By David R. Sands
Two allies who frequently talk past each other will talk directly this week when South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun meets with President Bush for a White House working visit tomorrow.
The summit comes amid delicate talks over the command of South Korean troops in wartime and a larger debate on both sides about the purpose and future of an alliance forged in a Cold War conflict that ended more than a half century ago.
"I still believe the fundamentals of the strategic alliance are strong, but there is an awful lot of bad noise surrounding our relationship with South Korea," said Michael Green, point man for Asian affairs at the National Security Council in Mr. Bush's first term who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"It will take a good bit of management on our side to keep the relationship healthy," he said.
But the Roh government's policy of engaging North Korea contrasts with Washington's hardening line against Pyongyang over its nuclear programs. The North Korea issue -- and growing fears in Seoul that the U.S. wants to use South Korea to promote its own interests across the region -- have strained the alliance, said Adam Ward, executive director of the U.S. arm of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
"There's no common understanding now of what the alliance is for," Mr. Ward said. "Washington and Seoul have very different assessments of what the major threats are in the region."
The IISS global strategic survey, released last week, noted, "Where Americans see an increasingly dangerous and repressive evil regime [in North Korea], South Koreans see a pitiable renegade brother, estranged by an accident of history in which America was culpable."
Mr. Roh, a former labor organizer elected on a center-left platform in 2002, demonstrated the perception gap again last week, telling reporters on a European tour that Pyongyang's July 4 missile test -- condemned by the United States and Japan -- was more political theater than military threat.
"The missiles were too shabby to go to the U.S. and too big to go to South Korea," he said, according to a statement released by his office. "I believe the missiles were not for actual military attack but were launched for political purposes."
Mr. Roh's government has steadily increased aid to the North and has complained about U.S. criticisms of the North's human rights record.
Mr. Roh in January warned of potential bilateral friction with the United States over the North.
"The South Korean government does not agree with some forces in the United States that raise issues about North Korea's regime, put pressure on it and apparently desire to see its collapse," he said.
U.S. officials, in turn, have expressed frustration privately about the South's rapprochement with the North, which has continued even as the North boycotts multilateral talks organized by China about its nuclear missile programs.
Thomas Hubbard, ambassador to South Korea from 2001 to 2004, said he expected a "productive meeting" between Mr. Bush and Mr. Roh, but acknowledged, "We could do a better job managing the relationship."
"The central problem is that, just as Americans are coming to see North Korea as a greater threat, ... South Koreans, especially the younger generation, have come to see North Korea as less of a threat," he said.
Mr. Green said that despite often-noisy anti-American sentiment in the South, Seoul and Washington remain united on the need for the alliance to deter North Korea, to preserve the South's autonomy and to work for stability in northeastern Asia.
South Korea under Mr. Roh, he noted, has dispatched troops to Iraq, begun a politically sensitive reorganization of U.S. military bases and started negotiations -- ahead of Japan and China -- on a major free-trade agreement with the United States. Popular resentment of the United States has even fallen in recent polls, he said.
"The problem is that the Roh government is so invested in the policy of engaging with the North -- even when it plainly hasn't produced results -- that it can create a lot of sparks and disharmony," Mr. Green said.
But Mr. Ward said the South Korean mission in Iraq only underscored the growing strategic disconnect in the two capitals.
"The Americans see the South Korean deployment as the kind of role they think Seoul can play to help U.S. interests," he said. "The South Koreans see the mission as the price they have to pay to keep the U.S. side tied to the military alliance at home."
Many in South Korea, he added, are wary that the United States hopes to enlist Seoul in a long-term campaign to contain the growing economic and military clout of China. China recently surpassed the United States as Seoul's largest trading partner.
Although Mr. Bush and Mr. Roh lack the personal chemistry that Mr. Bush has had with Japanese leader Junichiro Koizumi, Mr. Green said the two leaders are "straight talkers" and have generally worked well together in past meetings.
South Korean officials said last week that the two leaders may discuss but are unlikely to resolve one of the more ticklish bilateral issues -- a push by Seoul to reclaim operational control in wartime of its own forces. Under agreements dating back to the Korean War, U.S. generals have been charged with the command of both U.S. and South Korean forces should hostilities break out.
Mr. Roh has strongly supported the command transfer as a way to bolster the South's sovereignty and control of its national defense. About 29,500 U.S. troops are stationed in the South.
South Korean and U.S. military officials are still negotiating a date for the transfer. Gen. B.B. Bell, the top U.S. military commander in South Korea, told reporters last week that he supported the transfer and said the U.S. commitment to the South's security would not be diminished by the shift.
But South Korean conservatives and former military and diplomatic officials have criticized the idea, saying it would send the wrong signal to Pyongyang and weaken the alliance.
•Hsin-Hsien Sheena Wong contributed to this report.
