White House not disturbed by firing in Seoul

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The Bush administration yesterday said relations with Seoul remain solid, despite the surprise firing of South Korea's foreign minister after a bitter internal debate over whether to revamp traditionally close ties with the United States.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said U.S. officials had been given no advance warning of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's decision to oust Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan. The firing followed what Mr. Roh said were insubordinate remarks by top officials in Mr. Yoon's ministry about the government's foreign policy goals in North Korea and elsewhere.

Career diplomats in the ministry's North American bureau were publicly and privately critical of Roh advisers in the South Korean National Security Council, who have echoed Mr. Roh's own calls during the past year's presidential campaign for a more independent stance from Washington.

"I think both countries are clearly committed to working closely together on issues of key concern," Mr. Boucher said. "We look forward to maintaining and strengthening U.S.-Korean relations."

The resignation comes as the United States and South Korea attempt to coordinate policy in anticipation of an expected new round of multinational talks over the North Korean nuclear weapons crisis.

The standoff over North Korea has sharpened tensions in the South over relations with Washington. The United States is a prime export market for the South, and the 37,000 U.S. troops and nuclear umbrella are critical to the South's security.

But members of the "independence faction" centered in the security council have pushed for a more assertive South Korean policy, improving ties with the communist North while challenging what they see as the Bush administration's inflexible hard line against Pyongyang.

Career diplomats at the Foreign Ministry, known in the South Korean press as the "alliance faction," have warned against alienating Seoul's key ally. More scathing comments by the diplomats, including one likening the political appointees at the National Security Council to Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban, infuriated Mr. Roh, who yesterday called the remarks "disobedience to the president."

Presidential personnel secretary Jeong Chan-yong told reporters in Seoul, "Some Foreign Ministry staff were unable to shed the past foreign policy and failed to adequately understand the basic spirit of the new independent foreign policy advocated by" the Roh administration.

Mr. Yoon, 53, an academician who received an international relations degree from Johns Hopkins University, was seen as a pro-U.S. moderate attempting to straddle the divisions within the Roh government. No successor had been named as of yesterday.

Mr. Roh's narrow victory in the December 2002 election tapped into rising anti-American sentiment in South Korea, especially among voters too young to recall the Korean War and subsequent Cold War tensions.

Controversies such as the death of two Korean schoolgirls in a 2002 traffic accident involving U.S. soldiers and the ongoing debate over the future of a massive U.S. military base in central Seoul have only fueled the debate.

A Jan. 5 poll reported this week in the Chosun Ilbo, a major Seoul daily, found that for the first time South Koreans see the United States as a bigger threat to the South's security than North Korea, by a 39 percent-to-33 percent margin.

Lee Sook-jong, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the North's suspected nuclear programs, so worrisome to Washington, do not loom as an added danger to many South Koreans, who have lived all their lives facing a massive conventional North Korean military threat.