Seoul, Republic of Korea. During the Gold Institute’s July leadership delegation to Seoul, Chairman Gen. Michael T. Flynn addressed Korean business leaders and the Korea-US Alliance Foundation (KUSAF) on the future of the U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance.
Gen. Flynn laid out the case. The alliance is entering a new chapter, and its next binding will be economic.
Seventy-three years after the Korean War, Gen. Flynn reminded the room, the alliance rests on real sacrifice. He pointed to the American veterans who served on the peninsula, the million-strong Korean-American community, and the generations of Korean families whose sacrifices built the Republic’s success. “The binding of a book is the strength of the book,” he said. That binding, the bond between the two nations, should never be overcome by short-term differences of political opinion. Relationships fluctuate like quarterly reports. An alliance cannot be judged on a snapshot in time.
The stakes, Gen. Flynn noted, are not abstract. A nuclear-armed, missile-capable North Korea sits to the north at a moment when ballistic missiles and drones are striking populated cities across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Preparedness is not optional.
His central call was to Korea’s business community. Just as the U.S.-ROK military-to-military relationship has held firm for decades, and Gen. Flynn pointed to his own long friendship with Gen. Shin as its model, Korea’s entrepreneurs must now organize themselves as part of the alliance’s security umbrella, building new “bindings” with American business partners for the future.
The Gold Institute for International Strategy is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan policy organization.
