Since taking office a year ago, President Lee Myung-bak has repeatedly emphasized that he is poised to revitalize Seoul's once-soured relationships with Washington.
When Lee’s predecessor, former President Roh Moo-hyun, was in office, Seoul and Washington often found themselves at odds on many key diplomatic issues, most prominently the transfer of wartime operational control from the U.S. forces in South Korea solely to South Korean military control and how to handle North Korea and its nuclear ambitions.
Lee vigorously expressed his intention to mend the diplomatic ties that many Seoul conservatives claimed had come undone during Roh’s presidency.
And Lee has stuck to his word.
He had two presidential summits with former U.S. President George W. Bush, last April and August, when the two leaders pledged to upgrade the South Korea-U.S. alliance to a new level and forge closer relations over their biggest diplomatic concern - North Korea.
After the two summits, the two leaders indicated that they would expand their alliance, previously confined to military cooperation on the Korean Peninsula at large, to a wider array of issues.
These include U.S.-led efforts to spread democracy, peacekeeping efforts and free-market ideology around the globe.
Other major accomplishments include the unprecedented large-scale student exchange program between the two countries called WEST (Work, English Study, Travel), in which more than 5,000 South Korean students will be allowed to attend English language courses and then intern at U.S. institutions and companies, and then vice versa for American students as well.
As a result, the first batch of 300 South Korean students is set to arrive in the U.S. on March 11 as part of an 18-month-long program.
The two leaders also jointly criticized North Korea's dire human rights record.
After the August summit, Bush and Lee said there should be "meaningful progress" in the North’s human rights situation in the course of normalizing diplomatic relations between both Pyongyang and Washington.
It was the first time high-level U.S. and Korean officials jointly addressed in public concerns on human rights in the North.
Unlike the Bush administration, which rarely shied away from denouncing the North’s poor human rights credentials, former President Roh refrained from making such denunciations because of the concern that doing so would strain inter-Korean relations.
The two leaders also urged Pyongyang to take more steps to achieve a "complete, verifiable and irreversible" denuclearization as agreed in the six-party talks.
But now, with the Bush administration long gone and a new government taking over the White House, the two countries face a daunting task to streamline each other’s diplomatic priorities.
A major step was taken last week when the new U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Seoul as part of her first overseas tour in her new position.
Most commentators agree that her trip won over government officials here, as well as the general public.
During her high-profile visit, she not only met South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan and Prime Minister Han Seung-soo but also lunched with President Lee, a highly unusual move as the president rarely has such one-on-one meetings with an overseas minister-level official.
During her one-day visit, Clinton reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to work closely with Seoul on the nuclear issue in North Korea.
"There is no issue on which we are more united than North Korea," Clinton said in a press conference in Seoul on Feb. 20.
"We maintain our joint resolve to work together... North Korea is not going to get a different relationship with the U.S. while insulting and refusing dialogue with South Korea."
She also lauded Seoul’s joint efforts with Tokyo to provide more aid, albeit nonmilitary support, to help reconstruct Afghanistan, where Washington plans to dispatch more military forces to root out the insurgency.
The two top diplomats also indicated that Presidents Lee and Obama are expected to meet for their first summit in London in April this year at the G-20 financial summit on the global economic crisis.
As Seoul has ratcheted up efforts to improve the relations with its top ally over the past decade, the South Korean public’s support for the Korea-U.S. alliance has also apparently improved.
According to a poll of 1,000 Koreans conducted by the JoongAng Ilbo and the East Asia Institute earlier this month, 57.4 percent of respondents expressed a positive view of the U.S., a sharp increase from the same poll in 2007 when the number hovered below 40 percent.
Polling experts suggest the result reflected South Koreans' expectations for the new Obama administration, which, unlike the Bush administration, has highlighted the importance of greater levels of engagement with the international community.