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 intervened, the peninsula might have been unified under Seoul’s governance.

The damage to Chinese favorability was further compounded in 2017, when Beijing responded to Seoul’s deployment of the U.S.-built THAAD system by imposing wide-ranging economic sanctions. China restricted South Korean tourism, pressured South Korean businesses operating in China and effectively blacklisted the Korean Wave entertainment industry from Chinese platforms. The South Korean public viewed this retaliation as the conduct of a bully leveraging economic dependence as a geopolitical weapon. 

Beyond these specific grievances lies a more fundamental incompatibility. China is North Korea’s most important patron. It is Pyongyang’s primary economic lifeline and (along with Russia) its diplomatic shield at the U.N. Security Council. For South Koreans living under the daily reality of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, this alignment places China in the structural position of strategic adversary. 

South Korea and China are geographically neighbors and economic partners in ways that cannot be wished away. However, what is apparent is that they are not and cannot be allies. Their values, political systems and visions of the regional order are all incompatible. For South Korea, China is closer to a managed rival than to a potential partner. 

South Korea’s Red Line  

In South Korea’s strategic calculus, there is a discernible threshold beyond which the structural affinity for the U.S. could begin to fracture. 

The current redeployment of THAAD components and Patriot batteries to the Middle East has prompted concern in Seoul, but officials have sought to reassure the public that deterrence against North Korea remains intact. That reassurance holds for now, but the logic that underlies South Korean anxiety points toward a more consequential scenario: the withdrawal of the approximately 28,500 U.S. troops currently stationed on the peninsula under U.S. Forces Korea.

If that were to happen, the structural confidence that underpins South Korean support for the alliance would face its severest test. It would raise, in concrete and inescapable form, the question of whether the United States remains a reliable guarantor of South Korean security. And in a country that lives under the shadow of a nuclear-armed adversary with active intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities, that question is not abstract.

There is also a nuclear dimension to this calculus that is rarely discussed with full candor in allied capitals. South Korean support for developing an indigenous nuclear weapons capability reached 76.2 percent in the Asan Institute’s 2025 survey – an all-time high since polling began on the question in 2010. Support for redeploying American tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula stood at 66.3 percent. Meanwhile, South Korean confidence that the U.S. would actually use nuclear weapons to defend South Korea in an emergency fell to 48.9 percent, down from 53 percent in 2024.

That declining confidence reflects a strategic anxiety that American policymakers have found uncomfortable to acknowledge openly. The doctrine of extended deterrence rests on a simple but profoundly difficult question: Would an American president, confronted with a North Korean nuclear attack on South Korea, order a nuclear response that could invite North Korean missiles to strike California, New York, or Guam? 

North Korea has demonstrated, through years of missile tests, a credible second-strike capability targeting the continental United States and American territories in the Pacific. In that scenario, extended deterrence requires an American president to accept existential risk to American cities in order to honor a security commitment to a treaty ally. South Korean strategic analysts and a growing share of the public are no longer certain that any American president would make that choice – which they believe is a quite rational decision.

The war generation experienced American commitment as a physical and immediate reality: American soldiers dying on Korean soil, American aid sustaining Korean survival. Their children, who watched the country’s extraordinary economic ascent, understood American partnership as the structural condition of South Korean prosperity. However, the generation that has come of age in the 21st century – born into a country that already ranked among the world’s most advanced economies – relates to the alliance through a different register.

Of course, there was a history of older generations’ anti-U.S. sentiment. Some of those who experienced the Korean War and the division of the two Koreas blamed the U.S. as the actor who split a unified Korea after World War II. For those who are in their 50s and 60s, the U.S. was once a hypocrite that de facto recognized the illegitimate presidency of Chun Doo-hwan, who committed a coup to become the leader of the country. However, for those who are in their 30s and below, there has been no incident that could create such strong anti-U.S. sentiment, leading them to be the most powerful forces giving unconditional support to the U.S., given the circumstances. 

Also, for the younger generations in South Korea, the division of the peninsula is not a wound to be healed but a background condition of modern life. North Korea is not a fraternal people temporarily separated by geopolitical circumstance. It is a hostile and alien regime whose political system and worldview are wholly irreconcilable with South Korea’s own. The aspiration for unification has given way, among many younger South Koreans, to something closer to indefinite coexistence at best and managed deterrence at worst. Younger South Koreans are among the most supportive of an indigenous nuclear deterrent, precisely because they view North Korea not as a partner in a shared national destiny but as a permanent military threat.

And yet, even as the texture of South Korean support for the U.S. has evolved across generations, the directional commitment has not changed. The structural preference for the South Korea-U.S. alliance remains as strong as it has ever been measured. However, it is not unconditional. South Korean support for the alliance has survived economic coercion, diplomatic friction, immigration raids and the partial withdrawal of missile defenses to a distant theater. It will not survive the withdrawal of American military presence from the peninsula or the unambiguous abandonment of the extended deterrence commitment.

In the end, many observers predict that China will ultimately be the top partner of South Korea in various fields, including security and economy. However, China’s unfavorability will not improve without a fundamental reorientation of Beijing’s relationship with Pyongyang – a development that seems all but impossible at the moment. 

For now, the most important fact about South Korean public opinion is also the simplest one. Even as a majority of South Koreans expected the bilateral relationship to deteriorate under Trump’s second administration, a record number chose the U.S. as their preferred future partner over every available alternative. They did so not because they are unaware of the tensions and provocations that have characterized the relationship in recent years. They did so because the alternative looks considerably more dangerous than a difficult friendship with an ally that, whatever its current behavior, is still the reason South Korea exists as it does today.

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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 intervened, the peninsula might have been unified under Seoul’s governance.

The damage to Chinese favorability was further compounded in 2017, when Beijing responded to Seoul’s deployment of the U.S.-built THAAD system by imposing wide-ranging economic sanctions. China restricted South Korean tourism, pressured South Korean businesses operating in China and effectively blacklisted the Korean Wave entertainment industry from Chinese platforms. The South Korean public viewed this retaliation as the conduct of a bully leveraging economic dependence as a geopolitical weapon. 

Beyond these specific grievances lies a more fundamental incompatibility. China is North Korea’s most important patron. It is Pyongyang’s primary economic lifeline and (along with Russia) its diplomatic shield at the U.N. Security Council. For South Koreans living under the daily reality of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, this alignment places China in the structural position of strategic adversary. 

South Korea and China are geographically neighbors and economic partners in ways that cannot be wished away. However, what is apparent is that they are not and cannot be allies. Their values, political systems and visions of the regional order are all incompatible. For South Korea, China is closer to a managed rival than to a potential partner. 

South Korea’s Red Line  

In South Korea’s strategic calculus, there is a discernible threshold beyond which the structural affinity for the U.S. could begin to fracture. 

The current redeployment of THAAD components and Patriot batteries to the Middle East has prompted concern in Seoul, but officials have sought to reassure the public that deterrence against North Korea remains intact. That reassurance holds for now, but the logic that underlies South Korean anxiety points toward a more consequential scenario: the withdrawal of the approximately 28,500 U.S. troops currently stationed on the peninsula under U.S. Forces Korea.

If that were to happen, the structural confidence that underpins South Korean support for the alliance would face its severest test. It would raise, in concrete and inescapable form, the question of whether the United States remains a reliable guarantor of South Korean security. And in a country that lives under the shadow of a nuclear-armed adversary with active intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities, that question is not abstract.

There is also a nuclear dimension to this calculus that is rarely discussed with full candor in allied capitals. South Korean support for developing an indigenous nuclear weapons capability reached 76.2 percent in the Asan Institute’s 2025 survey – an all-time high since polling began on the question in 2010. Support for redeploying American tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula stood at 66.3 percent. Meanwhile, South Korean confidence that the U.S. would actually use nuclear weapons to defend South Korea in an emergency fell to 48.9 percent, down from 53 percent in 2024.

That declining confidence reflects a strategic anxiety that American policymakers have found uncomfortable to acknowledge openly. The doctrine of extended deterrence rests on a simple but profoundly difficult question: Would an American president, confronted with a North Korean nuclear attack on South Korea, order a nuclear response that could invite North Korean missiles to strike California, New York, or Guam? 

North Korea has demonstrated, through years of missile tests, a credible second-strike capability targeting the continental United States and American territories in the Pacific. In that scenario, extended deterrence requires an American president to accept existential risk to American cities in order to honor a security commitment to a treaty ally. South Korean strategic analysts and a growing share of the public are no longer certain that any American president would make that choice – which they believe is a quite rational decision.

The war generation experienced American commitment as a physical and immediate reality: American soldiers dying on Korean soil, American aid sustaining Korean survival. Their children, who watched the country’s extraordinary economic ascent, understood American partnership as the structural condition of South Korean prosperity. However, the generation that has come of age in the 21st century – born into a country that already ranked among the world’s most advanced economies – relates to the alliance through a different register.

Of course, there was a history of older generations’ anti-U.S. sentiment. Some of those who experienced the Korean War and the division of the two Koreas blamed the U.S. as the actor who split a unified Korea after World War II. For those who are in their 50s and 60s, the U.S. was once a hypocrite that de facto recognized the illegitimate presidency of Chun Doo-hwan, who committed a coup to become the leader of the country. However, for those who are in their 30s and below, there has been no incident that could create such strong anti-U.S. sentiment, leading them to be the most powerful forces giving unconditional support to the U.S., given the circumstances. 

Also, for the younger generations in South Korea, the division of the peninsula is not a wound to be healed but a background condition of modern life. North Korea is not a fraternal people temporarily separated by geopolitical circumstance. It is a hostile and alien regime whose political system and worldview are wholly irreconcilable with South Korea’s own. The aspiration for unification has given way, among many younger South Koreans, to something closer to indefinite coexistence at best and managed deterrence at worst. Younger South Koreans are among the most supportive of an indigenous nuclear deterrent, precisely because they view North Korea not as a partner in a shared national destiny but as a permanent military threat.

And yet, even as the texture of South Korean support for the U.S. has evolved across generations, the directional commitment has not changed. The structural preference for the South Korea-U.S. alliance remains as strong as it has ever been measured. However, it is not unconditional. South Korean support for the alliance has survived economic coercion, diplomatic friction, immigration raids and the partial withdrawal of missile defenses to a distant theater. It will not survive the withdrawal of American military presence from the peninsula or the unambiguous abandonment of the extended deterrence commitment.

In the end, many observers predict that China will ultimately be the top partner of South Korea in various fields, including security and economy. However, China’s unfavorability will not improve without a fundamental reorientation of Beijing’s relationship with Pyongyang – a development that seems all but impossible at the moment. 

For now, the most important fact about South Korean public opinion is also the simplest one. Even as a majority of South Koreans expected the bilateral relationship to deteriorate under Trump’s second administration, a record number chose the U.S. as their preferred future partner over every available alternative. They did so not because they are unaware of the tensions and provocations that have characterized the relationship in recent years. They did so because the alternative looks considerably more dangerous than a difficult friendship with an ally that, whatever its current behavior, is still the reason South Korea exists as it does today.

Mitch Shin is a chief correspondent for The Diplomat, covering the Korean Peninsula. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies and associate fellow for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

anti-China sentiments in South Korea

China-South Korea relations

South Korea public opinion

Trump tariffs South Korea

U.S.-South Korea alliance

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