Seoul isn't drifting away from Washington

A particular narrative has taken hold in Washington policy circles: that Korea’s current government and the ruling party represents an ideological departure from the U.S.-Korea alliance, one that is more sympathetic to Beijing than to its treaty ally across the Pacific. A recent Wall Street Journal article criticizing the Lee Jae Myung administration as acting “far-left.” At a recent congressional hearing in which Rep. Darrell Issa called out the Korean government for “oppressing” American companies operating in the country. These are examples of this worrisome trend.

Understanding what is actually happening in Seoul matters because misdiagnosis leads to bad policies — such as threatening to withdraw American troops from the Korean Peninsula or restricting tech cooperation — that undermine alliance credibility.

The ruling Democratic Party of Korea's history is complicated. It is true that many of its leading figures came of age in the student protest movements during the 1980s, which were critical of American military presence and its passivity in condemning the country’s dictators. Understanding political lineage is important, but it alone is not a reliable guide to legislative behavior four decades later, any more than an American politician’s college activism reliably predicts their foreign policy as executive decision-makers.

The convenient ideological framing of Korea's progressives misses the degree to which structural imperatives constrain and shape any choices by Seoul regardless of one’s party. Korea is a global trade powerhouse with no energy independence, but an export-dependent economy with its supply chains intertwined with both the United States and China. Security-wise, its nuclear-armed adversary lies just 30 miles from its capital, building up its nuclear arsenal with technical and economic assistance from its partners. These fixed strategic constants of Korea goes beyond one’s party affiliation and produce a certain degree of policy continuity across administrations.

For instance, the initiative to manage relations with China is not particularly a liberal agenda nor an attempt to leave America alone in its competition with China as accused. Former conservative President Lee Myung-bak made two state visits to China during his tenure and agreed to establish a “strategic partnership” between the two countries, and his successor Park Geun-hye attended the 70th anniversary commemoration of the end of World War II in Beijing, a rare occasion for a South Korean president. It was only in 2016 that the bilateral relationship derailed following tensions over the installment of a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antimissile battery missile system in the South as a response to the belligerence of North Korea. Even in 2024, when the relationship was reportedly at its lowest point under conservative hardliner Yoon Suk Yeol, the countries held a trilateral summit with Japan after four years of hiatus.

What these points exemplify is that conversing with Beijing to pursue stability in the region has been a strategic objective that cuts through both progressives and conservatives, despite the differences in the extent of the cooperation, and the current administration is not an outlier in Lee's efforts to manage the relationship.

Judged by outcomes rather than lineage, the current administration does not appear focused on moving away from its 73-year-old alliance. Since June 2025, Korea and the United States have held two summit meetings, and have reached agreements on major bilateral projects including a $350 billion Korean investment package to the U.S. in exchange for reduced tariffs. The U.S. also gave its approval for Seoul to develop its own nuclear-powered submarines, which Lee justified by stating that “current diesel submarines have limited capacity to track subs on both the North Korean and Chinese side.” South Korea was also among the first countries to join Pax Silica, an international effort led by Washington to create artificial intelligence and semiconductor supply chains free from disruptions.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, praised Korea’s defense spending increases and called it a “model ally.” At the Center for Strategic and International Studies event, Lee himself questioned the durability of the old “security with America, economy with China” framework, signaling a candid acknowledgement that the era of clean compartmentalization between the two relationships is closing. And five summits with Tokyo in a year have reinforced the trilateral cooperation central to American strategy in Northeast Asia.

Where difference exists, including Korea’s restrained posture in the Middle East, its more balanced approach to Beijing and occasional legislative tensions with American firms operating in Korea, it reflects structural realities rather than ideological hostility.

The recent data leak investigation into Coupang, a U.S.-listed e-commerce firm, is a notable example. The case has been read in some as targeted harassment of the company, but the fuller picture is more mundane. The data breach at issue affected roughly 60 percent of the Korean population, local telecommunications firms faced comparable legislative scrutiny for similarly serious disclosures, and the controversy was amplified by the company’s own combative public response. The episode reveals less about the administration’s attitude toward America than about Korea’s evolving and growing consumer demand for data protection.

Analogously, Korea’s energy exposure through the Strait of Hormuz, its economic interdependence with China and its legal and political pressures that have dissuaded Seoul from taking actions that Washington might have wanted are constraints any Korean government would navigate similarly. Treating these collectively as symptoms of anti-Americanism conflates cause and effect.

To clarify, this is not an argument for complacency. How Seoul manages the boundary between legitimate criminal accountability and politically motivated prosecution against foreign corporations matters for the alliance’s credibility. How certain controversial legislative reforms, including the recent Special Prosecutor Bill for Fabricated Indictment, develop can test the separation of power and democratic resilience of our society. And certainly, how Korea traverses the era defined by the sharpening competition between two superpowers can often be a hot potato between Seoul and Washington. All these warrant both the domestic and international attention.

However, what they do not warrant is the unsubstantiated assumptions that ideological predisposition is the master variable and that Seoul’s choices are primarily explained by where its leaders stood in the 1980s rather than where South Korea stands in 2026. When Washington’s reading of Seoul is filtered primarily through an ideological lens, it distorts both the diagnosis and the response, causing false alarms that deviates our attention from the pressure points that actually require attention.

History has shown that alliances are sustained not only by treaty commitments and joint military exercises, but by the quality of mutual understanding between partners. For the United States, Korea might be a complicated partner, but it is still also one of the most capable, institutionally resilient and strategically significant allies that America has in the Indo-Pacific.

Park Jin-wan is a nonresident fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna.