Causes of Distrust and Conflict in the ROK-US Alliance: With a Focus on the Roh Moohyun Era

초록

Given a widespread consensus that the ROK-US alliance had weakened during the Roh Moohyun years, this paper proposed four explanations on trust depletion and conflict escalation between the two nations: explanations based on “core belief divergence,” “motivated bargaining tactic,” “mutual communication mismanagement,” and “political institutional difference” respectively. Among other things, the core belief explanation was right in pointing out the distrust and conflict arising from preference differences of two nations’ foreign policy elites. The motivated bargaining tactic model also has merits in that it emphasizes political elites’ incentive to bargain in an advantaged position, and to take advantage of threat from outside to solidify domestic support. The mutual communication mismanagement explanation, in its turn, well captures one of the important situations where two allies begin to engage with each other without enough information about each other’s counterpart. Finally, the political institutional model is remotely related to the distrust and tension problem. Among the four explanations mentioned above, the first and fourth ones are exogenously given when a new Korean administration starts in the context of the Korean political structure, while the second and third ones focus on the processional context.

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