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New Beginnings, a non-partisan study group of distinguished former senior American officials and experts formed by the Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the New York-based Korea Society, released a report on how to revitalize the Seoul-Washington alliance on Monday.
In the report, the study group urges the U.S. government to consolidate the alliance by responding positively to requests from South Korea to renegotiate the handover of wartime operational control of Korean troops, which the two countries agreed to transfer to Seoul on April 17, 2012.
New Beginnings spent some three months preparing the policy report.
The group says it was a good decision to hand operational control over to Seoul in 2012 but adds the decision should be premised on an adequate deterrent against the North Korean army. It stresses troop control should be transferred after a comprehensive evaluation of the Northeast Asian situation, including the Korean Peninsula, and the South Korean military's capacity to carry out operations on its own.
The report also advises the U.S. government to respond positively to South Korean government's request to complete OPLAN 5029, a contingency plan by Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command for the collapse of North Korea. The report urges the U.S. to give active support to OPLAN 5029 given that the Lee Myung-bak administration is looking to take the operational plan off the shelf where it had been put by the previous government. The report also supports the governments of the two countries in their review of OPLAN 5027, the Combined Forces Command basic warplan.
Participants in the study group are Michael Armacost, former U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs; Victor Cha, former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council; Stephen W. Bosworth and Thomas C. Hubbard, former U.S. ambassadors to South Korea; David Straub, a former State Department Korean affairs director; Don Oberdorfer, chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; Charles Pritchard, president of the Korea Economic Institute in Washington, D.C.; Evans Revere, president of the Korea Society; Shin Gi-wook, director of Shorenstein APARC; and Robert Carlin, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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