Sitting before a group of lawmakers at the National Assembly in Seoul last year, Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said something out loud that many here in South Korea had already quietly concluded about the country’s closest ally.
“I am coming to terms with the fact that the U.S. of the past, which engaged in really good cooperation with allies and friendly nations, is not the U.S. of today,” Mr. Cho said during a parliamentary inquiry last September. The comments came soon after agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 300 Korean workers at a Hyundai plant in Georgia.
They offered a rare moment of candor about the country’s frayed relationship with the United States. They also revealed that the U.S. might not be dealing with the same South Korea, either.
Why We Wrote This
The decades-old alliance between the U.S. and South Korea has come under strain, largely because of political pressures from inside both countries. As a result, South Korean leaders are looking to expand their horizons beyond the country’s reliance on the U.S.
“The majority of politicians in Korea have become emboldened, or empowered, vis-à-vis the United States,” said Youngshik Bong, a visiting professor at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies.
“But that, of course, does not necessarily mean political elites are in denial of the United States as South Korea’s partner in many realms,” he added. “Cho Hyun’s remark shows how much South Korean officials are perplexed by the United States under the Trump administration.”
Not quite a decade ago, South Korea’s freshly inaugurated president, Moon Jae-in, sparked controversy with the country’s most staunch conservatives when he made the seemingly innocuous statement that Seoul needed to be in the “driver’s seat” when it came to inter-Korean affairs.
South Korean right-wingers pounced on the phrase from Mr. Moon. They used it to paint him as anti-American or, even worse, pro-North Korean. Elderly right-wing protesters – some of whom had lived through the Korean War – rallied in the streets, at times calling the president a communist or North Korean spy.
Fast-forward a few years to U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, and those ultraconservative voices in South Korea “have been on steady decline,” according to Mr. Bong. Meanwhile, public reaction to a South Korean politician, such as the foreign minister, drifting out of lockstep with the U.S. does not appear to ruffle nearly as many feathers.
“It was surprising when Moon Jae-in mentioned it a decade ago, but Lee Jae-myung or other officials questioning the reliability of the United States’ commitment is not particularly surprising,” said Inwook Kim, an associate professor at Sungkyunkwan University’s Department of Political Science and Diplomacy. He was referring to the current President Lee, who was sworn in last summer.
“It’s not just Korea who is questioning how and to what extent U.S. foreign policy is changing under the Trump administration,” Mr. Kim adds. “The entire world is doing this, right?”
In 2021, when Mr. Lee was a candidate from the center-left Democratic Party of Korea, he went so far as to refer to the United States as an “occupying force.” And, more recently, few here appeared to object when Mr. Lee said that Korean firms would be “very hesitant” to invest in the U.S. in light of the ICE raid at the Hyundai plant in Georgia.
Ahn Young-joon/AP
President Lee has still managed to survive political accusations labeling him the “anti-American president,” after repeatedly calling for South Korea to “move toward a strong, self-reliant defense.” He has flat-out ignored Mr. Trump’s demands for South Korea’s navy to assist in the Persian Gulf during the Iran war, and he has openly railed against the conduct of another major U.S. ally, Israel. At the United Nations, South Korea has voted in favor of recognizing Palestine as a full member state.
“Those things are a really big change,” says Eunbee Kim, an associate professor at the Korean National Defense University in Seoul. “We used to follow whatever the United States’ decision is – we would basically give up our vote. But recently, we decided to go against the U.S. or, rather, make our voice heard.”
Officially, South Korea and the U.S. continue to describe their relationship as ironclad, and experts say there is little doubt over Washington’s commitment to defend Seoul in the event of an armed conflict with North Korea. But politicians in Seoul are more willing to be forthright about the need to balance their own national interests against the current priorities of the U.S.
President Lee “seems to have decided that the Trump administration cannot be trusted” on “global or economic issues,” according to Cheehyung Harrison Kim, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Both countries are publicly butting heads over a massive data leak at Coupang, a prominent online retail firm that is ubiquitous in daily South Korean life. The Korean government has launched a probe into the company – owned by Korean American billionaire Bom Kim – after the breach affected 33 million customer accounts in South Korea.
The Coupang feud has become an online spectacle, with video clips of a company executive facing angry questioning from South Korean lawmakers going viral. In the U.S., dozens of Republican lawmakers have also accused South Korea of a “whole-of-government” assault on the American company, calling Seoul’s actions “targeted and discriminatory.”
Experts say South Korea has become more willing to act on its own in recent years, having climbed the ranks as a global economic powerhouse that has also invested in its soft-power reach around the world. Successive governments in Seoul have spent time expanding the country’s influence in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
“South Korea has undergone a lot of growth in the last 10 years, in terms of economic strength and culture. We are more confident now,” says Ms. Kim from Korea National Defense University. “We should not understand it as a move away from the United States, but people are aware of the risk of depending too much on one partner.”
Sitting together for a photo op at the recent Group of Seven banquet in France, Mr. Lee and Mr. Trump projected an image of unity. The two leaders spent 90 minutes together, talking about “peace on the Korean Peninsula and U.S.-Korea relations.”
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
If any major disagreements came up during that meeting, they were not aired publicly. But Mr. Lee later disclosed that he told President Trump that “sanctions and pressure” against North Korea “are ineffective,” which will be seen in South Korea as careful pushback against U.S. policy.
“South Korea is not making much headway in North Korea engagement lately, and the best way out of this blockage is the U.S. getting on board,” says Mr. Kim of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “Lee knows this very well and is willing to maintain a friendship with Trump for the sake of engaging with [Pyongyang].”