WASHINGTON -- South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said Wednesday that while his country's five-decade alliance with the United States is changing, Seoul will continue to support the U.S.-led fight against terrorism.\nThe South Korea-U.S. "alliance will in part change according to the times," Roh said through an interpreter. "But the very fundamental basis of this alliance will not change."\nRoh noted he will meet with President George W. Bush on Thursday to discuss the state of the alliance and ways to settle a tense nuclear standoff with North Korea.\nBoth Roh and Bush want the North to return to stalled negotiations aimed at persuading Pyongyang to scrap its self-proclaimed nuclear bomb production program. But bickering has flared occasionally on just how to achieve that.\nRoh told business leaders at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that he was "quite aware that in Korea and the United States, we have many people who are quite concerned about the state" of the U.S.-South Korea relationship.\nBut "in all areas where the United States has been fighting to establish order and freedom, Korea has always been at the United States' side," he said.\nSouth Korea deployed about 3,600 troops in Iraq in 2004, making it the second-largest U.S. coalition partner after Britain. It plans to withdraw about 1,000 of its 3,200-member contingent by the end of the year.\nRoh met Wednesday with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, with both leaders underlining that U.S.-South Korean cooperation was needed to resume stalled nuclear disarmament talks, according to South Korean officials. Roh was scheduled later Wednesday to visit the Korean War Memorial and to meet with U.S. lawmakers.\nHow the two allies handle the North Korean nuclear crisis matters because some believe mixed messages from Washington and Seoul have allowed the reclusive North to boost its nuclear arsenal while falling into deeper isolation.\nEfforts to restart the disarmament talks have gained greater urgency in recent weeks as leaders worry about a potential North Korean nuclear weapons test and after the North decided in July to test launch seven missiles. But so far, no resumption of the negotiations by the Koreas, the United States, Russia, Japan and China is in sight.\n"The most important thing is that they can get along and project that to the world," Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, said in looking ahead to Roh's meeting with Bush.\n"They just totally see the world differently," O'Hanlon said, calling the Roh-Bush relationship perhaps "the single rockiest" of Bush's tenure and "probably the one with the greatest consequences."
Roh's time in Washington will be a low-key affair, in marked contrast to a June trip by the leader of another major U.S. ally in Asia, Japan. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi spoke publicly of his "heart-to-heart" friendship with Bush during that visit, and Bush treated Koizumi to a rare presidential tour of the home of the prime minister's musical hero, Elvis Presley, in Memphis, Tennessee.\nDuring their meeting, Roh and Bush will discuss an ambitious U.S.-South Korean free trade proposal and Seoul's desire to retake wartime command of its troops from the United States. The focus, however, will be on North Korea.\nBush favors a hard-line approach, refusing to talk to the North outside of the six-nation talks, which Pyongyang has boycotted since November. Roh has tried to engage Kim Jong Il's communist government.\n"North Korean policy has been foundering, in part because North Korea sees the huge gap between Seoul and Washington and drives right through it," O'Hanlon said.\nSeparately, U.S. lawmakers were expected to consider on Wednesday a North Korean nonproliferation measure and a resolution asking Japan to accept responsibility for the sexual exploitation of women in Korea and other Asian countries during World War II.\nMichael Green, Bush's senior adviser on Asia until December, said that Roh and Bush have a good working relationship, but he noted that there will be intense pressure on Roh from some in Seoul to emphasize differences with Washington about North Korea.\nIn the past, Roh has lobbied Bush to change the tone of U.S. policy on North Korea, an attempt to cater to South Koreans who favor expanding ties with the North, said Green, now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
