadcasting a news report on North Korea firing what appeared to be a long-range ballistic missile, at a railway station in Seoul, South Korea, December 18, 2023. Yonhap via REUTERS Acquire Licensing Rights

U.S SUBMARINE VISITS SOUTH KOREA

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts and stressed the importance of sharing missile warning data, the White House said.

South Korea's presidential office also said the officials discussed working closer to stop the North's illicit cyber activities and illegal foreign businesses.

The allies have been working to set up a real-time missile data sharing system, but it is still "a few days" from going operational, South Korea's defence ministry said.

On Friday, following a high-level meeting by U.S. and South Korean officials on the use of U.S. strategic military weapons to deter North Korea's military threat, Washington warned any nuclear attack would lead to the end of the regime.

North Korea says it has a sovereign right to operate a ballistic missile program for self defence and rejects a Security Council ban, which it says is a product of hostile U.S. policy.

After Sunday's launch, North Korea's defence ministry criticised "military gangsters" in the United States and South Korea for raising tensions with drills, displays of force, and nuclear war planning.

The statement by an unnamed ministry spokesman cited the arrival of the U.S. nuclear-powered submarine Missouri in the South Korean city of Busan on Sunday.

Visits by U.S. nuclear submarines had previously been rare, but they have increased under agreements between Seoul and Washington that have boosted arrivals of U.S. military assets.

The USS Carl Vinson, a U.S. aircraft carrier, also visited Busan last month as part of an effort to increase deterrence against North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.

The North's defence ministry also condemned the meeting by South Korean and U.S. officials in Washington as another sign of efforts to streamline war preparations and a provocative show of force.

The United States and South Korea have increased the intensity of joint military drills against rising threats from the North, which had tested a range of ballistic missiles and in November launched its first military spy satellite.

Reporting by Soo-hyang Choi, Hyonhee Shin and Josh Smith in Seoul, Kantaro Komiya, Kaori Kaneko and Mariko Katsumura in Tokyo and Ryan Woo in Beijing, Writing by Jack Kim Editing by Ed Davies and Michael Perryens new ta

Kantaro Komiya

Thomson Reuters

Kantaro writes about everything from Japan's economic indicators to North Korea's missiles to global regulation on AI companies. His previous stories have been published in the Associated Press, Bloomberg, the Japan Times and Rest of World. A Tokyo native, Kantaro graduated from DePauw University in the United States and was the recipient of the Overseas Press Club Foundation 2020 Scholar Award.

3. North Korea's Missiles: Liquid To Solid Fuel

See the graphic comparing liquid fuel to solid fuel at the link: https://www.barrons.com/news/north-korea-s-missiles-liquid-to-solid-fuel-0e052a98

North Korea's Missiles: Liquid To Solid Fuel

Barron's · by NICHOLAS SHEARMAN

North Korea's missiles: liquid to solid fuel

NICHOLAS SHEARMAN

Text size

Igniter lights the core, which burns from the inside outward

Combustion

chamber

Combustion

chamber

Pumps

Oxidiser

Burned

propellant

Solid fuel and

oxydiser

Fuel

Solid-fuel

Liquid-fuel

Fuelled from the point of manufacture; ready for immediate launch

Launch preparation can

take hours as needs fueling

before use

Easier and quicker

to develop an ICBM

arsenal

Easier storage, maintenance, and transportation

Sources: Scientific American, ResearchGate, 38 North

Barron's · by NICHOLAS SHEARMAN

4. Next steps for North Korea: How successful is Yoon’s inter-Korean policy?

Why is there never a survey about the failure of Kim Jong Un's strategy? Is Kim Jong Un's strategy achieving success (the answer is perhaps yes if the only criteria is that he is remaining in power. By all other criteria he is failing). But why is this never addressed and discussed? Why do we never consider how to exploit his failing strategy and cause ultimate failure?

And the ROK/US alliance strategy has been successful by the only criteria that counts: there has not been a resumption of hostilities. The Kmi family regime has not given the order to attack for 7 decades.

Next steps for North Korea: How successful is Yoon’s inter-Korean policy?

Survey of over 100 experts finds most consider Seoul’s approach ‘ineffective,’ with many saying tensions have worsened

https://www.nknews.org/2023/12/next-steps-for-north-korea-how-successful-is-yoons-inter-korean-policy/?utm

Chad O'Carroll December 15, 2023

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol looks through a fence near the inter-Korean border on Oct. 1, 2023. | Image: ROK Presidential Office

Editor’s note: The following article is the second in a seven-part series about what lies ahead for North Korea in 2024 and beyond, based on a survey of more than 100 experts. The first part can be read here.

A majority of North Korea experts believe South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s inter-Korean policy is “ineffective,” according to a new opinion survey conducted by NK News, with many stating that security conditions on the peninsula have worsened.

Over 29% of respondents said that Yoon’s “Audacious Initiative” policy offering aid in return for denuclearization steps is “highly ineffective” due to “failing to address key issues and worsening relations with DPRK.”

The same percentage of respondents described inter-Korean policy under Yoon as “somewhat ineffective,” with “limited progress” but “several missed opportunities.”

Many experts said that Seoul has failed to halt Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile development, while pushing Kim Jong Un to bolster ties with Vladimir Putin and Russia.

However, others judged Yoon’s inter-Korean policy to be at least a partial success, welcoming growing trilateral cooperation between the U.S., ROK and Japan and improvements to South Korean defense capabilities under Yoon’s watch.

The seven-part survey conducted in early December asked the following question: “To date, how do you assess South Korea’s approach to the DPRK under President Yoon Suk Yeol?”

The survey, sent to around 350 North Korea watchers, received analysis and explanations about the future of global North Korea policy from 106 different respondents — 52 on-record and 54 anonymous.

In reverse order, here’s how experts judged Yoon’s inter-Korean policy to date:

President Yoon Suk-yeol at a military parade on Sept. 27, 2023. | Image: ROK Presidential Office

#5 (2.8% of votes) — Highly Effective: South Korea’s approach has been highly effective, showing strong leadership and clear strategic outcomes in dealing with the DPRK

Just three experts said they believe the Yoon administration has taken a “highly effective” approach to inter-Korean policy.

“If one assumes no possible initiative by Yoon is likely to lead Kim Jong Un to get serious, then Yoon is best served by a policy that deters North Korean provocations, strengthens the alliance with the U.S., keeps a principled open door for China and strengthens the ROK’s strategic deterrence,” said Sydney Seiler, former national intelligence officer for DPRK at the U.S. National Intelligence Council.

Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said he welcomed the Yoon administration’s embrace of “a comprehensive, integrated strategy using all the instruments of national power.”

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol with U.S. President Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida at the Camp David Summit on Aug. 18, 2023. | Image: ROK Presidential Office

#4 (10.4% of votes) — Generally Positive: The approach has been mostly positive, with some successful initiatives and constructive steps toward dealing with the DPRK

Over 10 percent said Yoon’s inter-Korean policy has been “mostly positive,” with some noting the growth of Japan-ROK relations and increased emphasis on ROK military deterrence capabilities.

“Although South Korea’s policy did not change the DPRK’s policy, its attitude strengthened solidarity among Japan, the U.S. and ROK to counter North Korean threats,” said Maiko Takeuchi, a former member of the U.N. Panel of Experts on DPRK.

“If the trilateral defense frameworks survive other regimes by institutionalization, President Yoon’s initiative will be considered a significant contribution,” she added.

Stephen Blancke, associate research fellow with the RUSI think tank, said Yoon’s policy makes sense because history has shown that “North Korea does not care about friendly rapprochement” policies like those pursued by the former Moon Jae-in administration.

Others said they appreciated the Yoon administration’s stronger emphasis on DPRK human rights problems.

“Compared to the Moon administration, the Yoon administration’s foreign policy is based on promotion of democracy and human rights,” said Benjamin Young of Virginia Commonwealth University.

An anonymous respondent added that, “The reassertion of concern for human rights alongside WMDs as a major delineation is very welcome.”

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol salutes at a ceremony celebrating the 75th founding anniversary of ROK armed forces on Sept. 26, 2023. | Image: ROK Presidential Office

#3 (19.8% of votes) — Moderately Successful: South Korea’s strategy has had a moderate level of success, with some achievements balanced by areas needing improvement

Around 19.8% of respondents said Yoon’s North Korea policy has been “moderately successful,” while acknowledging some areas that need extra attention.

“President Yoon has managed to improve relations with U.S., which had deteriorated under his predecessor, and to draw Japan into a de facto alliance as well,” said Donald Kirk, a veteran journalist based in South Korea. “It’s too early to say whether this approach will have much success, but it is an improvement over the unrealistic dreams of his predecessor.”

Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King’s College London said the way North Korean leader Kim Jong Un treated former ROK President Moon during the last two years of his administration showed Yoon that the DPRK isn’t interested in dialogue.

“(This is) why I think that Yoon is focusing on managing relations with North Korea, rather than seeking any real breakthrough, at least for the time being,” Pacheco Pardo said. “From this perspective, the policy has been moderately successful.”

Lauren Gilbert of the Atlantic Council said Yoon’s foray into talking about preemptive strikes has been misguided. But she said his “call to cease development of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons while being open to diplomacy and providing aid” is progress compared to either Sunshine Policy engagement or past demands for complete denuclearization before diplomacy.

And while Terence Roehrig of the U.S. Navy War College welcomed the improvement of trilateral ties, he expressed concern about the security climate.

“The Yoon administration also needs to devote more effort to tension reduction along with lessening the potential for accidents and miscalculation to achieve some degree of long-term stability on the peninsula,” he said.

Yoon Suk-yeol visits a South Korean navy unit in March 2023. | Image: ROK Presidential Office

#1 + #2 (58.4%) — Highly Ineffective: South Korea’s strategy under President Yoon Suk Yeol has been highly ineffective, failing to address key issues and worsening relations with DPRK

Somewhat Ineffective: The approach has been somewhat ineffective, with limited progress and several missed opportunities in relations with DPRK

Almost 30% of respondents said they thought that Yoon’s approach to North Korea has been “highly ineffective,” while the same number judged it as “somewhat ineffective.”

“Strengthening the alliance is important, but much of what has been advocated strengthens Kim’s determination to work with Russia,” said nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies.

Bronwen Dalton of the University of Technology in Sydney said North Korea’s nuclear program is rapidly accelerating and that the DPRK is increasingly able to counter sanctions through cybercrime and warmer relations with Russia.

An anonymous respondent said Yoon’s pursuit of denuclearization is a non-starter.

“The policy of forcing North Korea to make nuclear disarmament or serious concessions from a position of superior force is not realistic and senseless,” they said. “The U.S. has been trying to do this for many decades, but even they have had no visible success.”

Another respondent agreed: “Yoon gives Kim Jong Un no reason to see him as a useful partner, no reason to slow down his race to develop a nuclear deterrent.”

Others emphasized that Yoon has failed to make adequate efforts toward diplomacy to accompany his containment and deterrence strategy.

“A two-track approach combining risk reduction dialogues and diplomatic/military pressure should be pursued together for strategic stability on the Korean Peninsula,” said Jina Kim of the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Another respondent said South Korea could have anticipated North Korea’s military responses to Yoon’s policies.

“While the approach has been successful in rallying support for a containment strategy, the approach has demonstrated lack of understanding of the DPRK psyche,” they said. “It should have been predictable that DPRK would retaliate if the ROK partially withdrew from the [inter-Korean] military agreement as a response to the satellite launch.”

Stephan Haggard, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, assessed that DPRK issues have not been a priority for the Yoon administration.

“It is not surprising that there has been little progress,” he said.

A few experts declined to classify Yoon’s North Korea policy as effective or ineffective, stating that the Moon administration’s approach also failed to meaningfully influence the DPRK or that Pyongyang ultimately isn’t interested in Seoul.

“Kim Jong Un doesn’t care much about ROK diplomacy or military buildup, only focusing on the USA’s moves,” said Malovic Dorian, chief Asia editor of France’s La Croix daily.

Edited by Bryan Betts

5. How to Kill a Country (South Korean Demographics)

Maybe the Kim family regime just has to wait out the South. Of course the north has its own demographic problems as we saw Kim Jong Un cry about recently.

How to Kill a Country | Newgeography.com

newgeography.com

December 14, 2023 Last Update: 12/14/2023

How to Kill a Country

by Randal OToole 12/13/2023

Much of Seoul is a sea of high-rises. And not just Seoul: Busan and other cities in South Korea have lots of high rises. More than half of all South Korean households live in high rises, and well over 60 percent live in some kind of multifamily housing.

South Korea also has the lowest birthrate of any country in the world. The latest numbers say the average woman has just 0.70 children in her lifetime. Birthrates need to be 2.1 per woman for a population to remain constant; at 0.70, South Korea will be almost totally depopulated in just three generations. Seoul’s birthrate is 0.64 and, due to an aging population, it will likely fall to 0.30 in the next ten years.

It is strange that a few decades ago we were worried about overpopulation and now we need to worry about population decline, at least in the developed world. A birthrate of 0.70 heralds an existential collapse for any country that doesn’t welcome immigrants — and I know of only two countries that welcome and assimilate immigrants, as opposed to isolating them as most European countries do.

South Korea’s high-rise housing and low birthrates are closely related. People don’t have children if they don’t have room for them. High rises are expensive to build so living space is at a premium. Birth rates are declining throughout the developed world, but they have declined the most in countries like South Korea, Russia, and China that have tried to house most of their people in high rises.

South Korea became a high rise country when it rapidly industrialized after the end of the Korean War. People moving from rural areas to the cities to get jobs created a housing crisis, and then-current urban planning theories held that high-rise housing was the best way to house people. Remember that, even though South Korea was the “good guys” in the Korean war, the country was still a dictatorship until about 1990, which meant the leadership could direct the country into one style of housing even if residents might have preferred otherwise.

Admittedly, South Korea has one of the highest population densities in the world with 1,340 people per square mile. But the country could have housed most of its population in low-rise apartments and single-family homes and still left well over 80 percent of its land for farming and other rural purposes. South Korea’s urban areas make up 17 percent of its land but, even with all of its high rises, have an average of less than 7,000 people per square mile. For comparison, 73 percent of the residents of Philadelphia live in single-family homes (mostly townhouses) yet the city’s population density is nearly 12,000 people per square mile.

The current urban planning fad is for mid-rise housing instead of high rises, but the result is the same: cramped quarters unsuited for raising children. In 1996, Portland planners set a target of reducing the share of the region’s households living in single-family homes from 65 percent (which is what it was in 1990) to 41 percent by 2040. Planners have had enough of an impact to date that Portland has a pretty low birthrate, though its suburbs are higher.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Seoul apartment buildings by Francesco Anzola via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License

newgeography.com

6. Yoon orders joint response with U.S., Japan following N. Korea's ICBM launch

Trilateral coordination grows stronger. Also President Yoon is acting deliberately and prudently. Of course the headline is a little misleading - he is not ordering Japan and the US to respond. - he is stating that the ROK will respond with Japan and the US.

But wait until the north conducts a provocation that attacks the Korean people and territory in the South. Then I believe we will see a different response that could be very decisive at the time and place of the actual attack on the South and where the attack emanated from.

(2nd LD) Yoon orders joint response with U.S., Japan following N. Korea's ICBM launch | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Han-joo · December 18, 2023

(ATTN: UPDATES with more info throughout; CHANGES photo)

SEOUL, Dec. 18 (Yonhap) -- President Yoon Suk Yeol on Monday ordered a joint response with the United States and Japan to North Korea's long-range missile launch by using the countries' missile information sharing system.

Yoon made the instruction during an emergency meeting of the National Security Council presided over by National Security Adviser Cho Tae-yong.

"Utilizing the real-time information sharing system for North Korean missiles, we have to proactively push for South Korea, the U.S. and Japan's joint response," Yoon was quoted as saying by the presidential office.

The trilateral real-time system was agreed upon at the landmark Camp David summit in August, where Yoon, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida committed to operate the system by the end of the year.

The president also ordered an "immediate, overwhelming response" to any provocations by North Korea toward the South Korean territory and people.

Earlier in the day, North Korea fired a long-range missile into the East Sea in its fifth intercontinental ballistic missile launch this year. The latest launch came hours after the North fired a short-range missile from Pyongyang on Sunday.

The back-to-back missile launches also came just days after Seoul and Washington held the second session of the Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) and agreed to complete the establishment of guidelines on the planning and operation of a shared nuclear strategy by the middle of next year.

Yoon also gave the instruction that the NCG's tasks be promptly pushed forward so that the joint nuclear deterrence capabilities of South Korea and the U.S. can be strengthened, his office said.

President Yoon Suk Yeol (4th from L) attends a National Security Council meeting on Dec. 18, 2023, in this photo provided by the presidential office. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)

khj@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Han-joo · December 18, 2023

7. N. Korea fires ICBM at lofted angle into East Sea

Is the regime still acting with some restraint - lofting versus firing the missile for distance? Is that a function of necessary testing required? Are they still working out the bugs in the system? Or was it to send a message to the alliance and the US but still with a measure of restraint? Is the regime probing for a red line from the US?

(4th LD) N. Korea fires ICBM at lofted angle into East Sea | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Chae Yun-hwan · December 18, 2023

(ATTN: RECASTS 4th para; UPDATES with more details in paras 8-10, 12; ADDS photo)

By Kim Eun-jung and Chae Yun-hwan

SEOUL, Dec. 18 (Yonhap) -- North Korea fired a long-range missile into the East Sea on Monday, the South Korean military said, in its fifth intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch this year as Seoul and Washington seek closer nuclear cooperation against threats from Pyongyang.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the missile was fired from the Pyongyang area at 8:24 a.m. at a lofted angle and flew about 1,000 kilometers before landing in the East Sea.

It was not immediately known how high the missile went up and whether the missile used solid fuel, with the in-depth analysis currently under way, the JCS said.

This photo, provided by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on April 14, 2023, shows the North's new solid-fuel Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), test-fired the previous day under the guidance of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

It marks the North's fifth ICBM launch this year, representing the highest number of ICBM launches in a single year.

The North fired Hwasong-15 and Hwasong-17 ICBMs, in February and March, respectively. It test-fired a solid-fuel Hwasong-18 in April and conducted a second test in July.

"While elevating our alert readiness, our military is maintaining a full readiness posture by closely sharing data on the 'North Korean ballistic missile' with the United States and Japan," the JCS said in a text message sent to reporters.

The three countries have agreed to operate a system for the real-time sharing of North Korean ballistic missile warning data by the end of this year amid efforts to bolster trilateral security cooperation against the North's threats.

President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered a joint response with the United States and Japan to the North's launch by utilizing the data-sharing system, as he attended an emergency meeting of the presidential National Security Council.

Meanwhile, the JCS called the latest launch a "clear" violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions banning the North from using ballistic missile technology, urging the North to immediately halt "reckless provocative acts."

"Despite our military's repeated warnings, North Korea continues to undertake threatening provocations. We sternly warn once again that North Korea holds all responsibility for everything that happens afterwards," Maj. Gen. Lee Seung-o, director of operations at the JCS, said in a televised statement.

A news report on North Korea's launch of a long-range ballistic missile on Dec. 18, 2023, is aired on a television at Seoul Station in central Seoul. (Yonhap)

The latest launch came hours after the North fired a short-range missile from Pyongyang at 10:38 p.m. Sunday. It flew about 570 kilometers before splashing into the East Sea, according to the JCS.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson condemned the two launches in a statement, calling on the North to return to dialogue, while also reaffirming the U.S.' "ironclad" commitment to the defense of South Korea and Japan.

The back-to-back missile launches came just days after Seoul and Washington held the second session of the Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) and agreed to complete the establishment of guidelines on the planning and operation of a shared nuclear strategy by the middle of next year.

The two sides also agreed to conduct joint military exercises simulating nuclear attacks from the North.

Just after Sunday's launch, the North's defense ministry lambasted the NCG meeting as "an open declaration on nuclear confrontation" and criticized the U.S.' deployment of major military assets to the Korean Peninsula this year.

The North's latest saber-rattling also came amid heightened tensions after Pyongyang scrapped a 2018 inter-Korean military agreement designed to reduce tensions and prevent accidental clashes along the border last month.

The North's scrapping of the deal came after South Korea partially suspended the deal in protest of the North's successful launch of its first military spy satellite on Nov. 21.

ejkim@yna.co.kr

yunhwanchae@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Chae Yun-hwan · December 18, 2023

8. Nuclear envoys of S. Korea, U.S., Japan condemn N. Korea's missile launches

I have not seen any official announcement that Dr. Jung Pak has assumed the role of special representative now that Ambassador Sung Kim has retired. But it is only logical that she has taken over since she was the deputy.

Excerpt:

Kim Gunn, South Korea's special representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, spoke by phone to discuss the latest provocations with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Jung Pak and Hiroyuki Namazu, respectively, the ministry said.

Nuclear envoys of S. Korea, U.S., Japan condemn N. Korea's missile launches | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Yi Wonju · December 18, 2023

SEOUL, Dec. 18 (Yonhap) -- The top nuclear envoys of South Korea, the United States and Japan held phone talks and condemned North Korea's recent back-to-back missile provocations, Seoul's foreign ministry said Monday.

Earlier in the day, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into the East Sea, marking the fifth ICBM launch this year -- the highest number ever recorded in a single year. Also Sunday, North Korea launched a short-range missile from Pyongyang.

The back-to-back missile launches came just days after Seoul and Washington held the second session of the Nuclear Consultative Group and agreed to complete the establishment of guidelines on the planning and operation of a shared nuclear strategy by the middle of next year.

Kim Gunn, South Korea's special representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, spoke by phone to discuss the latest provocations with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Jung Pak and Hiroyuki Namazu, respectively, the ministry said.

During the phone talks, the three "strongly condemned" the launches as clear provocations that seriously threaten the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and the international community, denouncing them as overt violations of the U.N. Security Council resolutions.

They pointed out that the North's illicit nuclear weapons development and threat of a preemptive nuclear strike are the "root causes" of regional security being undermined.

The three sides also agreed to strengthen their trilateral cooperation to deter the provocations and to intensify their joint efforts to curb the North's illicit activities that fund its nuclear and missile development.

North Korea fires a Hwasong-18 solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on July 12, 2023, in this file photo released by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un guided the launch and the missile flew 1,001 kilometers for 4,491 seconds at a maximum altitude of 6,648 km before splashing into the East Sea, the North said. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

julesyi@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Yi Wonju · December 18, 2023

9. U.S. condemns recent N. Korean ballistic missile launches: State Dept.

U.S. condemns recent N. Korean ballistic missile launches: State Dept. | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · December 18, 2023

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 (Yonhap) -- The United States condemns North Korea's two ballistic missile launches this week, a State Department spokesperson said Sunday, reiterating America's "ironclad" security commitment to South Korea and Japan.

Pyongyang fired an intercontinental ballistic missile on Monday (Korea time) just hours after its launch of a short-range one, as Seoul and Washington agreed last week on stronger measures to counter nuclear threats from the recalcitrant regime.

"The United States condemns the DPRK's December 17 ballistic missile launches," the spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"These launches, like the other ballistic missile launches Pyongyang has conducted this year, are in violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions. They pose a threat to the DPRK's neighbors and undermine regional security," the official added.

The spokesperson also said that the U.S. remains committed to a diplomatic approach to the North, and called on the North to return to dialogue.

"Our commitments to the defense of the Republic of Korea and Japan remain ironclad," the spokesperson added.

The North's latest saber-rattling followed the second session of the South Korea-U.S. Nuclear Consultative Group, where the allies agreed to craft guidelines on the planning and operation of a nuclear strategy by the middle of next year and incorporate scenarios of nuclear operations in major allied drills.

The North fired a Hwasong-15 ICBM in February and a Hwasong-17 ICBM in March. It also test-fired a solid-fuel Hwasong-18 in April and conducted another test of the newest ICBM in July.

This photo, carried by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency on July 13, 2023, shows the North's firing of a Hwasong-18 solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile the previous day. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

sshluck@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · December 18, 2023

10. Unification minister says human rights violations 'status quo' in N. Korea

Ambassador Turner has consistently stated this message about the voices of the Korean people in the north.

Excerpts:

Turner, the U.S. special envoy, said the voices of the North Korean people should be factored into the process.

"I want to encourage everyone to think about victim-centered accountability, survivor-centered accountability and how we are undertaking these efforts to make sure that the voices of refugees and escapees are factored into what they want to say on the other end of these accountability efforts," Turner said.

In 2014, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued a landmark report after a yearlong probe, saying North Korean leaders are responsible for "widespread, systematic and gross" violations of human rights.

(LEAD) Unification minister says human rights violations 'status quo' in N. Korea | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Lee Minji · December 18, 2023

(ATTN: ADDS remarks in paras 6-9, byline)

By Lee Minji

SEOUL, Dec. 18 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's point man on North Korea called Monday for concerted international efforts to address the North's dire human rights situation, saying such violations are the "status quo" in the reclusive country.

North Korea has been under pressure from the international community to improve its human rights situation, though no meaningful progress has been reported.

"Despite the long-standing international endeavors, including the North Korean human rights resolutions, human rights violations are still the status quo in North Korea," Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho said in an international forum that brought together security and human rights officials and experts.

High-profile participants included Lee Shin-wha, the ambassador-at-large for international cooperation on North Korean human rights, and Ambassador Julie Turner, the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights.

Lee, the human rights envoy, stressed the importance of tackling the "global fatigue phenomenon" associated with long-standing issues surrounding the North and noted efforts are being undertaken to "ensure that such issues are not overshadowed or forgotten by other global crises."

Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho attends a Cabinet meeting at the government complex in Seoul on Dec. 12, 2023. (Yonhap)

While acknowledging realistic difficulties in holding North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his regime accountable for human rights violations, participants still underscored the importance of documenting the North's rights abuses through all possible means.

"I think it will be very hard to achieve as long as Kim Jong-un is in power, but I think it is extremely important for the future of North Korea and for the well-being of the people in North Korea that we do everything possible to document in great detail the ongoing violation of human rights," said Larry Diamond, a political science professor at Stanford University.

Turner, the U.S. special envoy, said the voices of the North Korean people should be factored into the process.

"I want to encourage everyone to think about victim-centered accountability, survivor-centered accountability and how we are undertaking these efforts to make sure that the voices of refugees and escapees are factored into what they want to say on the other end of these accountability efforts," Turner said.

In 2014, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued a landmark report after a yearlong probe, saying North Korean leaders are responsible for "widespread, systematic and gross" violations of human rights.

North Korea has long been accused of grave human rights abuses, ranging from holding political prisoners in concentration camps to committing torture and carrying out public executions.

Still, North Korea claimed its people are freely enjoying genuine human rights in a white paper issued earlier this month on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations.

mlee@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Lee Minji · December 18, 2023

11. Israeli Military Reveals Tunnel It Says Hamas Built for Large-Scale Attack

Good to see even a slight mention of the possibility of north Korean assistance.

Excerpt:

Hamas started its tunnel program with crude small passageways reinforced with wooden planks. Over the years, the group has built tunnels reinforced with concrete that vehicles can pass through, similar to those built by North Korea into South Korea, said Richemond-Barak.

Israeli Military Reveals Tunnel It Says Hamas Built for Large-Scale Attack

Underground passageway, dubbed ‘Sinwar’s secret,’ ends near an Israeli military base

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-reveals-tunnel-it-says-hamas-built-for-large-scale-attack-934b3bf8?mod=world_lead_pos5

By Dov Lieber

Dec. 17, 2023 10:47 am ET

North Korea’s Missiles Can Reach the U.S., Japan Says, but Kim Jong Un Wants to Perfect Them

Pyongyang needs to strengthen its intercontinental ballistic missiles, weapons experts say, as its regional threats rise

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/north-koreas-missiles-can-reach-the-u-s-japan-says-but-kim-jong-un-wants-to-perfect-them-eb506ea4?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Dasl Yoon

Dec. 18, 2023 8:02 am ET

A news program shows file footage of a North Korean missile launch on a screen at a Seoul rail station. PHOTO: AHN YOUNG-JOON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

SEOUL—In November 2017, North Korea hit a milestone: launching a homegrown intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the U.S. mainland.

More than six years later, honing the technology has become a perennial quest, with launch after launch.

The latest came on Monday, as Pyongyang fired a missile thousands of miles into space before it fell safely into the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. It was the fifth ICBM launch of the year, following four such stand-alone tests in 2022.

Based on the flight data of Monday’s launch, North Korea has likely fired its newest ICBM for the third time, weapons experts said. The Hwasong-18 can be launched faster and farther than any of the regime’s previous models.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s drive to pursue more sophisticated ICBM technology is aimed at matching the power of his rivals, said Hong Min, a senior fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a state-funded think tank in Seoul. “For now, North Korea has limited capability to deter U.S. nuclear assets, so advancing its ICBMs is the biggest threat it can make,” Hong said.

In a show of strength, the U.S. has regularly been sending its nuclear assets to the region, with the latest coming on Sunday, when the USS Missouri arrived in the South Korean port city of Busan. The U.S. is also stepping up coordination with South Korea and Japan. The three countries will soon knit together their missile-radar systems for the first time.

The U.S., South Korea and Japan had positioned ballistic missile-defense ships to defend against the ICBM launch, which they had expected, Adm. John C. Aquilino, the chief of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said on Monday. “We are stronger when we’re together,” he said.

Meanwhile, China’s foreign minister held talks with North Korea’s vice foreign minister in Beijing, vowing to strengthen bilateral communication and coordination in various fields. It couldn’t be determined whether the latest ICBM launch was discussed at the Monday meeting.

This image provided by North Korean state news agency Korean Central News Agency shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at an event earlier this month. PHOTO: KCNA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Kim regime has one of the world’s largest standing armies with more than one million personnel. But without assistance from neighboring China and Russia, North Korea would be decimated in any type of land war owing to its outdated, underequipped military hardware, security experts say.

Kim’s vision for ICBMs plays a central role in presenting a credible threat to the nation’s enemies, weapons experts say.

After the 2017 Hwasong-15 launch showing the ability to strike anywhere in the U.S., Kim shifted Pyongyang toward diplomacy with Washington, placing a self-imposed ban on ICBM and nuclear tests as a sign of goodwill. Talks eventually broke down between the U.S. and North Korea. Pyongyang pivoted back to major weapons tests in March 2022, debuting its next-generation Hwasong-17.

Since then, North Korea has prioritized developing ICBMs that could fly even farther and upgrading their rocket engines.

The Hwasong-15 could travel an estimated 8,100 miles and reach the U.S. within a half-hour. Pyongyang is roughly 7,500 miles from Florida, with the West Coast being much closer. In recent years, Kim has pledged to develop an ICBM that could reach 15,000 kilometers, or about 9,320 miles, on a normal trajectory. The extra flight length also means North Korea could carry heavier payloads over shorter distances, missile experts say.

With its first ICBM test in four years in March 2022, North Korea’s Hwasong-17 showed the potential to hit Kim’s lengthier flight-distance target.

Monday’s ICBM test was launched around 8:24 a.m. local time from near Pyongyang. It soared about 3,700 miles high and flew about 620 miles, staying airborne for roughly 73 minutes, according to South Korean and Japanese officials.

In response to Monday’s test, Washington, Seoul and Tokyo issued condemnations. Japan said that the ICBM demonstrated an ability to hit anywhere in the U.S.

The other major ICBM pursuit is transitioning to solid-fuel engines from liquid-fuel ones—the technology used through the Hwasong-17. Doing so could give Pyongyang the ability to deploy the missile faster and make it harder to detect, since the missiles can be fueled well in advance and stored in hiding. Liquid propellants must be loaded into the missile before the launch and the process of erecting and fueling the ICBM can take hours, making it a target for interdiction.

North Korea tested a solid-fuel engine on the ground for the first time a year ago. In April, the Kim regime successfully launched its first ICBM equipped with a solid-fuel engine, the Hwasong-18.

“The difference between the liquid-fuel ICBM we saw in 2017 and the Hwasong-18 is vast in terms of preparation time and detectability,” said Kim Jina, a professor at South Korea’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Questions remain around North Korea’s ability to affix a nuclear warhead, or several of them, atop its ICBMs and fire them at the U.S. with precision, weapons experts say. The Kim regime has yet to prove its warheads could survive the intense heat and vibration of re-entering the atmosphere.

But doing so would require North Korea to test-fire its ICBMs on a normal trajectory. To date, the country has preferred lofted launches that mean the missile doesn’t fly to the Pacific Ocean—and perilously close to Hawaii or U.S. territories such as Guam.

Earlier this year, North Korea threatened to use the Pacific as a firing range, claiming its missiles could survive a prolonged re-entry into the atmosphere.

Another driver for Pyongyang’s unrelenting ICBM ambitions: closer ties to China and Russia, which as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have vetoed any efforts to curb the Kim regime’s illicit weapons-testing activity.

Moscow and Pyongyang have drawn closer after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. North Korea is supplying Russia with munitions, Washington and Seoul officials say. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who met with Kim in September, vowed to help North Korea with its satellite program. During his Russia visit, Kim also inspected nuclear-capable strategic bombers and a jet-fighter factory.

Chinese trade with North Korea has rebounded since Pyongyang lifted most of its pandemic-era border restrictions earlier this year.

The Kim regime, at least outwardly, has shown increased confidence regarding its ICBM program, too. The country has increasingly referred to the ICBM launches as exercises, rather than tests, a suggestion that the weapons system is preparing for deployment, said Moon Jang-ryul, a former South Korean presidential security adviser.

“Oftentimes we dismiss North Korea’s claims that it has the ability to conduct long-range nuclear strikes,” Moon said. “But North Korea is showing that it’s not just empty threats.”

Chieko Tsuneoka and Alastair Gale contributed to this article.

Write to Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com

13. Activists cast bottled rice into West Sea in hope of reaching North Koreans

A low tech process to get semi high tech communications into north Korea. According to escapees these reach the north and information is disseminated. But with modest government funding and support so much more could be done. And if we could enlist technology firms, the possibilities for information penetration would be enormous.

We need to get serious about overt information capabilities to support an information campaign plan.

[INTERVIEW] Activists cast bottled rice into West Sea in hope of reaching North Koreans

The Korea Times · December 18, 2023

Activists stand at the water's edge at Seokmo Island, Ganghwa County in Incheon, on late Thursday night to throw 200 plastic bottles containing rice, USB drives, SD cards and cold medicines into the West Sea, hoping that the bottles might reach North Korea. Courtesy of Park Jung-oh

2-liter plastic bottles of rice, cold medicine, K-drama USB sticks show starving Northerners what's going on outside reclusive state

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Park Jung-oh, 54, and seven other activists threw plastic bottles stuffed with rice, USB drives, SD cards and cold medicines, one after another, into the West Sea near Ganghwa County in Incheon, late on Thursday night.

The stuffed two-liter bottles created a distinct sound as they hit the surface of the frigid water.

On this dark, chilly night, eight activists threw 200 of the bottles into the water as waves crashed on the shore around them.

Park, a North Korean defector and human rights activist, hoped that the bottles might travel all the way to North Korean waters, and that hungry residents there might find them, eat the rice and learn about free and affluent South Korea as portrayed in the Korean dramas loaded on the USB drives and SD cards.

“My humble wish is that more North Koreans can find the bottles and realize that they have been deceived by the North Korean regime for their whole lives,” he told The Korea Times, Friday.

Park founded the non-profit advocacy group Keunsaem, or “big spring,” established to send relief goods to the North and provide free after school programs for underprivileged children, including those born to North Korean escapees. He began the bottle program in 2015.

“At the time, I heard from a member of our prayer meeting group that people in North Korea’s southwestern province of Hwanghae were going hungry. I thought that was weird because the region is filled with rice fields. How could farmers who grow rice and grain have no food to eat?” he said. “I was told that when harvest season came, armed soldiers would show up to rice fields and collect all the crops from the farmers, so the farmers were left with nothing to eat.”

He said he and other members of the prayer meeting discussed how they could help the people going hungry in the North.

Someone presented the idea of casting bottled rice into the sea that might make it all the way to North Korea.

“The person said he had heard about it being done years before. We thought it was a great idea,” he said.

Park immediately called maritime research institutes to talk to experts and met fishermen living near the West Sea to double-check if stuffed plastic bottles could move upward in the waters of the West Sea to reach North Korea as he and fellow activists were planning.

“They said it’s possible, telling me we should get the bottles into the water as the tide goes out. They also said time and date matter. They advised me to thoroughly check those three factors — date, time and the tidal direction — to make that happen,” he said.

Park, along with fellow activists, went to Seokmo Island, Ganghwa County, in late Thursday night for the operation. Midnight was determined as the time when all three conditions would be met.

Two-liter plastic bottles containing rice, USB drives, SD cards and cold medicine / Courtesy of Park Jung-oh

Park has sent the bottles to North Korea twice a month since April 2015.

He has had feedback from several different fellow North Korean escapees.

“One of them said people living in Ongjin, Hwanghae Province, had found the bottles of rice. Some cooked the rice to feed their families, and some sold it and purchased cheaper grain in bulk at the market,” he said.

He said he was glad to hear that the bottles had reached North Koreans.

“A friend of mine, who is a filmmaker, told me the other day that Korean dramas we put on the USB drives and SD cards have created a stir in the North as people secretly watched them and some shared them with others,” he said.

Park hoped that the bottles could become an agent of change in North Korea.

“Awareness is the key to change in North Korea,” he said, adding that residents there need to know what kind of society they are living in and how they are being duped by the regime.

Without knowing this, he said it is unlikely that any change will happen in North Korea.

“Outside information is critical to channel their anger and frustration into collective action for change, because North Korea is a closed society and people there are cut off from the outside world,” he said.

Park Jung-oh, a North Korean defector and founder of the non-profit advocacy group Keunsaem, is surrounded by reporters in Seoul in this 2020 file photo. Korea Times file

Park’s campaign to help North Koreans have access to outside information met an obstacle when former President Moon Jae-in of the liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) came to power in May 2017.

Some DPK lawmakers revealed their hostility toward North Korean defectors, and some called them "traitors" just because they defected to South Korea.

Moon tried to improve inter-Korean relations through a set of engagement-oriented policy measures. His prioritization of peace on the Korean Peninsula sometimes came at the cost of human rights, as seen in the case of the forced repatriation of two North Korean fishermen in November 2019, despite their defection to the South.

The DPK took advantage of its majority status in the National Assembly to introduce the controversial Development of Inter-Korean Relations Act which banned activists from sending anti-North Korea propaganda materials to the North. Violators would face up to three years in jail.

Then the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) dubbed it “legislation supervised by North Korean leader’s sister Kim Yo-jung,” as a group of DPK lawmakers hurriedly introduced the ban after Kim lashed out at North Korean escapees for sending the anti-Kim regime leaflets.

Back then, Park’s bottled rice program was illegal under the Act.

“It was the toughest time for North Korean defectors, particularly those who operated human rights programs,” he said, recalling what happened to him during the five years under Moon's presidency. “I stood trial eight times as the police kept trying to find fault with me, and pressed charges against me whenever they identified a minor offense on my part,” he said.

“My office was searched by the investigators. There were numerous other cases that made me think that the government had targeted me and tried to stop me from sending the bottles north.”

In September, the Constitutional Court ruled against the Act, saying the ban on sending anti-North Korea propaganda materials is unconsitutional.

Despite the ruling, Park said he is still feeling the pinch because corporate donors, who also came under pressure, stopped supporting the campaign.

“Even after conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol took office, those corporate donors still haven't resumed their donations because they are worried about another possible administration change in next presidential election,” he said.

Despite the tough circumstances, Park said he will not give in and will continue to do the food-for-awareness campaign to help enlighten North Koreans.

“All I want is reunification of the two Koreas. I hope that can happen without bloodshed. To make it happen, we need to keep informing North Koreans that they must stand up to free North Korea,” he said.

The Korea Times · December 18, 2023

14. Police clamp down on carrying cell phones in public (north Korea)

A safety issue or another form of information control? (the safety issue is for sarcasm)

And what is a national secret? Probably any information that would embarrass the regime to the outside world such as the real pain and suffering of the Korean people in the north.

Police clamp down on carrying cell phones in public

Authorities say the scrutiny is to keep ‘national secrets’ from leaking, but residents are skeptical.

By Son Hyemin for RFA Korean

2023.12.17

rfa.org

North Koreans walking around in public holding their cell phones are getting in trouble with the police, residents there told Radio Free Asia.

But it isn’t clear if it's an effort to guard state secrets, as the government claims, or simply an excuse for police to shake down people for bribes. Or both.

North Korea introduced the State Secrets Protection Law in February to prevent photos and videos – especially those of propaganda lecture materials – from finding their way out of the country.

The country remains blocked off from the global internet, making it hard for most people to send any kind of information outside the country through their phones.

But people living along the border with China do sometimes use smuggled Chinese phones to access the Chinese cellular network, and can transmit photos and videos that way.

Now it appears that authorities are trying to stop people from taking any photos that would reveal anything at all about life in the isolated country.

Police in plain clothes patrol the marketplaces and stop people walking around with their cellphones in their hands, a resident of South Pyongan province, north of the capital Pyongyang, told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Recently, when police see people walking around in the marketplace with cell phones in their hands, they stop them and check their phones,” he said, adding that it isn’t possible to know how many police are observing a particular location, since they are not wearing uniforms.

Excuse for extortion?

Previously, when police would stop to check people’s electronic devices, the goal was to find contraband media, such as TV shows or movies from South Korea. But now they are simply looking for pictures, the resident said.

“The crackdowns on cell phones involve searching for photos and videos of the marketplace among the photos in the phone,” he said.

A man looks at his mobile phone as he waits to cross a street in Pyongyang, North Korea, Feb. 18, 2017. (Ed Jones/AFP)

If such a photo were to be found, there is a possibility that the phone owner could be accused of spying and trying to sell secret information to South Korea, and imprisoned.

“As the police randomly crack down on cell phones, market merchants say it is a tactic to extort money ahead of the end of the year,” he said.

Police are more privileged than the civilian population, but just like the average citizen, the salary from their government-assigned job is nowhere near enough to make a living. Most families must run side businesses selling goods or services in the local market to support themselves.

Police, however, can catch people doing questionable or illegal activities and accept a bribe to look the other way. So it is possible that the increased scrutiny is a way to collect some cash before year-end, the residents said.

In the city of Sinuiju, on the border with China in North Pyongan province, police have been on the lookout for phones near the train station and at the marketplace all December, a resident there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“Residents who were caught [with their phones] say it is ridiculous because the police said … they want to check whether they are taking pictures of their surroundings,” he said.

“The police threaten them, saying that preventing people from taking ‘internal photos’ with cell phones … is merely upholding the State Secrets Protection Law.”

But many people aren’t buying the police officers’ explanations, the North Pyongan resident said.

“[They say] authorities are creating anxiety by cracking down on cell phone owners as leakers of national secrets,” he said. “But the scenes around the market and the station are not national secrets.”

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

rfa.org

15. Defense chief warns N. Korea against ICBM launches

These words do scare Kim Jong Un.

Excerpts:

In an interview with local cable channel MBN, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said South Korea and the United States are considering the two options of deploying further U.S. strategic assets and drills to "decapitate" the North Korean leadership should North Korea continue its provocations.

"It is difficult to speak publicly about the decapitation (exercise)," Shin said, while noting that South Korean and U.S. special forces are holding combined aerial maneuvers and facilities raid training this week.

Shin said talks were also under way for the deployment of U.S. strategic assets "within a few days," with joint South Korea-U.S. drills and a trilateral one, involving Japan, being considered in conjunction with the deployment.

Defense chief warns N. Korea against ICBM launches | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Chae Yun-hwan · December 18, 2023

SEOUL, Dec. 18 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's defense chief on Monday warned North Korea against its intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches, saying Seoul and Washington could deploy additional strategic assets or conduct "decapitation" drills against the North Korean leadership.

Earlier in the day, Pyongyang fired an ICBM into the East Sea, the fifth such launch this year and the highest number ever recorded in a single year. A day earlier, the North launched a short-range missile from Pyongyang.

In an interview with local cable channel MBN, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said South Korea and the United States are considering the two options of deploying further U.S. strategic assets and drills to "decapitate" the North Korean leadership should North Korea continue its provocations.

"It is difficult to speak publicly about the decapitation (exercise)," Shin said, while noting that South Korean and U.S. special forces are holding combined aerial maneuvers and facilities raid training this week.

Shin said talks were also under way for the deployment of U.S. strategic assets "within a few days," with joint South Korea-U.S. drills and a trilateral one, involving Japan, being considered in conjunction with the deployment.

This file photo shows Defense Minister Shin Won-sik taking part in a Cabinet meeting at the government complex in central Seoul on Nov. 22, 2023. (Yonhap)

Regarding the latest ICBM launch, Shin said that Seoul assesses the missile to be a Hwasong-18 solid-fuel ICBM, which the North fired in April and July this year.

"Looking at the (missile's) maximum altitude, flight distance and top speed, it is similar to the Hwasong-18 fired in July," he said, noting that the launch used a three-stage rocket, unlike the two-stage rockets used in the North's Hwasong-15 and 17 liquid-fuel ICBMs.

Shin said the missile's flight appeared to be successful, although the North is assessed to have yet to complete development of atmospheric reentry technology for the missile's warhead.

The South's Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missile flew about 1,000 kilometers at a lofted trajectory before landing in the East Sea.

He assessed the launch as the final one before the ninth plenary meeting of the eighth Central Committee of the North's ruling Workers' Party later this month to demonstrate progress in the development of one of the country's key strategic weapons projects.

A solid-fuel ICBM is one of the five major projects the North put forward at a key party congress in January 2021.

Shin also said South Korea, the United States and Japan will officially announce a system to share North Korean missing warning data in real-time within the "next 24 hours."

"Before, we only shared maritime detection methods, but now the difference is we will share all missile data detection methods, including those on the ground," he said.

In August, President Yoon Suk Yeol, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reaffirmed efforts to operationalize the data-sharing system by the end of this year in a joint statement adopted at their Camp David summit.

yunhwanchae@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Chae Yun-hwan · December 18, 2023

16. N. Korea slams S. Korean military chiefs' warning of retaliation

Defense Minister Shin has gotten Kim Jong Un's attention. Someone should make a meme of thesis rhetoric. But I am sure the north will paint it on a propaganda leaflet and they will not mean it as a meme.

Excerpts:

"A frightened dog barks louder. If (South Korea) continues to bark noisily, it could be struck by a bolt of lightning," the KCNA said, calling the South Korean military chiefs' remarks a "bluff and bravado coming from a guilty conscience."

During a meeting with top military commanders Wednesday, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik warned only a "hell of destruction" awaits North Korea if the country carries out "reckless" actions.

N. Korea slams S. Korean military chiefs' warning of retaliation

The Korea Times · by 2023-12-18 08:54 | North Korea · December 18, 2023

This photo provided by the North Korean government, shows what it says Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile during a military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the armistice that halted fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War, on Kim Il-sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea, July 27. AP-Yonhap

North Korea on Monday denounced South Korean military leaders' vow to overwhelmingly retaliate against Pyongyang in the event of the North's provocations, brushing it off as a show of "bravado."

In a commentary carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea scoffed at their call for enhancing combat readiness against Pyongyang, repeating its claim that South Korea should be blamed for the rupture of a 2018 inter-Korean military accord.

"A frightened dog barks louder. If (South Korea) continues to bark noisily, it could be struck by a bolt of lightning," the KCNA said, calling the South Korean military chiefs' remarks a "bluff and bravado coming from a guilty conscience."

During a meeting with top military commanders Wednesday, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik warned only a "hell of destruction" awaits North Korea if the country carries out "reckless" actions.

N. Korea fires suspected ICBM toward East Sea

Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Chairman Adm. Kim Myung-soo also called for "overwhelming" capabilities against possible North Korean provocations during his visit to a border island Tuesday.

North Korea vowed to restore all military measures halted under the 2018 military tension reduction agreement, effectively scrapping the deal, after Seoul partially suspended it in protest of Pyongyang's launch of a military spy satellite last month.

Earlier in the day, North Korea fired a long-range missile into the East Sea, the South Korean military said, in its fifth intercontinental ballistic missile launch this year. The launch came a day after North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile.

South Korea's unification ministry condemned North Korea for issuing warnings "full of bluffs" against Seoul's just countermeasure, saying it is North Korea that has violated multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions. (Yonhap)

The Korea Times · by 2023-12-18 08:54 | North Korea · December 18, 2023

17. Fort Cavazos soldiers to deploy to South Korea under winter rotation plan

Fort Cavazos soldiers to deploy to South Korea under winter rotation plan

Stars and Stripes · by Gary Warner · December 16, 2023

Army

ByGary Warner

Stars and Stripes •

Soldiers from the 3rd Cavalry Regiment fire a 155mm M777 howitzer in support of Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq in June 2019. (Capt. Jason Welch/U.S. Army)

The Army’s 3rd Cavalry Regiment from Fort Cavazos will deploy to South Korea for a planned winter rotation, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The Texas-based unit will replace the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division from Fort Carson in Colorado.

The 3rd Cavalry Regiment is a combined-arms unit from the III Armored Corps that can act as a reconnaissance and security force or as a Stryker combat team, according to the Army’s website.

The previous two Army rotational deployments to South Korea used Stryker combat teams under a Pentagon policy moving away from tank-heavy armored brigades to mobile units with more infantry that can maneuver quickly.

The U.S. plans to maintain an active-duty force of roughly 28,500 personnel in South Korea under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, the annual Pentagon policy and spending bill passed this week by Congress.

Camp Humphreys, the largest U.S. military base overseas, about 40 miles south of the capital of Seoul, is the headquarters of U.S. Forces Korea.

Gary Warner

Gary Warner covers the Pacific Northwest for Stars and Stripes. He’s reported from East Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France and across the U.S. He has a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

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Stars and Stripes · by Gary Warner · December 16, 2023

18. Alliance Commitment in an Era of Partisan Polarization: A Survey Experiment of U.S. Voters

A very long read that is filled with data. This provides some very interesting perspectives about public support for US decision making in various Korean scenarios.

This is a data driven political science project.

Please go to the link to view all the graphs and proper formatting.

https://tnsr.org/2023/10/alliance-commitment-in-an-era-of-partisan-polarization-a-survey-experiment-of-u-s-voters/

Vol 7, Iss 1 Winter 2023/2024

Alliances Asia

Alliance Commitment in an Era of Partisan Polarization: A Survey Experiment of U.S. Voters

Verónica Bäcker-Peral, Gene Park

There is rising apprehension that U.S. partisan polarization is making it harder for the United States to keep its international commitments. This could have profound implications for one of the most critical elements of U.S. foreign policy: its commitment to its alliance partners. We explore this issue by analyzing to what extent partisanship can influence U.S. voter commitment to aid and defend allies. Using four survey experiments, the study analyzes the resilience of U.S. support for an ally, the Republic of Korea, across a range of scenarios. When presented with a neutral framing of South Korea without any overt partisan cues, voters support South Korea even at the risk of incurring military casualties or economic costs. Compared to Democrats, however, Republicans consistently express lower support for South Korea. These results suggest that there is a clear partisan divide when it comes to alliances. Furthermore, we find that stronger cues that target partisan group identities can trigger sizable effects on voter attitudes. Collectively, these results suggest that growing partisan polarization may increase uncertainty in U.S. voter commitment, a finding with important implications for the U.S.-South Korean alliance and alliance credibility more broadly.

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A perennial question is whether countries will honor their alliance commitments. For decades, a degree of bipartisan consensus around foreign policy contributed to the perception that the United States would be willing to use force to live up to its specific treaty obligations.1 Domestic politics was said to end at the water’s edge. When Donald Trump ran for and secured the presidency on an explicitly nationalist “America First” platform, he openly questioned the alliance status quo. He chided allies for not doing enough to share the financial burden; he hinted at withdrawing U.S. troops from the territory of some allies (e.g., South Korea); he levied tariffs on allies; and his administration signed an agreement to move troops from Germany to Poland.2

The reality is that alliances are never ironclad. Commitment is always contingent. States cannot be forced to honor their treaty obligations, and in some cases, they do not live up to their treaty duties. Indeed, although defensive alliances are more often reliable than not, they are not honored about 25 percent of the time.3 Furthermore, alliance treaties also leave signatories with some discretion. Allies retain some ability to determine when they are obliged to aid an ally with force and what the nature of the response will be.4 There are other ambiguities too, such as whether cyber attacks should be regarded as an armed attack or the precise territorial boundaries covered by an alliance.5

Alliances thus face significant credibility challenges since they are, by nature, self-enforcing agreements.6 Yet, credibility is paramount for deterrence and extended deterrence,7 reputation,8 crisis bargaining,9 and maintaining alliance relations.10 Consequently, countries rely on measures to signal their commitment. To enhance the credibility of these signals, they attempt to raise the domestic costs of defection through hand-tying.11 Governments sign alliances and make bold pronouncements of support for an ally to raise the domestic political costs of backing down — what’s known as “audience costs” — thereby signaling their resolve to a possible adversary as well as their alliance partner.12 They also make costly investments — “sunk costs” — to signal their commitment by deploying troops on an ally’s soil, creating tripwires, building military interdependence, and taking other measures.13

Still, alliance commitment ultimately rests on domestic politics, and even such commitment measures can never be locked in indefinitely. As Paul Musgrave observes, in democracies, electoral politics create incentives over the long term for politicians to change the status quo as parties seek to differentiate themselves when coalitions shift. This dynamic has given rise to polarization that has eroded the democratic base of support for U.S. hegemony.14 While Musgrave uses historical examples, the United States is currently experiencing intense partisanship reflected in changing foreign policy views on issues such as trade and, more recently, support for Ukraine.15 This may also have important implications for the domestic political durability of alliance commitment.

This paper studies the effects of partisanship on U.S. voter commitment to allies, specifically the Republic of Korea, under conditions of partisan polarization. To examine this, we administered surveys to U.S. voters in January of 2022 and March of 2023, wherein we experimentally analyzed the impact of various partisan cues on their support for South Korea. We found that, while overall support for defending South Korea is relatively stable across a range of different hypothetical scenarios, there are underlying differences between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats show higher support than Republicans for aiding and defending South Korea. Moreover, presenting more overt partisan cues that appeal to an individual’s partisan group identity can have substantial impacts on levels of support for South Korea. Voters, particularly Republicans, are responsive to partisan leadership cues and strong language that echoes Trump’s America First rhetoric. However, appeals to duty and values in support of maintaining alliance commitments have little effect on voters, Democrat or Republican. These results suggest that polarizing messaging can subvert public support for allies. One implication is that leaders may be able to influence voters in ways that reduce the potential domestic costs of reneging on alliance commitments, which has the potential to undermine alliance credibility.

The following section elaborates how partisan polarization has the potential to weaken voter commitment to allies. We then introduce our research approach, followed by a presentation of our survey experiments and results. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for the U.S.-South Korean alliance and alliance commitment more broadly, some of the limitations of our study, and areas for future research.

Partisan Polarization and Alliances

Before looking at the results of our survey, it is important to understand the implications of partisan polarization for alliances. We define partisan polarization as the growing division of people’s opinions and identities along partisan lines. Below, we focus on two broad types of polarization: ideological polarization and group identity polarization.

Ideological Polarization

Ideological polarization refers to the growing divergence of public beliefs among voters and their sorting into two increasingly distinct political parties. Research points to growing ideological polarization across a range of policy issues, such as the economy, civil rights, and foreign policy.16

There are several ways in which the ideological polarization of voters matters for alliance commitment. First, some research suggests that voters are aware of foreign policy issues and that foreign policy can influence their vote.17 Thus, voters may play a role in electing — or creating the possibility of electing — candidates who are skeptical of international commitments and less supportive of aiding and defending allies. Second, ideological polarization may influence alliance support directly via public opinion. Public opinion has been found to influence politicians and military leaders in making critical decisions about using force or maintaining military activities.18 Third, ideological polarization could reduce domestic political costs for reneging or weakening commitment mechanisms. With greater ideological polarization, leaders may rely increasingly on a political base of strong partisan supporters. A growing number of alliance skeptics within a party would give a leader greater room to maneuver and perhaps even incentives to weaken alliance commitments. Leaders would thus face few domestic political repercussions among supporters were they to undo earlier commitments, such as to deploy troops on an alliance partner’s soil, or possibly even were they to choose not to live up to their treaty obligation to defend their ally.

These polls suggest that there may be an emerging skepticism of alliances among Republicans relative to Democrats.

Voters may indeed be developing increasingly distinct ideological preferences toward alliances that split along party lines. Opinion polls show growing divergence in foreign policy beliefs generally and for alliances specifically. According to the Pew Research Center, among Republicans or those that lean Republican, support for an active U.S. role in the world has declined from 53 percent in 2004 to only 45 percent in 2019. By contrast, support among Democrats increased from 37 percent in 2004 to 62 percent by 2019. The Pew Research Center also finds a large and growing partisan gap in expectations for U.S. allies. In 2019, only 31 percent of Republicans or those leaning Republican believed that the United States should compromise with allies by taking their interests into consideration, compared to 42 percent in 2004. By contrast, 83 percent of Democrats or those leaning Democrat supported that view, up from 65 percent in 2004.19 Another poll from Reuters / Ipsos in 2018 found that two-thirds of Republicans agreed that America should not be bound by treaty commitments if NATO allies do not spend sufficiently on defense, whereas about 40 percent of Democrats held the same view.20 These polls suggest that there may be an emerging skepticism of alliances among Republicans relative to Democrats.

Group Identity Polarization

Another perspective on polarization suggests that people sort by social identity rather than ideology.21 Increasingly, party identification has become more central to people’s identity rather than reflective of a specific set of ideological beliefs. Indeed, some research finds that one’s identity as a member of a political party is even stronger than religious, linguistic, ethnic, or regional identities.22 Furthermore, the intensity of these partisan identities and the gap between them has been shown to be growing over time.23 This has driven partisan polarization by creating increasingly divergent social realities. From this perspective, partisan polarization is not so much about ideological divergence. Rather, partisan identity creates differences in perception of basic facts, the interpretation of facts, what facts are remembered, and the types of information that people seek.24

Voters’ views are driven by partisan cues, motivated biases, and emotions, rather than coherent ideological positions. Existing research suggests that voters take cues from party leaders and elites and align their views accordingly.25 In a polarized world, the effect of party endorsements on public opinions increases, voter receptiveness to substantive information declines, and voters become more confident in their own opinions.26 Moreover, the fragmented media and social media landscape facilitate self-confirming information seeking,27 and partisans select increasingly distinct media sources that reinforce their preexisting views. Emotion also drives partisan identities, and leaders use charged rhetoric to connect with co-partisans and accentuate differences with members of the other party. Such affective polarization has led partisans to view members of the outgroup with increasing suspicion, hostility, and even hatred.28

From the perspective of group identity polarization, leaders may be able influence the level of voter support for alliances through their rhetoric. Trump openly questioned the value of alliances and used angry rhetoric to suggest that allies were ripping off the United States. He sought to increase South Korea’s contribution toward the cost of maintaining U.S. troops in South Korea from $900 million to $5 billion.29 Moreover, he suggested at times that the United States should undo one of its key commitment mechanisms by removing U.S. troops from South Korean soil.30 Co-partisans may be influenced by such messages from a leader, which may be reinforced through selective consumption of news and social media, emotional appeals by the president or other leaders, and other types of motivated reasoning.31 If voter views are, in fact, highly malleable, as Matthew Baum and Philip Potter suggest, then the dynamics of costly signaling may be undermined, which could weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to defend South Korea.32 A leader such as Trump may have the means to limit domestic audience costs by swaying supporter opinions and could therefore undo commitment mechanisms, such as drawing down or eliminating America’s troop presence, with little domestic political consequence.

Some evidence suggests that group identity polarization may have different effects on Democrats and Republicans. Some research has found that Republicans are more prone to feelings of outrage.33 Moreover, partisan sorting has created greater social cohesion in the Republican party as it has become whiter and more Christian, while Democrats have become a broader and more diverse coalition.34 With less heterogeneity and greater tendency to feelings of outrage, polarizing cues may have clearer and stronger effects for Republicans than for Democrats.

Existing Work

While there is some existing work that is relevant to understanding the effects of partisanship on support for alliances, the evidence is mixed. One study suggests that there is no partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans toward alliances.35 Other research finds that audience costs do not vary by partisanship in situations that involve a leader backing down from a public statement to defend another country (not necessarily an ally) that has been invaded.36 Michael Tomz and Jessica Weeks reach a similar conclusion with regard to formal alliances. They found that alliance treaties increase audience costs and that these effects hold regardless of partisan affiliation.37 Joshua Alley, however, notes systematic differences between strong partisans, specifically Democrats who are committed to alliances and Republicans who are skeptical of alliances. Moreover, these strong partisans are not responsive to elite cues.38 Kyung Suk Lee and Kirby Goidel investigated whether different framings and partisan cues affect U.S. voter support for NATO. They found that framing the alliance in terms of cost to the United States reduces support for NATO, but that a cue from Trump had a weaker and more mixed effect.39 This study seeks to contribute to this work by systematically examining the effects of ideological and group identity polarization using four survey experiments.

Research Approach

Case Selection

While there is debate about the use of hypothetical versus real world cases, we have chosen to focus on U.S. voter views toward South Korea.40 Compared to hypothetical scenarios that do not use actual countries, using the U.S.-South Korean alliance allows us to present more realistic scenarios to participants.41 At a minimum, there is likely to be higher validity because it pertains to an alliance that is important in its own right, and possibly more broadly to other similarly situated alliances such as the U.S.-Japanese alliance.

We used four survey experiments to test for partisan effects consistent with ideological and group identity polarization effects.

The United States and South Korea have had a formal military alliance since 1954, after an armistice was signed halting the Korean War. But even since America’s entry into the war in 1950, domestic politics have played a key role in U.S. policy toward South Korea. America’s involvement in the war was subject to domestic partisan politics with objections over the cost of the war, America’s strategy, the sacking of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and other issues.42 In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter’s announcement of the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula led to a political backlash from the armed forces as well as congressional leaders from both parties, which ultimately curtailed the drawdown of troops. Furthermore, in response to Carter’s intention to remove U.S. troops, Congress also authorized an aid package to strengthen South Korea’s military.43 More recently, Trump revisited the issue of support for South Korea. He openly questioned the need for U.S. military troops in South Korea and reportedly intended to remove them.44 He also made demands for much higher financial contributions to host the U.S. military in South Korea.

Empirical Strategy

We used four survey experiments to test for partisan effects consistent with ideological and group identity polarization effects. For the experiments, we presented our surveys to two separate pools — one made up of Democrats and the other of Republicans — of roughly the same size to focus on the effects of partisanship. The samples were balanced to be representative of U.S. census demographics in terms of age, race, and region. In addition, the samples were approximately representative in terms of household income.45 This block randomization approach enabled us to examine treatment effects more efficiently along partisan lines.46 The first experiment that we present below tests to see if there are underlying ideological differences between parties. The following three experiments prime respondents using treatments that target partisan group identities, including leadership cues, media cues, negative language cues, and positive language cues. It should be noted that we do not directly test the effect of partisan polarization or address whether it is increasing or not. Rather, our approach seeks to test for partisan effects that we would expect given the well-documented conditions of growing ideological and group identity partisan polarization.

The four experiments were fielded in two distinct online surveys of American voters. The first survey included the group identity polarization experiments and consisted of 1,896 respondents who took the survey between December 2021 and January 2022. The second included the ideological polarization experiment and consisted of 625 respondents who took the survey in March 2023. Both surveys were fielded with Lucid, a digital marketplace specialized in recruiting representative, high-quality survey takers.

We measure participants’ commitment to alliances in two ways: 1) as the degree of support to directly aid or defend South Korea across different situations; and 2) the level of support for a key commitment and reassurance mechanism in a crisis situation: the deployment of troops on South Korean soil.

Ideological Polarization Experiment

As discussed above, there is some evidence to suggest that Republicans may be more skeptical of alliances than Democrats. To test if there are any underlying policy differences between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to alliance commitment, we use a vignette survey experiment that was fielded from March 7, 2023 to March 14, 2023. After giving their consent to participate in the survey, respondents were provided with this brief description of our survey:

An on-going question in U.S. foreign policy is when to provide types of support to countries. We’d like to ask you a few questions about this subject. In the sections that follow, you’ll be presented first with some background about the topic. After reading the background, you will then be asked to consider situations that are hypothetical but realistic scenarios.

Respondents then read the following text:

In the sections that follow, you’ll be asked some questions about South Korea. For your convenience, we’ve put together some information about South Korea that may be relevant. Please read the following information carefully before proceeding to the next step.

We then provided a neutral presentation of South Korea that avoids overt partisan cues. The description of South Korea is composed from the six conditions listed in Table 1. To make it easier for respondents to retain the information that they read, we limited the information we presented to only three of the conditions and listed them as bullet points. The specific combination of three bullet points each respondent read was randomly assigned.

Table 1: Ideological Polarization Treatment Conditions

AllyIn 1953, the United States and South Korea signed a formal military alliance, which remains in effect to this day, that declares “publicly and formally their common determination to defend themselves against external armed attack.”CostThe United States spends upwards of $3 billion annually to maintain its military presence in South Korea.Common InterestThe largest military and economic threats to South Korea are its neighbors, North Korea and China, which many experts believe pose significant threats to the United States as well.EstablishmentSouth Korea, formally known as the Republic of Korea, was established in 1948 after World War II.PopulationSouth Korea has a population of 51.74 million, ranking as the 13th largest Asian country.GDPSouth Korea has a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars, a little under one tenth of the GDP of the United States.

The first three facts in Table 1 are our key treatment conditions of interest. The ALLY condition is designed to test whether knowing that South Korea is a formal treaty ally influences the level of support for South Korea differently for Democrats and Republicans. The ALLY condition states when the alliance treaty was signed, notes that it is currently in force, and cites text from the actual treaty that refers to mutual defense against external attack. The COST condition mentions the approximate annual cost to the United States of maintaining its presence in South Korea.47 We include costs since there may be a partisan divide over the financial burden of supporting allies. As noted earlier, a much larger share of Republicans than Democrats believe that U.S. treaty obligations to NATO should be contingent on their financial contribution. Moreover, Trump raised concerns that America pays too much to support its allies (e.g., NATO allies, Japan, South Korea, etc.). To gauge the extent to which presenting a convergence of national interests might increase support for South Korea, we include the COMMON INTEREST condition. This highlights that North Korea and China pose economic and military threats to South Korea and to the United States.

So that we could include or exclude the above three conditions of interest and keep the length consistent (three bullet points), we also had three additional facts that contain generic information about South Korea. These include the ESTABLISHMENT condition, which describes the foundation of South Korea in 1948; the POPULATION condition, which lists South Korea’s population size and ranking; and the GDP condition, which references South Korea’s GDP size in dollars and in relation to the U.S. economy.

We used a variety of scenarios — including one direct attack and seizure of South Korean territory as well as conflicts that involve coercion and the use of force against South Korean forces in other contexts — to gauge how robust voter support is for South Korea.

After reading the three randomly assigned facts about South Korea, respondents were presented with four different conflict scenarios with the order in which the scenarios appeared randomized to avoid order bias.48 Each scenario involves a military conflict between South Korea and an adversary (either China or North Korea). After each scenario, respondents indicated their level of support for a possible U.S. response using an 11-point Likert scale ranging from -5 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). To make these decisions more realistic, each option to support South Korea incorporates costs to the United States. For three of the scenarios, U.S. intervention would result in thousands of U.S. military casualties. In the fourth scenario, the costs are economic — billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. We used a variety of scenarios — including one direct attack and seizure of South Korean territory as well as conflicts that involve coercion and the use of force against South Korean forces in other contexts — to gauge how robust voter support is for South Korea.

The NORTH KOREA scenario involves a North Korean invasion of a South Korean island. U.S. support for South Korea is described as leading to military casualties. In the MINING scenario, China seizes a South Korean mining operation in disputed seas. The United States then must decide whether to help South Korea retake the mining operation and maritime space, even with the possibility of casualties. In the CYBER ATTACK scenario, the United States weighs launching a cyber attack against China in retaliation for its cyber attack on South Korea. China’s cyber attack is prompted by America and South Korea signing a new military cooperation agreement. U.S. involvement would lead to billions of dollars of economic damage to the United States as well as shutdowns of some of its critical infrastructure. Finally, a SEA PATROL scenario describes a conflict arising from a Chinese attack on South Korean naval vessels that are part of a joint patrol with the United States in the South China Sea, a body of water described as vital to international trade. America must decide whether to aid South Korea or not in an operation that is expected to lead to U.S. military casualties.

Results and Discussion

Looking at the responses from both Democrats and Republicans, the overall level of support is positive across all four scenarios, but there is some variation. As Figure 1 shows, for three scenarios — NORTH KOREA, MINING, and CYBER ATTACK — the level of support for helping South Korea ranges from about 1 to 1.2 on the Likert scale that ranges from -5 (strongly disagree) to +5 (strongly agree). For the SEA PATROL scenario, in which the United States weighs a strike on a Chinese ship in retaliation for the Chinese military sinking a South Korean ship, the average response is lower at 0.52.

Figure 1: Mean Response by Scenario for all Respondents49

Figure 1 also shows the partisan differences in response between Democrats and Republicans. For this, as well as for subsequent experiments, we define “partisans” as those who self-identify with a specific party.50 The results show clearly that there are meaningful differences between the two. Compared to Republicans, Democrats express higher levels of support for South Korea across all four scenarios. As the figure shows, the gap is quite large, with Republican responses about a full point lower on the Likert scale. In the case of the SEA PATROL scenario, the mean response fofr Republicans is slightly negative, while the mean response for Democrats, while still lower than for other scenarios, is about 1.

The differences are statistically significant for one-tailed and two-tailed t-tests (p < .0001) for all four scenarios. We also examined the treatment effects on partisans.51 We do not find any systematic differences in the treatment effects on Republicans and Democrats. In particular, there is little evidence that describing South Korea as an ally (ALLY) matters for Democrat or Republican views on defending South Korea. For three of the four scenarios, there is no statistically significant effect. Only in the MINING scenario is there a negative effect, but it is on the outer edge of standards for statistical significance (p < 0.10). This may seem to suggest that knowing that a country is an ally might have little effect on support to defend a country, but caution is required in interpreting the data, because the result could reflect that some respondents likely already know that South Korea is an ally. The COST condition also has little to no significant effect, suggesting that concerns about the cost to the United States of supporting an ally does not contribute to a difference in policy preference between Democrats and Republicans. Finally, we also find no evidence that the COMMON INTEREST condition conveying common national interests affects support for South Korea.

In sum, we find strong support that Democrats and Republicans have different preferences toward allies. This evidence is robust across a variety of realistic scenarios, while controlling for different treatment conditions in the presentation of South Korea. Moreover, these results hold even when including information in scenarios that should increase Republican support relative to Democrats. Compared to Democrats, Republicans tend to support the use of force more, are less sensitive to casualties, and view China as more threatening.52 And yet, Republicans show lower support for South Korea across the scenarios that incorporate these conditions.

Group Polarization Experiments

As discussed above, existing literature suggests that group identity polarization can have strong effects on partisans’ views. In this section, we present our results from survey experiments that test if partisan cues influence levels of support for aiding and supporting South Korea.

All three of the experiments in this section are framed around a true current event, namely the perceived threat of hypersonic missiles from China and North Korea. Hypersonic missiles travel several times faster than the speed of sound and have unpredictable flight paths, which makes it difficult for countries to defend themselves against them. In 2021, shortly before our survey was fielded, China launched a successful hypersonic missile test, and North Korea claimed to as well, raising concern in the United States and allied countries in East Asia.

In this experiment, we explore the effect of cues from political figures and news media outlets — both of which can evoke partisan sentiments and group identities — on Democrat and Republican support for South Korea.

The experiments were also conducted within the same survey that was fielded between Dec. 16, 2021, and Jan. 27, 2022.53 At the start of this survey, all respondents were first presented with factual information about the hypersonic missile testing in East Asia. Then, survey respondents were presented with the Leadership and Media Cues Experiment and either: 1) the Negative Language Cues Experiment, or 2) the Positive Language Cues Experiment. Since participants were only presented with one of the two language experiments, they never received contradictory treatments.

To control for contamination across experiments, we randomized the order of their appearance: Some participants received the Leader and Media Cues Experiment first and others received the Negative/Positive Language Cue Experiment first.54

Leadership and Media Source Cues

In this experiment, we explore the effect of cues from political figures and news media outlets — both of which can evoke partisan sentiments and group identities — on Democrat and Republican support for South Korea. To do this, we created a fabricated news article excerpt reporting on the actual developments regarding the hypersonic missile situation described earlier. The excerpt included a fictitious quote urging U.S. public support for South Korea. The text of the excerpt read as follows:

After back-to-back hypersonic ballistic missile tests from China and North Korea, experts are concerned about the danger this poses to South Korea.

“I will do everything in my power to defend our South Korean allies,” said [INSERT PERSON] at a press conference today, “we can not tolerate any Chinese or North Korean threat against the core American values of liberty and democracy.”

To examine the effect of leadership cues, we randomized the attribution of the quote between Trump, President Joe Biden, and a made-up foreign policy expert. To explore the effect of media source cues, we randomized the news source of the article. We embedded these excerpts into mock-ups that appear as screenshots of websites from Fox News, CNN, and AP News. The text remained the same across all variations. This yielded nine treatment variations, presented in Table 2.55

Table 2: Experiment 2 Treatment Conditions

ConditionsOptionsNewsOption 1: CNN

Option 2: Fox News

Option 3: AP NewsLeaderOption 1: Joe Biden

Option 2: Donald Trump

Option 3: Neutral Expert

Survey participants were randomly assigned one of these nine variations. Afterwards, participants were asked to answer the following question on a scale of -5 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

Suppose that China or North Korea launches a hypersonic missile attack on South Korea. The U.S. government must now decide whether to defend South Korea by responding to the attack, an action that would likely result in several thousand casualties. To what extent to do you disagree or agree that the U.S. should defend South Korea?

The distribution of responses to the question of whether to defend South Korea is presented in Figure 2 for Democrats and Republicans. It is worth noting the sharp discontinuity at zero — both Democrats and Republicans are much more likely to support rather than oppose defending South Korea in the case of conflict. In fact, on average, support appears fairly consistent regardless of partisanship.

In Figure 3 we present mean responses to this question, separated by party affiliation and treatment group. As we had expected, support is much greater among Republicans after receiving a cue from Trump. Likewise, a cue from Biden also increases support among Democrats. Moreover, we find evidence of affective polarization among Democrats, who are significantly less likely to defend South Korea when prompted to do so by Trump.

Figure 2: Histogram of Response to the Leader and Media Cue Experiment

Democrats

Republicans

Figure 3: Mean Response by Treatment Group56

Leadership Condition

News Source Condition

We examine the effect of the LEADER condition by performing one tailed t-tests comparing mean responses across treatment groups for Democrats and Republicans separately.57 Democrat support of South Korea was 0.36 points higher if they received the Biden cue relative to the neutral control and 0.68 points higher relative to the Trump cue. Interestingly, the Trump cue significantly decreases support among Democrats, relative to the neutral control, by about 0.32 points. For Republicans, the Trump cue increases support by more than 1 point on the Likert scale relative to both the control and the Biden cue. However, the Biden cue does not affect Republicans differently from the control group. Therefore, we find that group identity has an effect on the views of both Democrats and Republicans, who are more likely to support South Korea when given a cue that aligns with their group identity. Among Democrats, we further find evidence of affective polarization: A Trump cue decreases support for South Korea below the baseline of a neutral expert about as much as a Biden cue raises support.

In contrast, the NEWS condition did not have a significant effect on Democrats or Republicans.58 This suggests that leader cues may be more effective in arousing partisan sentiment, especially in issues pertaining to alliances.

Our results differ from those of Kyung Suk Lee and Kirby Goidel, who found that, while framing an alliance in terms of cost reduces U.S. voter support for NATO, a Trump cue has a weaker and more mixed effect.59 We believe that our experiment has an important methodological advantage: We embed our experiment into a realistic news story that provides a quote attributed to the former president, whereas Lee and Goidel present a long text that describes Trump’s views in the third person. It is plausible that this difference in framing explains the diverging results. Another difference is that our experiment examines the effect of leadership cues in raising support for South Korea, since the quote expresses a positive view. Lee and Goidel instead present Trump’s negative views of NATO. The quote we chose to attribute to Trump is in many ways misaligned with the platform that the former president pushed forward during his campaign and time in office, so we presume that an alternative framing that presented a negative point of view toward South Korea would have equal or stronger effects in reducing Republican support for the alliance. However, we leave the validation of this hypothesis to future research.

Negative Language Experiment

Above, we saw that key information about the U.S.-South Korean alliance does not affect Democrats’ and Republicans’ views on whether to support South Korea. But does the language in which this information is presented make a difference? In this section and the subsequent section, we study the role of language in shaping support for alliances. Polarizing language is often encountered in the context of social media, so for these experiments, we chose to present the treatments in the form of tweets from a fabricated user. Given the mutually contradicting frameworks of the Negative Language and Positive Language Experiments, respondents were randomly assigned to one or the other, but never to both.

Table 3: Negative Language Experiment Treatment Conditions

ConditionsOptionsRipping Off0: “relying excessively on U.S. support”

1: “ripping us off”America First0: “carefully consider national interests”

1: “put America first”

In the Negative Language Experiment, we were interested in understanding the differential effect of language that is critical of an ally on Republicans’ and Democrats’ overall support for South Korea. Toward this end, respondents were presented a tweet with the following structure:

Once again, South Korea is [Ripping Off Condition] by asking us to intervene in this conflict with China. It is time that we [America First Condition] and keep troops home! #hypersonicmissile

The text in the two condition blocks was randomly assigned from the options presented in Table 3. In both cases, the first option expresses a point of view using mild negative language and the second option expresses the same point of view using more emotionally charged language. The text was then formatted to look like tweets.60

By contrast, the effects of the negative language treatments for Republicans are quite large and statistically significant.

Both conditions reflect concerns raised by Trump during the 2016 election and his subsequent years in office. The Ripping Off Condition echoes a frequent claim Trump made that allies “rip us off.” The America First Condition emulates Trump’s campaign slogan “America First” that he used during the 2016 election campaign, and which later became a tagline for his foreign policy approach. In both cases, the second option utilizes the same language that Trump has used in the past.

Additionally, we included a control treatment with no tweet to provide a baseline reference. Respondents in the control group were presented the following information on the situation:

After news about the hypersonic missile tests was released, South Korea requested increased U.S. military support. The U.S. is currently considering whether to deploy more troops to South Korea.

Survey participants were randomly assigned one of these four treatment variations or the control. Afterward, participants were asked whether they disagreed or agreed with the following statement on a scale of -5 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree): “The U.S. should deploy troops to South Korea.”

Figure 4: Histogram of Responses to Negative and Positive Language Experiment

Democrats

Republicans

The distribution of responses to the question of whether the United States should deploy troops to South Korea is much more uniform than that of whether to defend South Korea in the Leader and Media Cue Experiment, especially for Republicans, a third of whom indicated that America should not deploy troops to South Korea. In contrast, about a quarter of Democrats opposed deploying troops.

In Figure 5, we show the effect of each treatment on Republicans’ and Democrats’ responses to the question of whether to deploy troops to South Korea across treatment groups. The first two bars indicate that the mean level of support for respondents in the control group (i.e., those who did not receive any tweet) is positive and relatively high for both Republicans and Democrats, although Republican support is slightly higher. The impact of the treatments vary widely, however, by political party. The negative language treatments have relatively small negative effects on Democrats, and neither the mildly negative nor the stronger negative cues are statistically significant. By contrast, the effects of the negative language treatments for Republicans are quite large and statistically significant. In fact, support among Republicans who saw any version of the tweet dropped sharply. Republicans who saw a tweet indicating that the United States should “carefully consider national interests” or that South Korea is “relying excessively on U.S. support” had mean scores about 1 point lower than those in the control group. Support for South Korea fell even further relative to the mild negative language cue for Republicans who received versions of the tweet that used stronger language associated with Trump. In particular, Republicans who saw the phrase “ripping us off” had a mean response 0.5 points lower than those who saw the more neutrally framed “relying excessively on U.S. support.” The inclusion of the term “America first” also lowered support for South Korea relative to those who saw the phrase “carefully consider national interests,” though in this case the difference is not statistically significant. The stronger versions that evoke Trump’s rhetoric also lowered support among Democrats relative to the mild negative cue. The differences are not statistically significant, however, perhaps due to the implicit Trump cue.

Thus, the mean level of support among Republicans who saw the stronger negative cues — “ripping us off” and “put America first” — dropped to below zero while among Democrats support remained positive across the board.61

Figure 5: Mean Support to Deploy Troops by Treatment Group

Positive Language Experiment

The Positive Language Experiment examines the effect of language that reinforces and upholds alliances. We chose to use a similar experiment format as in the Negative Language Experiment, but in this case, the tweets express support for deploying more troops to South Korea. The template for each tweet is as follows:

This move by China is [Values Condition]. We must [Duty Condition] and deploy troops to protect South Korea! #hypersonicmissile

The text for each condition is randomly assigned from options presented in Table 4. Again, the first option for each condition expresses a point of view using more neutral language, and the second option expresses the same point of view using emotionally charged language.

The conditions in this experiment reflect more traditional arguments in favor of U.S. involvement abroad, using the lofty language about duty and values that the Biden administration often utilizes. The Values Condition presents an ideological argument against China’s actions, using language about “American values.” The Duty Condition studies the effect of rhetoric regarding America’s international responsibilities — emphasizing the “duty” of the United States to the rest of the world — on the public’s willingness to support South Korea.

Table 4: Experiment 4 Treatment Conditions

ConditionsOptionsValues0: “concerning from an ethical standpoint”

1: “an outright challenge against American values”Duty0: “take action”

1: “uphold our duty to our international partners”

We used the same control group from the Negative Language Experiment and again randomly assigned the other respondents to one of the tweet variations. Participants were asked to rank whether they agreed or disagreed with the same statement presented in the Negative Language Experiment.

Both the VALUES and DUTY conditions had insignificant effects on both Democrats and Republicans, whose support for South Korea remained stable across all treatments.62 Therefore, it appears that appeals to traditional arguments in favor of alliances do not shift public opinion. Our results suggest that negative language that demeans alliances is more effective in changing public opinion than positive language which upholds alliances. One caveat, though, is that the positive cues, while more in line with rhetoric used by Biden, are less identifiable with a specific leader, compared to the more negative nationalist language used by Trump.

Conclusion

Collectively, our findings suggest that there are meaningful partisan differences in the level and resilience of support for a major U.S. ally, South Korea. Republicans have lower enthusiasm for aiding South Korea than Democrats, a finding that is consistent across different scenarios and controlling for different presentations of South Korea. This finding is particularly striking given that Republicans tend to be more willing in general to support the use of force, are more tolerant of casualties, and tend to view China as more threatening than Democrats. On average, however it should be noted that Republicans still support helping South Korea in all but one of our scenarios in our ideological polarization experiment.

Furthermore, our experiments investigating the effects of appeals to partisan group identity suggest that certain cues can shift support for an ally, in some cases sharply. A cue from a co-partisan leader (Biden or Trump) shifts voter views in the direction of the cue. The magnitude of the co-partisan leader effect is larger for Republicans who received the Trump leader cue than for Democrats who received the Biden cue. This finding is particularly notable since: 1) the message Republicans received in the treatment supportive of aiding South Korea was substantively the opposite of much of Trump’s actual anti-alliance rhetoric as a leader; and 2) Republicans express, on average, lower support than Democrats for defending and aiding South Korea as described above. We can speculate that a strong anti-alliance message would have at least as large of an effect on Republican voters. Indeed, we do find that negative language critical of allies reduces support for South Korea in a crisis situation both for Democrats and Republicans, although the effect is much larger and only statistically significant among Republicans. Positive language toward allies that appeals to duty and values, however, has no meaningful effect on Republicans or Democrats. Given that the strong negative cues are likely associated with messaging from the Trump administration, we cannot discount that the effect we are seeing reflects a shadow Trump cue, nor can we know yet if these expressions will prove durable and will resonate with Republican voters in the future. Nevertheless, even mild negative cues with no association with Trump have large effects. Lastly, we find some evidence of affective polarization, but only among Democrats. A Trump cue can push Democratic sentiment in the opposite direction, thereby increasing polarization. This was only observed in one of the experiments, but it is worth further investigation.

We show that partisan polarization can create greater uncertainty in voter support for defending an ally and troop deployments abroad.

Our study does have several limitations and caveats. First, we do not directly test if the increase in polarization in American society accounts for the partisan differences that we observe. Instead, we draw on the robust literature and polls discussed above that substantiate that both ideological and group-identity polarization have increased. We thus take polarization as a given. Given that our experiments were conducted at one point in time, we cannot test if these effects of partisanship are more pronounced than they were in the past or if they will intensify if polarization were to increase in the future.

Second, since we focus specifically on American voter views of South Korea, we cannot necessarily assume that our findings will apply to other alliances. Still, there are some reasons to be optimistic about the broader relevance of our work. South Korea shares strong common interests with the United States: Its adversaries — a nuclear-armed North Korea and China — are also widely seen as threats to America. Thus, if we see partisan differences in support for South Korea, we would expect to see even larger effects when it comes to allies with less convergent security interests. Furthermore, a 2022 article found that studies, like ours, that give participants specific details tend to produce similar results compared to designs that are more abstract (e.g., those that do not use specific countries or leader names). If anything, the effects in experiments with more detail tend to produce more conservative results compared to more abstract experimental designs.63

Despite these caveats, our results provide meaningful grounds for concern about how domestic politics might weaken U.S. alliance commitment. We show that partisan polarization can create greater uncertainty in voter support for defending an ally and troop deployments abroad. There are, however, many other ways that one can imagine how partisanship might weaken U.S. support for an ally. In the event of conflict, for instance, U.S. resolve to stay engaged would also likely be subject to partisan messaging and cues. Indeed, as current events in Ukraine show, even a small but dedicated minority could potentially block funding and threaten support for another country, using partisan slogans to justify their positions for withdrawing it.

These findings have policy implications for East Asia. The U.S.-South Korean alliance is one of the most significant alliances in East Asia. Strong public support in the United States for the alliance is necessary for maintaining a credible deterrent and reassuring allies in East Asia. With public support so subject to polarizing cues, adversaries may seek to exploit such divisions and attempt to sow doubt about the credibility of America’s security guarantee. Alarmed allies, dependent on the United States for their security, may seek to realign their foreign policies through various forms of hedging. Indeed, it is no coincidence that public support in South Korea for nuclear weapons increased and a growing number of experts began to call for the development of nuclear weapons during the Trump presidency.64

If there is a silver lining to our findings, it is that, in the absence of polarizing cues, Democrats and Republicans still support defending and aiding South Korea across a variety of crisis situations. To maintain support for the U.S.-South Korean alliance moving forward, our research shows that leader cues and messaging are paramount. Both can play a meaningful role in maintaining or undermining domestic support in the United States for allies such as South Korea.

Verónica Bäcker-Peral is a pre-doctoral researcher at Princeton University, studying macroeconomics and international finance.

Gene Park is a professor of political science and international relations and the director of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Gabriele Magni, Hsin-Hsin Pan, and the participants at a workshop held at Academia Sinica who provided comments.

This research was supported by the Korea Foundation.

Appendix A: Additional Figures and Tables

Table A.1: Ideological Polarization Scenarios

North Korea ScenarioMining ScenarioTensions between South Korea and North Korea are high. North Korea fires artillery just across the border in an attempt to destroy loudspeakers in South Korea broadcasting news, music, and anti-North Korean messages into North Korea. South Korea then retaliates by returning fire. No one is harmed in the exchange.

Then later in the year, North Korean naval ships fire on a South Korean naval vessel. The South Korean Navy returns fire, sinking a ship. Several weeks later, North Korea invades a South Korean island with a population of about 1,000 residents. In planning to retake the islands, the South Korean government confers with the U.S., to see if it will support South Korea. The U.S. government expects doing so would cause North Korea to retaliate, inflicting thousands of U.S. military casualties.

Decision Point: Do you oppose or support the United States helping to retake the islands to aid South Korea?South Korea starts mining cobalt, a valuable metal with many industrial uses, on the seabed of the East China Sea. The mining is in areas in which South Korea claims exclusive economic rights to seabed resources under international law. China, however, claims that it has exclusive rights. The dispute has never been settled under United Nation’s procedures. In the spring, Chinese naval vessels swarm South Korea’s mining operation and drive the South Koreans away, allowing the Chinese to control the area and mining operations.

The South Korean government appeals to the United States for help to reclaim the area and its mining operation. China publicly states that any interference from the United States will be met with force, a threat that the U.S. military believes is credible and would result in thousands of U.S. military casualties.

Decision Point: Do you oppose or support the U.S. government helping South Korea reclaim control over the maritime area?Cyber Attack ScenarioSea Patrol ScenarioThe United States and South Korea sign a military cooperation agreement. Under the agreement, the United States will give South Korea new advanced missiles capable of avoiding missile defense systems, and South Korea will deploy these missiles on its land and naval vessels. The missiles are capable of striking not only North Korea but large population centers in China.

China retaliates strongly against South Korea through a cyberattack, a targeted attack on the country’s computer networks that cripples its economy in an attempt to force South Korea to end its agreement with the United States.

The U.S. government is considering a retaliatory cyberattack to pressure China to end its attack on South Korea. U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that there is a significant chance that China would respond against the United States in kind, causing billions of dollars in economic losses and possible shutdowns of critical infrastructure.

Decision Point:

Do you oppose or support the U.S. government conducting a cyberattack against China to pressure it to back off of South Korea?

The United States and South Korea have started joint sea patrols in the South China Sea, a body of water vital to international trade. China issues a statement that these joint patrols are a threat to its security and that it will not tolerate them. Several days later, the joint patrol enters territorial waters near an island that China controls but other countries also claim. Two days later, the Chinese military launches missiles that destroy a South Korean ship. The U.S. government considers sinking a Chinese vessel in return. China would likely escalate against the United States by targeting ships and military bases, resulting in thousands of U.S. military casualties.

Decision Point:

Do you oppose or support the U.S. government retaliating by sinking a Chinese ship?

Table A.2: Ideological Polarization Experiment Treatment Effects: Scenario 1

DemocratRepublican1234567AllyCostCommon InterestAllyCostCommon InterestDifference in Means-0.276

(0.324)-0.0750

(0.319)-0.294

(0.324)0.116

(0.319)0.526

(0.323)0.0657

(0.319)N305320305320305320

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports two-tailed difference in mean t-tests for Scenario 1 of the Ideological Polarization experiment. Each column indicates the difference in mean between respondents that did or did not receive the ALLY, COST, and COMMON INTEREST treatments, respectively. The first three columns present t-tests for Democrats and the next three present t-tests for Republicans. In all cases, the results are insignificant.

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Table A.3: Ideological Polarization Experiment Treatment Effects: Scenario 2

DemocratRepublican1234567AllyCostCommon InterestAllyCostCommon InterestDifference in Means-0.0300

(0.328)0.487

(0.317)-0.161

(0.329)-0.534∗

(0.317)0.577∗

(0.327)0.0657

(0.319)N305320305320305320

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports two-tailed difference in mean t-tests for Scenario 2 of the Ideological Polarization experiment. Each column indicates the difference in mean between respondents that did or did not receive the ALLY, COST, and COMMON INTEREST treatments, respectively. The first three rows present t-tests for Democrats and the next three present t-tests for Republicans. In almost cases, the results are insignificant or weakly significant in the case of the COST and ALLY treatment on Republicans.

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports two-tailed difference in mean t-tests for Scenario 2 of the Ideological Polarization experiment. Each column indicates the difference in mean between respondents that did or did not receive the ALLY, COST, and COMMON INTEREST treatments, respectively. The first three columns present t-tests for Democrats and the next three present t-tests for Republicans. In almost cases, the results are insignificant or weakly significant in the case of the COST and ALLY treatment on Republicans.

Table A.4: Ideological Polarization Experiment Treatment Effects: Scenario 3

DemocratRepublican1234567AllyCostCommon InterestAllyCostCommon InterestDifference in Means-0.301

(0.345)0.294

(0.331)-0.0111

(0.346)-0.400

(0.331)0.294

(0.346)0.588∗

(0.330)N305320305320305320

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports two-tailed difference in mean t-tests for Scenario 3 of the Ideological Polarization experiment. Each column indicates the difference in mean between respondents that did or did not receive the ALLY, COST, and COMMON INTEREST treatments, respectively. The first three rows present t-tests for Democrats and the next three present t-tests for Republicans. In almost cases, the results are insignificant or weakly significant in the case of the COMMON INTEREST treatment on Republicans.

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports two-tailed difference in mean t-tests for Scenario 3 of the Ideological Polarization experiment. Each column indicates the difference in mean between respondents that did or did not receive the ALLY, COST, and COMMON INTEREST treatments, respectively. The first three columns present t-tests for Democrats and the next three present t-tests for Republicans. In almost cases, the results are insignificant or weakly significant in the case of the COMMON INTEREST treatment on Republicans.

Table A.5: Ideological Polarization Experiment Treatment Effects: Scenario 4

DemocratRepublican1234567AllyCostCommon InterestAllyCostCommon InterestDifference in Means-0.517

(0.347)0.506

(0.352)-0.168

(0.348)0.0182

(0.353)0.128

(0.348)0.118

(0.352)N305320305320305320

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports two-tailed difference in mean t-tests for Scenario 4 of the Ideological Polarization experiment. Each column indicates the difference in mean between respondents that did or did not receive the ALLY, COST, and COMMON INTEREST treatments, respectively. The first three rows present t-tests for Democrats and the next three present t-tests for Republicans. In most cases, the results are insignificant.

b coefficients; se in parentheses

∗ p < 0.1, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports two-tailed difference in mean t-tests for Scenario 4 of the Ideological Polarization experiment. Each column indicates the difference in mean between respondents that did or did not receive the ALLY, COST, and COMMON INTEREST treatments, respectively. The first three columns present t-tests for Democrats and the next three present t-tests for Republicans. In most cases, the results are insignificant.

Table A.6: Leader Cue T-Tests

Democrat

Republican

CueBiden

Trump

Biden

Trump

ReferenceNeutralTrumpNeutralBidenNeutralTrumpNeutralBiden12345678Difference in Means0.355∗∗

(0.204)0.678∗∗∗

(0.216)-0.323∗

(0.211)-0.678∗∗∗

(0.216)0.019

(0.232)-1.108∗∗∗

(0.209)1.127∗∗∗

(0.218)1.108∗∗∗

(0.209)HaDiff > 0Diff > 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Diff > 0Diff > 0Rejects Ho✓✓✓✓✓✓✓N590594626594654694634694

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports one-tailed t-test results. Each column reports the difference in mean response between respondents who saw the cue (listed in the second row) and respondents who saw the corresponding reference (listed in the third row). For each row, the alternative hypothesis that respondents will align with the corresponding co-partisan leader is indicated. The table also indicates that the null hypothesis is rejected in all cases except for Column 5.

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Table A.7: News Source Cue T-Tests

Democrat

Republican

CueCNN

FOX

CNN

FOX

ReferenceAPFOXAPCNNAPFOXAPCNN12345678Difference in Means0.220

(0.213)0.339∗

(0.208)-0.119

(0.212)-0.339∗

(0.208)-0.312∗

(0.224)0.004

(0.227)-0.316

(0.217)-0.004

(0.227)HaDiff > 0Diff > 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Diff > 0Diff > 0N591629590629656669657669

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Table A.8: Negative Language T-Tests

Democrat

Republican

America FirstRip OffAmerica FirstRip Off1234Difference

In Means-0.311

(0.243)-0.251

(0.241)-0.471∗∗

(0.260)-0.677∗∗∗

(0.258)HaDiff < 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Diff < 0Rejects Ho✓✓N507507563563

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports one-tailed t-test results. Each column reports the difference in mean response between respondents who received the AMERICA FIRST and RIP OFF treatments and those who did not. Results are presented separately for Democrats and Republicans. In each column, the alternative hypothesis (Ha) is that the difference in means is negative, meaning that the more negative version of the condition ought to decrease support for South Korea. The alternative hypothesis is rejected for Columns (3) and (4), for Republican respondents.

Table A.9: Positive Language T-Tests

Democrat

Republican

ValuesDutyValuesDuty1234Difference

In Means0.101

(0.248)0.072

(0.247)-0.108

(0.255)-0.056

(0.254)HaDiff > 0Diff > 0Diff > 0Diff > 0Rejects HoN507507550550

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports one-tailed t-test results. Each column reports the difference in mean response between respondents who received the VALUES and DUTY treatments and those who did not. Results are presented separately for Democrats and Republicans.

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Figure A.1: Mean Support To Deploy Troops By Treatment Group (Positive Language)

The figure presents the mean response to the question of whether to deploy troops to South Korea across treatment groups of the Positive Language Experiment for Democrats and Republicans. The first two bars include respondents who saw the control tweet. The remaining bars present the mean response across all respondents who saw the indicated variation of the VALUES and DUTY conditions. 95 percent confidence intervals are shown.

Table A.10: Leader and Media Experiment Treatment Variations

CNN

Presented as an article from CNNFox News

Presented as an article from Fox NewsAP

Presented as an article from the APBiden

Presented alongside an image of BidenBiden claims that US must protect South Korea from nuclear threat

After back-to-back hypersonic ballistic missile tests from China and North Korea, experts are concerned about the danger this poses to South Korea. "I will do everything in my power to defend our South Korean allies," said President Biden at a press conference today, "we can not tolerate any Chinese or North Korean threat against the core American values of liberty and democracy."Biden claims that US must protect South Korea from nuclear threat

Presented alongside an image of TrumpTrump claims that US must protect South Korea from nuclear threat

After back-to-back hypersonic ballistic missile tests from China and North Korea, experts are concerned about the danger this poses to South Korea. "I will do everything in my power to defend our South Korean allies," said former President Trump at a press conference today, "we can not tolerate any Chinese or North Korean threat against the core American values of liberty and democracy."Trump claims that US must protect South Korea from nuclear threat

After back-to-back hypersonic ballistic missile tests from China and North Korea, experts are concerned about the danger this poses to South Korea. "I will do everything in my power to defend our South Korean allies," said former President Trump at a press conference today, "we can not tolerate any Chinese or North Korean threat against the core American values of liberty and democracy."Neutral

Presented alongside an image of an expertExpert claims that US must protect South Korea from nuclear threat

After back-to-back hypersonic ballistic missile tests from China and North Korea, experts are concerned about the danger this poses to South Korea. "I will do everything in my power to defend our South Korean allies," said foreign policy expert Tim Anderson at a press conference today, "we can not tolerate any Chinese or North Korean threat against the core American values of liberty and democracy."Expert claims that US must protect South Korea from nuclear threat

After back-to-back hypersonic ballistic missile tests from China and North Korea, experts are concerned about the danger this poses to South Korea. "I will do everything in my power to defend our South Korean allies," said foreign policy expert Tim Anderson at a press conference today, "we can not tolerate any Chinese or North Korean threat against the core American values of liberty and democracy."

Figure A.2: Example Tweet

Appendix B: Demographic Distribution

In Figures B.1 and B.2. we present the distribution of ethnicity, age, and region of our respondents, which were provided by the company that fielded our survey. The distribution of respondents is selected such that it is roughly representative of the United States as a whole.

Figure B.1: Ideological Polarization Survey Demographic Distribution

(a) Race

(b) Age

Figure B.2: Group Polarization Survey Demographic Distribution

(a) Race

(b) Age

Appendix C: Robustness Checks

Alternative Measures of Partisanship

In our paper, we classify respondents as Democrats and Republicans based on how they self-identify. Our results are robust to classifying individuals based on whether they voted for Trump or Biden in 2020.65 In Figures C.4, C.5, and C.6, we see that our main results from all the experiments hold whether we split by reported partisan identification or by reported 2020 vote.

Figure C.1: Mean Response to Ideological Polarization Experiment, By Partisanship and 2020 Vote

The figure presents the mean response to each scenario of the Ideological Polarization Experiment for Democrats and Republicans, as well as for Trump and Biden voters (using their reported vote from the 2020 election). The sample excludes the small percent of respondents who voted for third parties. 95 percent confidence intervals are shown.

Figure C.2: Mean Response to Leader and Media Cue Experiment, By Partisanship and 2020 Vote

The figure presents the mean response to the Leader and Media Cue value question for Democrats and Republicans, as well as for Trump and Biden voters (using reported vote from the 2020 election). The sample is further divided according to which leader cue respondents received. The sample excludes the small percent of respondents who voted for third parties. 95 percent confidence intervals are shown.

Figure C.3: Mean Response to Negative Language Experiment, By Partisanship and 2020 Vote

The figure presents the mean response to the question of whether to deploy troops to South Korea for Democrats and Republicans, as well as for Trump and Biden voters (using their reported vote from the 2020 election). The sample is further divided according to which version of the America First and Rip Off conditions the respondent received. The sample excludes the small percent of respondents who voted for third parties. 95 percent confidence intervals are shown.

Spillovers Between Experiments

The Leadership and Media Source Experiment as well as both Language Experiments were fielded on the same survey and their order was randomized. Because of this randomization, any bias that one experiment has on the other will have mean zero and therefore are highly unlikely to explain our results. However, to mitigate any concerns, we present our results for the Leadership and Media Source Cues Experiment, Negative Language Experiment, and Positive Language Experiment using only the respondents who saw that experiment first, and therefore cannot have been biased by spillovers. The results for the Leadership and Media Source Cues Experiment and the Positive Language Experiment are statistically unchanged, as seen in Table C.1, Table C.2, and Table C.3. The results for the Negative Language Experiment are similar in magnitude, as seen in Table C.4. However, the America First treatment is no longer statistically significant likely due to the loss of observations.

Table C.1: Leader Cue T-Tests, Robustness Check

Democrat

Republican

CueBiden

Trump

Biden

Trump

ReferenceNeutralTrumpNeutralBidenNeutralTrumpNeutralBiden12345678Difference in Means0.440∗

(0.282)0.819∗∗∗

(0.306)-0.379∗

(0.297)-0.819∗∗∗

(0.306)-0.195

(0.325)-1.3∗∗∗

(0.296)1.1∗∗∗

(0.310)1.3∗∗∗

(0.296)N286297323297336351321351

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports one-tailed t-test results for the Leader and News Cues experiment across each leader cue. The sample is restricted to respondents who received the Leader and News Cue experiment before receiving the Positive/Negative Language experiment.

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Table C.2: News Source Cue T-Tests, Robustness Check

Democrat

Republican

CueCNN

FOX

CNN

FOX

ReferenceAPFOXAPCNNAPFOXAPCNN12345678Difference in Means-0.071

(0.297)0.287

(0.303)-0.358

(0.290)-0.287

(0.303)-0.26

(0.319)0.157

(0.316)-0.417∗

(0.312)-0.157

(0.316)N290318298318333348327348

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports one-tailed t-test results for the Leader and News Cues experiment across each news cue. The sample is restricted to respondents who received the Leader and News Cue experiment before receiving the Positive/Negative Language experiment.

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Table C.3: Negative Language T-Tests, Robustness Check

Democrat

Republican

America FirstRip OffAmerica FirstRip Off1234Difference

In Means-0.083

(0.345)-0.365

(0.347)-0.416

(0.373)-0.592∗

(0.366)N251251268268

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports one-tailed t-test results for the Negative Language experiment. The sample is restricted to respondents who received the Negative Language experiment before receiving the Leader and News Cue.

Table C.4: Positive Language T-Tests, Robustness Check

Democrat

Republican

ValuesDutyValuesDuty1234Difference

In Means-0.139

(0.366)-0.031

(0.365)0.255

(0.343)0.004

(0.332)N254254279279

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

The table reports one-tailed t-test results for the Positive Language experiment. The sample is restricted to respondents who received the Positive Language experiment before receiving the Leader and News Cue.

Endnotes

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Peter Baker, “Trump Says NATO Allies Don’t Pay Their Share. Is That True?” New York Times, May 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/europe/nato-trump-spending.html; David Choi, “Trump Considered ‘Complete Withdrawal’ of US Troops from South Korea, Former Defense Chief Says,” Stars and Stripes, May 10, 2022, https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-05-10/defense-secretary-mark-esper-memoir-president-trump-south-korea-troops-5954121.html; Ana Swanson, “White House to Impose Metal Tariffs on E.U., Canada and Mexico.” New York Times, May 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/politics/trump-aluminum-steel-tariffs.html; “Trump: Poland to Get Some US Troops Withdrawn from Germany,” AP News, June 24, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/d6ebba9dfb5f500775a24a9d479e1d9c.

Brett Ashley Leeds, Andrew G. Long, and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, “Reevaluating Alliance Reliability: Specific Threats, Specific Promises,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44, no. 5 (2000): 686–99, https://www.jstor.org/stable/174649.

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For a discussion of cyber attacks and alliances, see Lindsey Guenther and Paul Musgrave, “New Questions for an Old Alliance: NATO in Cyberspace and American Public Opinion,” Journal of Global Security Studies 7, no. 4 (December 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogac024.

James D. Morrow, “Alliances: Why Write Them Down?” Annual Review of Political Science 3, no. 1 (2000): 63–839, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.63.

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See demographic distributions of respondents in Appendix B.

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See Table A.1 in Appendix A for a full description of the scenarios.

95 percent confidence intervals are shown.

Our vendor targeted partisan respondents by using this screening question: “In politics today, do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, or Independent?” We also asked respondents: “Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican or Democratic party?” In robustness checks, we used participants’ vote for the 2020 presidential election as an alternative measure of partisan identity. See Appendix C.

The statistical results are presented in Appendix A.

Carrie A. Lee, “Polarization, Casualty Sensitivity, and Military Operations: Evidence from a Survey Experiment,” International Politics, no. 59 (2022): 981–1003, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-022-00378-9.

The group polarization experiments were conducted in a different survey from the previously discussed ideological polarization experiment, which was fielded in March 2023.

In Appendix C, we investigate any possible spillover effects.

For examples of these texts, see Table A.10 in Appendix A.

95 percent confidence intervals are plotted.

See Table A.6 in Appendix A.

See Table A.7 in Appendix A.

Lee and Goidel, “US Public Support for the US-NATO Alliance.”

See Figure A.2 in Appendix A.

The results of our statistical tests can be found in the appendix in Table A.8.

For the specific results, see Figure A.1 and Table A.9 in Appendix A.

Brutger et al., “Abstraction and Detail in Experimental Design.”

Wiliam Gallo, “As Trump Looms, South Koreans Mull Their Own Nukes,” Voice of America, Nov. 24, 2022, https://www.voanews.com/a/as-trump-looms-south-koreans-mull-their-own-nukes/6848246.html.

We exclude the very small percent who voted for a third party candidate.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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