Korea’s public diplomacy vis-à-vis the US is the centerpiece of the country’s overall public diplomacy policy, with an emphasis on influencing the policy elites in Washington, DC, primarily through think tank-centric activities. This chapter explores Korea’s public diplomacy strategy vis-à-vis the US with an emphasis on the “policy public diplomacy” that was introduced in 2016 – coinciding mostly with the presidencies of Moon Jae-in in Seoul and Donald Trump in Washington, DC. At the policy elite level, the main objective of Korean public diplomacy in the US has been to generate support for Korea’s foreign policies, including in inter-Korean relations; and at the grassroots level, creating more favorability among the general American public. The former is more based on agenda-setting and framing Korean Peninsula-related issues and Korea’s increasing role in global governance. The latter is more diffuse and attempts to increase the country’s visibility and improve its brand value. In this time period, Korean public diplomacy has become partisan for the first time due to dividing nature of emphasis on inter-Korean relations in policy public diplomacy in the US.

The US–Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea) alliance underwent severe strains during the Trump era. However, we can only understand such strains by situating them in a larger post-Cold War context, wherein successive US and ROK administrations have sought to transform and upgrade the alliance. The Trump administration’s unorthodox policy approach accelerated alliance tensions and thus revealed the psychological and institutional limits and contradictions inherent to this larger transformation, even if Trump did not create the underlying dynamics driving them. This chapter explores these tensions through a survey of several issue areas under Trump in relation to which the allies held contrasting if not clashing positions, including perceptions of the North Korean threat and engagement with Pyongyang; the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) of the ROK military from the US back to South Korea; alliance cost-sharing; and the alliance’s place within the wider region. While alliance relations have returned to a degree of normalcy under President Biden, these same issues that caused alliance discord under Trump are no less salient today.