The Koreas | Society | East Asia

South Koreans Keep the Faith in America Even as Washington Tests It

South Koreans continue to choose the United States over any rival power by historically wide margins. But don’t call it naivety.

U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a bilateral meeting with President Lee Jae-myung of South Korea in the Oval Office, Aug. 25, 2025.

On September 4, 2025, hundreds of federal agents descended on a sprawling construction site in Georgia. Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved through the Hyundai Metaplant America complex. 475 workers were handcuffed and transported to a federal detention facility and more than 300 of them were South Korean nationals.

The workers had been employed through layers of subcontractors at a complex that state officials in Georgia had touted as the largest economic development deal in the state’s history. Many held B-1 business visitor visas or had entered under visa waiver programs for short-term technical assignments. The South Korean government negotiated the workers’ release and a chartered Korean Air jet flew more than 300 South Koreans home from Atlanta about a week after the raid. 

That episode did not unfold in isolation. It was just one example of U.S. President Donald Trump’s reckless moves to weaken the so-called “ironclad” alliance between South Korea and the United States.

In April 2025, the Trump administration imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly every country in the world, from enemies to staunch allies. That includes a tariff of 25 percent on South Korean goods. A bilateral trade agreement announced in July brought the rate down to 15 percent in exchange for a South Korean pledge to invest $350 billion in U.S. industries. Then, in January 2026, Trump announced via Truth Social that he was raising tariffs back to 25 percent because the South Korean legislature had not yet ratified the deal. (This bill was passed by the National Assembly on March 12, 2026.) 

Although the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently struck down the tariffs on constitutional grounds, the Trump administration quickly launched Section 301 investigations into 16 trading partners, including South Korea – which means his tariff war will not end.

This is not the first time a Trump administration has pressed Seoul. During his first term, Trump demanded that South Korea pay nearly five times its existing contribution for the cost of stationing U.S. Forces Korea – raising his demand to approximately $5 billion annually from roughly $920 million. As then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in refused to accept the deal, Seoul wanted the new U.S. administration to handle it. Weeks after former U.S. President Joe Biden took office, a final agreement was reached in March 2021, at a 13.9 percent increase over the prior rate.

Now, in early 2026, a more visceral pressure point has emerged. In response to escalating military conflict with Iran – triggered by U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian facilities beginning February 28 – the Pentagon has begun transferring parts of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system stationed in South Korea to the Middle East, along with Patriot missile defense batteries. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung publicly opposed the move but, at a Cabinet meeting, acknowledged the reality that his administration cannot fully enforce its position. This case was a candid admission of the alliance’s structural asymmetry: the United States makes its own operational decisions about American-owned weapons, even when those weapons serve as a critical layer of a partner nation’s defense.

Reasons Behind South Koreans’ Support for the US

And yet, by every available metric of public opinion, South Koreans continue to trust and support the United States to a degree that would seem paradoxical viewed from the outside.

The most comprehensive recent data comes from the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, whose annual survey conducted in March 2025 among a representative sample of 1,000 adults found that the U.S. remained by a wide margin South Koreans’ most favorably viewed nation, scoring 5.92 out of 10. That figure had declined from 6.42 in 2024, but it still far exceeded the ratings for every other neighboring country. 

Despite the historical disputes, Japan scored 4.52, itself a record high. North Korea’s score languished near the bottom alongside its leader Kim Jong Un’s personal rating of 1.22. Along with this, China scored 3.13. 

More striking still: even as 52.7 percent of South Korean respondents expected the bilateral relationship to worsen under Trump’s second term, a record 85.8 percent said South Korea should choose the U.S. over China as its preferred future partner. That figure was up 10.7 percentage points from 2024. It was higher than at any point during the first Trump administration. A majority of South Koreans expected a deterioration in relations with the United States and chose alignment anyway.

To understand why requires moving beyond the transactional logic of trade balances and tariff rates, and into the deeper architecture of South Korean historical consciousness.

The Legacy of the Korean War 

The 1950-53 Korean War ended not with a peace treaty but with an armistice signed in July 1953, leaving the peninsula divided roughly along the 38th parallel. What is less often noted outside Korea is how close the war came to a different outcome. 

When North Korean forces crossed the border on June 25, 1950, the South Korean military was overwhelmed almost immediately. Seoul fell in three days. Without the intervention of U.S.-led United Nations forces, the peninsula would almost certainly have been unified under Kim Il Sung’s government of North Korea. 

These are not merely historical footnotes for South Koreans. They are constitutive facts built into the substrate of national identity: the democratic Republic of Korea, which has grown from one of the poorest countries on earth to one of the wealthiest in the span of roughly two generations, only exists because the United States intervened in 1950. That awareness functions as something closer to a structural debt than to simple gratitude. It shapes how successive generations have been taught to understand their own country’s existence.

This helps explain the relative imperviousness of South Korean public support for the alliance to individual acts of American pressure. When Trump demanded a fivefold increase in burden-sharing payments, South Koreans were clearly unhappy. When the ICE raid humiliated Korean workers on American soil, South Koreans were outraged. However, neither episode fundamentally altered the underlying orientation. 

The Asan Institute has tracked U.S. favorability in South Korea since 2013. In that entire period, through three American presidents and repeated episodes of diplomatic friction, the U.S. has never fallen below 5 on its 10-point scale. A structural affinity built over seven decades does not dissolve in response to a tariff announcement or an immigration raid. It absorbs the shock and then it endures.

The inverse of South Korea’s warmth toward the U.S. is the country’s deep and durable suspicion of China. Far from softening as China’s economic importance to South Korea has grown, that suspicion has remained stubbornly resistant to improvement.

China’s 3.13 favorability score in the 2025 Asan survey also has a historical explanation. In October 1950, it was Chinese forces that halted the U.N. advance and foreclosed Korean unification under a democratic government. As with American intervention on the South’s behalf, Chinese intervention to defend North Korea is remembered not as a distant historical episode but as a defining geopolitical fact: had China not........

© The Diplomat