Evans J.R. Revere, a Northeast Asia specialist with the State Department and the current Cyrus Vance Fellow in Diplomatic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, posed a question that has been popping up in policy circles in Seoul and Washington lately. After all the United States and South Korea have accomplished together, why don’t both sides feel better about their relationship?

Then he suggested several possible answers. Generational changes in South Korea have seen the old political establishment give way to new actors and new thinking. The sense of U.S.-Korea solidarity, forged during the Korean War, has faded and the days when Seoul reflexively looked to Washington for leadership are gone. In the defense sphere, while U.S. forces continue to weigh heavily on the strategic scales, South Korea is assuming more and more responsibility for its own security. Additionally, Korea’s rise from “economic basket case” to economic powerhouse has imbued the body politic with new confidence. From this more self-assured outlook, South Koreans regard North Korea as an object of pity, not of danger. The U.S. assessment of North Korea has stayed static. That difference has undermined the shared threat perception that has been the foundation of the alliance for five decades.

Paradoxically, as their self-confidence has risen, South Koreans have grown more ambivalent about their relationship with the U.S. Many feel that there has never been a better time to lay the groundwork for Korean reunification, making them especially sensitive to any U.S. words or deeds that seem unfriendly to the process.

The U.S. has already taken some positive steps to assuage South Korean sensibilities, such as committing to the withdrawal of the headquarters of USFK from central Seoul, where it has become a lightening rod for critics of the U.S. presence in South Korea. And presidents Bush and Roh have made progress in drawing the two nations closer, vowing at the November 2005 APEC summit in Pusan to begin a new strategic dialog.

For the alliance to continue to thrive, however, Revere said that the U.S. has to affirm its support for Korean unification in ever clearer terms, and both parties need to find a justification for their partnership that’s not based on what they have done together in the past, but on what they can do together in the future.