Secretary Rumsfeld has, as the New York Times notes, been hinting that some American units should leave South Korea. He’s right. South Korea is wealthy, well able to pay for its defense and, apparently, increasingly unappreciative of its US military presence. The withdrawal of some its American military support might be just the sort of wake up call that the country needs.
While Rumsfeld is thinking about such matters he should also look at the US bases in Germany. With Germany effectively no longer an ally, it might well make sense to start redeploying those forces in Poland. The Poles could do with the economic boost that this could mean and something tells me that it is they, not the Germans, who are likely to be better friends to the US in future.