Camp Humphreys is the largest US overseas military base in the world. More than five square miles, it contains a huge runway and is home to a garrison of more than half of the 28,000 US army personnel located in South Korea. Its construction was intended to place most US soldiers in South Korea a safer distance from North Korean artillery as it lies nearly 100km south of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which is only an uncomfortable 38km from the border with Kim Jong-un’s despotic workers’ paradise.

The base was described by the US army in 2017 as its “largest power projection platform in the Pacific”. The cost of its expansion, about $11 billion, was largely paid for by the South Koreans. Back in 2019, when construction finished, Trump extracted massive payments from South Korea under a “cost plus 50 per cent” policy in which allies were required to pay not merely for the US presence but an extra 50 per cent as a kind of Trumpian protection racket.

Not content with that mobster-like squeeze, Trump then demanded that Camp Humphreys be made into US sovereign territory, a demand that South Korea refused relying on its constitution.

At that time Trump was engaged in his failed war of threats and bombast against the North Korean tyrant, Kim . Demanding that Kim abandon its nuclear weapons, Trump threatened........

© The Irish Times