Anti-Americanism in Contemporary South Korea

Most South Koreans regard their country as “pro-American,“ but a strong wave of anti-American sentiment threatened to upend relations in the not-so-distant past. From 1999 to 2002, the Korean media engaged in a sustained campaign of harsh criticism against the United States, especially U.S. Forces Korea. There were numerous incidents in which Koreans harassed and even physically attacked innocent Americans, and by late 2002 hundreds of thousands of South Koreans had taken to the streets to protest against the United States. The mainstream South Korean narrative about that time is that the United States and its representatives had long acted in ways that were arrogant, insensitive, and disrespectful of the Korean people, their culture, and their sovereignty. South Koreans believe that their protests were not only righteous and but also effective in forcing the United States to treat them as equals. The lecturer, at the time a senior official in the American embassy in