Together with the ministry officials whose faces will have turned pale before the committee, I recall an incident that took place at about this time five years ago. The Transition Committee at the time was really a revolutionary headquarters: it was baying for blood. Citizens were somewhat baffled by the brutal atmosphere, since power remained in the hands of the same party.

In the incident I have in mind, the president elect was being briefed on foreign affairs. Leading the briefing team was the presidential special assistant at the time. Shortly after the briefing started, there was a great deal of shouting and a man rushed out of the office. People outside must have been anxious enough already at the prospect of entering the revolutionary headquarters. Witnessing that scene on top of it must have made the officials turn a whiter shade of pale.

Nobody in the office dared to open their mouth: you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It was only several months after the revolutionary force moved into the presidential office that I heard bits of stories that allowed me to piece together a picture of what happened that day.

Apparently, while the chief briefer was telling the president elect about Korean-American relations, one of the attendees cut in to make supportive remarks. This brought on a dose of the "imperial wrath." Someone shouted, "You’re a pro-American, aren‘t you? Get the hell out of here!" So the official fled. The rumor sent a chill down the spines of government officials. At that time, nobody realized that this had been a trailer for "The Korea-U.S. Tiff", a movie that was to be screened throughout the duration of the Roh administration.

The movie meandered on, as we all remember. At one point, the president was heard to say, "But for the U.S., I would now be incarcerated in a North Korean political prison camp,” the next he was saying, “The problem is with Koreans who love America more than the Americans." Presidential aides, meanwhile, attacked "those who have studied in the U.S. and who are fluent in English." The tale came to a head when the foreign minister made the amazing confession, “There are no pro-Americans in the Foreign Ministry.”

In the end, the "Northeast Asia balancer" doctrine the administration advocated, perhaps in imitation of imperial Britain‘s "splendid isolation”, to become a country maintaining the power equilibrium between the U.S. and China, had to be dropped without ceremony. The entertainment value was more or less nil.

In any case, it was also during the Transition Committee period five years ago that I was embarrassed when a foreign ambassador asked me, "Is it true that the president elect told a Chinese government leader who called on him, 'Although it is all but an established practice for the Korean president to visit the U.S. first upon his inauguration, I wish the day would come when he opts for China?'" As it happens, I’d still be interested to know if that was true.

In deed, the Roh administration was far from anti-American. It dispatched troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, increased its share of the upkeep cost of the U.S. Forces Korea, consented to the reduction of the USFK, and concluded the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement. The problem, if any, is that the administration failed to take from Washington as much as it handed it on a platter. While conceding in real interests, the administration plumbed only for the freedom of anti-American rhetoric to feed the appetite of the anti-Americans who formed part of its power base.

As the political wind changes, everyone is now calling for the restoration of the Korea-U.S. alliance. It sounds good. But South Korea today is no longer the South Korea of yesterday, when all was well as long as Seoul-Washington relations were fine.

When the Bush administration replaced Clinton's, the slogan was ABC -- anything but Clinton. A Korean version -- ABR --simply isn’t feasible. We need the wisdom to balance what can be retained and what must be discarded.

Just for the record, the official who fled the meeting to shouts of "You’re pro-American" soon afterwards returned to the top of the pile, thanks to his endeavors.