A tale of two envoys: Kang Kyung-wha back in Seoul and new U.S. ambassador to arrive soon as key alliance tasks await

[NEWS ANALYSIS]

Kang Kyung-wha, South Korea's ambassador to the United States, is back in Seoul this week in a visit likely to address a series of issues that the alliance faces. 

Michelle Steel, the next U.S. ambassador to Korea, is also set to arrive in Seoul soon, finally filling a post that has been vacant for a year and a half.

The timing comes amid a crowded list of unresolved business between the two countries: a fight over the e-commerce company Coupang that has drawn in the White House and Congress, a 10 percent tariff due to expire on July 24 and a new Korean content law the State Department has already criticized on free-speech grounds.

Between them, the two envoys are stepping into a set of disputes that could shape the direction of Korea-U.S. relations for months to come.

Kang's talks with Cho on Wednesday afternoon will be the first in a round of meetings she will hold through Sunday on the state of the alliance.

As she arrived at the Foreign Ministry in central Seoul, Kang told reporters the Coupang case "has dragged on much longer than I expected."

Seoul is "managing it as its own issue," she said, while continuing separate consultations "at various levels" to advance the commitments made in last November's joint fact sheet reached through a summit between President Lee Jae Myung and U.S. President Donald Trump. Pressed on whether Washington had made any new specific demands, she said there was nothing she could share yet.

On U.S. pressure to speed up Korean investments, she said Korea's Trade Ministry and the U.S. Commerce Department "continue talks," and that identifying projects that meet "commercial rationality" would likely need more discussion.

Kang is also scheduled to meet with officials at the presidential National Security Office and the ministries of industry, defense and science over the coming days.

The upcoming visits by the two envoys represent a critical juncture for an alliance currently strained by perception gaps and delayed commitments.

Korea's own ambassador called home

The Foreign Ministry has framed Kang's unexpected trip as "routine," noting that the foreign minister regularly consults directly with ambassadors to hear their on-the-ground assessments.

Kim Jae-chun, a professor at Sogang University's Graduate School of International Studies who studies the Korea-U.S. alliance, sees it a little differently, though not as a reprimand.

"I don't think this is a summons," he told the Korea JoongAng Daily. "I think she came to convey just how serious things have gotten in Washington."

Kim's broader diagnosis is that Korea's economic and security tracks with Washington have effectively merged into a single package, whether Seoul likes it or not — and that the cash portion of the $350 billion pledge needs to move faster regardless of how unfair any individual dispute feels.

He points to Japan, which paired its own investment pledge with a concrete, bankable plan from SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, as a contrast to Korea's slower rollout.

"Whatever we agreed to give, we have to give," he said, adding that Seoul's earlier forward-leaning moves on trade are what drew a more forward-leaning U.S. posture on submarine and nuclear cooperation in the first place.

On Coupang, Kim’s advice is blunt: Korea must "swallow its pride" and move on. Continuing to relitigate the fairness of the case, he argues, does less for Korea than redirecting that energy toward unsticking the nuclear talks.

Some of the perception gap, he added, comes down to differing political cultures rather than deliberate discrimination — pointing to the Korean parliamentary practice of hauling in a corporate executive for a public dressing-down as the kind of contrition domestic politics demands, but which reads to American observers as evidence of a targeted campaign.

A succession of disputes 

Coupang sits at the center of the friction, and it has been building for months.

Congress issued a subpoena in February to Harold Rogers, the interim head of Coupang's Korean unit, and received thousands of pages of communications between the company and Korean regulators.

That fed into a House Judiciary Committee report released July 1 — titled "Closed for Competition: South Korea's Discriminatory Attacks on American-owned Businesses" — which accused Seoul regulators of a "whole-of-government assault" on the company following a 2025 data breach that led to a record fine of roughly 625 billion won ($400 million).

A White House official followed up, saying that Coupang had been "singled out" by the Lee administration. Officials well beyond the Judiciary Committee — Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and East Asia officials at the State Department among them — have separately raised concerns about the case.

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally who died on July 11, had also weighed in publicly on the dispute before his death.

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Park Il rejected the report the same week, saying it "unilaterally accepts Coupang's claims," and the National Intelligence Service and the presidential office separately denied allegations that it had directed the recovery of a discarded laptop tied to the breach, saying the case has been handled "without discrimination based on nationality."

Tariffs run on a similar, overlapping track.

Seoul's $350 billion investment pledge — split between $200 billion in capped cash installments and $150 billion for U.S. shipbuilding — secured South Korea a lower, 15 percent tariff rate last November, but the National Assembly's implementing legislation moved slowly enough to draw Trump's public criticism before it passed in March. Washington has since opened separate Section 301 investigations that could result in new tariffs regardless of that deal.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said publicly that he wants Samsung Electronics and SK hynix to build production facilities in the United States rather than at home, adding pressure on two companies that have already pledged roughly 800 trillion won in domestic chip investment.

The nuclear energy talks may be the hardest problem of all.

Under October's joint fact sheet, Washington agreed to support South Korea's bid for nuclear-powered submarines and the right to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel — changes that would require revising the "123 Agreement," last updated in 2015, which currently bars Korean enrichment or reprocessing without case-by-case U.S. consent.

The first round of talks wrapped up in Seoul in early June, with a second round originally expected in Washington as soon as July; it has not yet been scheduled, a delay Korean officials attribute largely to the U.S. negotiating team's absorption in ending the war with Iran.

The caution runs deeper than scheduling.

A covert weapons program Korea pursued in the 1970s, a 2004 laser-enrichment episode that nearly reached the UN Security Council, and a bitter, only recently settled intellectual-property fight between Westinghouse and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power over reactor technology sold to the Czech Republic have left Washington wary of expanding Seoul's nuclear latitude.

The wartime operational control transfer, or Opcon, remains unresolved amid subtle but persistent differences between Seoul and Washington over timing and conditions, and sits on the same overloaded agenda.

Furthermore, there is Korea's newly revised Network Act, which took effect July 7 and lets courts impose damages of up to five times proven losses on news outlets or large social media accounts found to have knowingly spread illegal or fabricated information, with fines of up to 1 billion won for repeat offenders.

This is no longer just a domestic dispute: The U.S. State Department said on July 8 that the law should not be used to demand censorship of free expression, and separately warned that it risks imposing excessive content-moderation burdens on American platforms.

Large platforms, those with over 1 million average daily users, must now self-police and publish transparency reports. Naver and Kakao have already rolled out compliance measures, while Google's and Meta's plans remain less clear.

Supporters say the law protects the public from proven falsehoods; critics call its standards too vague and warn it could chill legitimate reporting. Because it applies to American platforms as much as domestic ones, some industry voices already see it as the next Coupang-style flashpoint rather than a separate issue.

Another factor may be brewing: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, calling for countries that host American troops or seek shelter under its security umbrella to reject the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction. South Korea is a state party to the Rome Statute that created the court, which could put Seoul in an awkward spot if Washington presses the point.

The next U.S. ambassador's role 

Steel's biography is doing some of the diplomatic work before she even lands.

Born in Seoul in 1955 as Park Eun-joo, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1975, built a career in California tax administration and in Orange County government, and served two terms in the U.S. House before narrowly losing re-election in 2024.

She will be the second Korean American — and the first Korean American woman — to hold the Seoul post, following Sung Kim's 2011-2014 tenure, filling a seat that had been vacant for 18 months since Philip Goldberg's departure in January 2025.

Her introduction to the Korean public so far has come only through a video posted to the embassy's X account on July 8 — "I am so honored to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to South Korea," she said, mixing English and Korean — rather than a formal State Department announcement of the kind that often accompanies major postings.

A source familiar with the embassy's planning told the Korea JoongAng Daily that she is expected to arrive in Seoul "toward the end of the month."

The same profile that makes her arrival symbolically significant also carries risk.

As a political appointee rather than a career diplomat, Steel is more exposed to partisan headwinds than her predecessors, and her hawkish views on North Korea sit uneasily with the Lee government's preference for engagement with Pyongyang. Some figures within the ruling party and the Rebuilding Korea Party have gone so far as to suggest Seoul should withhold her credentials.

"She's not MAGA [Make America Great Again]," Kim said. "She's a hard-liner on foreign and security policy, in the mold of someone like [the late] Lindsey Graham — calling her MAGA is simply a mistake."

He argues her background is an asset rather than a liability.

"She's Korean American, and she has real standing with the Trump administration," Kim said. "That's something we should use well, not something to be wary of."

At her May 20 confirmation hearing, she pledged to press Seoul on fair treatment for U.S. companies and on its $350 billion U.S. investment commitment — the same investment package now tangled up in the tariff dispute Kang has been sent home to help manage.

Pressed on what that could look like in practice, Kim's answer points less to diplomatic protocol than to personal access: he expects Steel's real value to Seoul will be as a direct channel to Trump himself — someone with enough standing in the White House to actually move the logjam on Coupang, tariffs and the nuclear talks, rather than simply relay Washington's grievances.

Her primary role will be to act as a direct, trusted conduit to the White House.

If utilized properly, Steel could prove instrumental in untangling the stalled $350 billion investment package and getting the critical nuclear agreement revisions back on track.

BY SEO JI-EUN   [[email protected]]