주한미군 전략의 변화와 한ㆍ미동맹 양식의 전략적 재검토 = Changes in U.S. Strategy for Its Forces in Korea and Rethinking the Mode of Our Alliance with the United States

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

One of the essential components in the twenty-first century U.S. strategy for maintaining robust alliance networks is to keep the forward deployment of its forces abroad, including the Korean peninsula. With this basic principle intact, however, the Bush Administration aims at transforming the capability and role of its forward deployed military force, which entails serious implications for the future of the Korea-U.S. alliance and our relationship with the neighboring countries. This development forces us to rethink carefully the long-term ramifications of the existing mode of military alliance between the two nations. In this context, we are faced with a critical choice: on the one hand, we may conform to the evolving American strategic concept and accept passively the risk of being entangled, as a supportive front-line junior partner of the United States military, into the prospective hegemonic rivalry between the U.S. and China in the coming decades; on the other, we have the option of exploring alternative mode of alliance wth the U.S., in which the partnership is not necessarily predicated on the physical military presence of U.S. forces in Korea, thereby taking a more flexible form of soft alliance rather than the extant framework of hard alliance. This essay tries to show why this alternative is both desirable and possible for peace and stability in East Asia as well as on the Korean peninsula.