The US-Korea alliance at 70

By Troy Stangarone

For more than seven decades the U.S.-Korea alliance has provided peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. It is one of the most successful alliances of the post-World War II period and has been a focal point for what has become a robust and wide-ranging partnership. It is a moment well worth celebrating and one that the United States and Korea will mark with a state visit in Washington, D.C. later this month. But it is also a moment for pondering the future of the relationship.

With this year marking the 70th anniversary of the alliance, there are expectations for a new joint vision statement, but the United States and Korea should avoid the temptation to announce a vision for the next 70 years.

When the alliance began seven decades ago, the world was much different than it is today. Technologies that we take for granted did not exist. Sputnik, the first satellite, was not launched until 1957. The U.S. military didn't begin using GPS until the late 1960s and commercial usage did not begin until the 1980s. The first cell phones wouldn't come out until the 1970s. While not commercialized yet, the 1980s would bring the internet. The 1990s would bring text messaging, the first internet browser, and e-commerce firms such as Amazon. The 2000s would see the release of Apple's iPhone, the beginning of social media, and Netflix's transition to streaming. There have also been significant advances in medicine, DNA analysis, clean energy, and countless other fields that have taken place since the alliance came into being in 1953.

What the world will look like seven decades hence is likely unknowable, especially given the potential for change over even the next decade and how the decisions of the next few years will shape the future.

The United Nations recently released a report calling the next decade critical for reducing global emissions sufficiently to avoid catastrophic climate change. If nations are unable to reduce emissions more rapidly than currently projected, the world will reach a tipping point over the next decade that will push global average temperatures up by over 1.5 degrees Celsius and make parts of the world uninhabitable.

Over the past year, U.S.-Korea cooperation on climate change has focused on disputes over the Inflation Reduction Act, but progress on climate issues will be critical for both countries over the next decade. As the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States needs to rapidly move to reduce emissions but it also has a national security interest in ensuring that it and U.S. allies are not dependent on potential adversaries for energy.

Korea is set to play an important role in the U.S. energy transition. Estimates suggest that Korean battery firms will capture 69 percent of the U.S. EV battery market by 2025, which is expected to grow to 44 percent of the total global market for EV batteries. Hanwha Q Cells is on pace to account for 30 percent of all solar panels built in the United States and just received the largest community solar panel order in U.S. history.

Whether Korea is able to become a global player in the future of energy technology and over time increase its own energy security as it transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy and energy storage will be determined in the next decade. From an alliance perspective, cooperation on deploying new energy technologies in other countries will drive down U.S. and Korean costs, create new markets, and speed up emissions reductions more broadly.

The changes brought by artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to be as significant as climate change. The release of ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 has demonstrated the potential of large language models and image generators to conduct research, draft text and create images that are nearly indistinguishable from what humans would create. Other forms of AI have the ability to sift data that would take humans years and speed the discovery of new drugs or improve the efficiency of EV batteries. However, these technologies will also reshape how wars are fought and have the potential to spread disinformation and be used as tools of political subversion by foreign powers.

How Korea and the United States approach these issues and work with other countries to put in place safeguards will shape whether AI becomes a tool for human prosperity or one with significant dangers.

When the alliance was initially formed no one could have imagined how the internet or the combination of smartphones and social media would change society. Climate change and AI have the potential to reshape the world in even more significant ways over the next decade. It's important for the alliance to acknowledge the successes and sacrifices of the last 70 years, but it is also important that the United States and Korea focus on how they will navigate the changes that could come from climate change, AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, geostrategic competition and other changes over the next decade.

Troy Stangarone (ts@keia.org) is the senior director and fellow at the Korea Economic Institute. The views expressed here are the author's alone.