Seongho Sheen is an assistant professor at Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University. He is also a member of Policy Advisory Board of Ministry of Defense, Republic of Korea.

The alliance between the Republic of Korea and the United States today faces a complex security environment, in which the threats it confronts are more diverse, more complicated, and require a more delicately balanced approach than ever before. In particular, expectations—even demands—are growing for South Korea to contribute to world peace and stability as a global partner for the United States in pursuing their mutual security interests (Campbell et al. 2009). Do the ROK and the United States share enough strategic interests to sustain such an alliance in the twenty-first century? And should South Korea assume an increasing role in maintaining regional and global peace? During the Cold War, the two countries' alliance was a military one, focused on the clear and direct threat from North Korea. Now, in the twenty-first century, the two security partners must transform their hard alliance into a "smart" alliance to meet more diverse security challenges together. A different set of hard and soft approaches are required, and a smart alliance will call for a more flexible combination of roles played by each partner, depending on the circumstances.

"Strategic Alliance" to Go Global

The election of President Lee Myung-bak in 2007 began a major shift away from what Lee dubbed "ten years of leftist governments" under Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. In the area of foreign policy, Lee promised to give priority to reviving the country’s earlier close partnership with Washington while taking a tougher approach in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program. To accomplish these two goals, he proposed forging a "Strategic Alliance" with the United States that would upgrade the nature and objectives of the alliance. A strategic alliance would first seek to repair the damage that had done under the previous Roh Moo-hyun administration. During the subsequent presidential campaign, Lee criticized Roh and his government for poor, if not antagonistic, management of bilateral relations with the United States. After Lee was elected, he visited Washington, D.C., two months after his inauguration, and called for "friendship based on a helping hand when needed most." Lee subsequently became the first Korean president to be invited to Camp David for a friendly summit meeting. President Lee and President George W. Bush agreed to reopen the Korean market to American beef exports, which had been banned since 2003 after the Mad Cow Disease outbreak. President Bush thanked Lee for lifting the beef sanctions and promised to upgrade South Korea’s authorization to buy high-tech U.S. weapon systems up to the same level as NATO members. By the end of 2008, South Korea had been included in the U.S. Visa Waiver Program (VWP), and other significant breakthroughs in the two nations’ bilateral relations had taken place as well.

What was remarkable, however, was President Lee's second effort, which involved expanding the ROK-U.S. alliance beyond the Korean Peninsula. He argued that the alliance should be upgraded to meet the challenges of the new twenty-first-century security environment. The original alliance had been based on opposing the North Korean military threat, but the basis of this new strategic alliance should be common values, mutual trust, and building peace. According to Lee, the two countries shared a liberal democracy, a market economy, and common values following South Korea’s success in economic development and transition to democracy. These factors would make it possible for the two countries to forge a lasting alliance even if North Korea’s military threat should disappear in the future. South Korea and the United States should, in Lee’s view, build an alliance of trust with expanding common interests in military, political economic, societal, and cultural matters. And drawing on shared values and trust, the ROK-U.S. military alliance should contribute to regional peace in Northeast Asia beyond the Korean Peninsula. Lee also envisioned that the alliance should contribute to international peace making in the fight against terrorism, poverty, disease, and environmental degradation. Lee’s argument meant a shift in the nature and mission of the alliance from a peninsular to a regional and global focus. As such Lee’s vision represented a bold departure from South Korea’s security strategy during the Cold War. Its new mission was to promote international peace and stability on the basis of universal values such as democracy and a free market. South Korea’s active participation in building international peace promised to be a more ambitious undertaking than the Northeast Asian balancer role that had been suggested by the Roh administration. Lee’s rhetoric paid off when he met with the newly selected U.S. president, Barack Obama, during the G20 London summit in April 2009, where Obama praised South Korea as one of America’s "closest friends and greatest allies."

Lee, an Important but Vulnerable Ally

One of the pressing issues for South Korea in its new role has been to determine the degree of support it will offer in the U.S. global war on terrorism. Especially as the situation in Afghanistan has increasingly deteriorated with the resurgence of the Taliban, the Obama administration has called for help from its major allies. The main agenda item for the meeting marking the sixtieth anniversary of NATO’s foundation held in Germany last April was Afghanistan, and NATO allies pledged to send 5,000 new troops in addition to the 37,000 troops already on combat missions there. South Korea was no exception. After the first meeting between President Obama and President Lee during the G20 London summit in April, Richard Holbrooke, Special Envoy to Afghanistan, paid a visit to Seoul. Even though Washington was careful not to make a specific request for military support in Afghanistan, Holbrooke made it clear that the U.S. government would welcome a contribution from South Korea to the war effort in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding President Lee's pledge to develop South Korea’s growing role in the alliance with the United States, it is not clear whether South Korea is ready to take on an active military role in places like Afghanistan. In fact, the Roh administration had sent 3,600 troops to Iraq and a number of medical units to Afghanistan. But by the end of 2008, South Korea had completed the withdrawal of its reconstruction mission in Iraq, and it had brought home its medical units from Afghanistan the year before. When the Bush administration asked for another troop deployment to Afghanistan, only 32 percent of the Korean public supported the idea, while 49 percent said they were against it. When asked about the management of the alliance with the new Obama administration and possible repeat of U.S. requests for military assistance in Afghanistan, a South Korean government official denied any plan to send troops there. With less than 40 percent support from the public for the idea, the Lee government has limited political capital to make a difficult decision that would go against the popular will, and Washington will need to be careful not to press Seoul on the issue. Lee’s conservative background and the country’s currently weak domestic economy make him vulnerable to leftist attacks on what they see as his pro-U.S. policy at the expense of Korea’s national interests. Lee already paid a big political price when he agreed to the resumption of U.S. beef imports a year ago. Radical activists organized mass rallies in downtown Seoul and criticized the government for sacrificing Korean public health by importing "unsafe" American beef. Angry mass protests continued for weeks and virtually paralyzed the government. A deployment of South Korean troops to Afghanistan could provide a useful excuse for anti-American radicals to organize more mass demonstrations, which would seriously damage Lee’s position as the country’s leader and his efforts to rebuild a long-term ROK-U.S. strategic partnership.

South Korea’s democracy is still relatively young and greatly polarized. The alliance with the United States became something of a victim of its own success in promoting South Korean democracy as it faced increasing questions and criticisms within South Korea during the 1990s. In the late 1980s, radical student activists in South Korea had accused the allied U.S. forces of being a defender of the then authoritarian government, which suppressed democratization. When in the 1990s these student group members took up leadership roles in a more democratized Korean government and society, the members of the so-called 386 generation criticized the ROK-U.S. alliance as an obstacle to reconciliation with the North (Hahm 2005). This diverging approach taken by the Roh government, if not anti-American, certainly caused problems in managing the alliance. It was no secret that Washington had difficulties in coordinating policy with Seoul toward Pyongyang’s nuclear brinkmanship during the second North Korean nuclear crisis. One interlocutor found it surprising when he heard officials from the Roh administration say that they would prefer a nuclear North Korea over regime collapse (Cha 2004, 116). As such, many South Koreans viewed President Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech as even more threatening than North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship. Watching growing criticism and widespread anti-American sentiment in South Korea, Americans too became more skeptical about the future of the alliance. For some, the alliance had served its original mission and was destined to dissolve over time (Bandow 2005). Today the Lee government must maintain a delicate balance between its desire to promote the alliance and its need to avoid giving anti-Lee activists any opportunity to use the U.S. relationship as an excuse for furthering an anti-American movement. It is in Washington’s interest not to put its important partner in a difficult position.

A Smart Alliance to Meet Global Challenges

Deploying troops to Afghanistan is not the only way that South Korea’s global partnership with the United States can be demonstrated. The two allies share enough common security threats and strategic interests to extend their efforts beyond the Korean Peninsula in a variety of useful ways. The mechanism, strategy, and role of the two nations’ work should be a flexible combination of both hard and soft approaches, depending on the context...(Continued)