Fresh from his commanding win in the June 3 snap presidential election, South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung presented himself as a supporter of the Western democracies at the G-7 in Alberta, Canada, this month.
While there as the president of an invited nation — South Korea, formally the Republic of Korea, is not one of the seven — Lee met with the leaders of Japan, Canada, Britain, Australia, South Africa, India, Brazil and Mexico. He also sat down with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as well as European Union officials.
Lee did not, however, get to meet with President Trump, who cut short his attendance to deal with the widening Israel-Iran war.
The cancellation of the meeting with Trump has already undermined Lee’s standing at home.
“The South Korean public is upset with Lee’s performance at the G-7,” Greg Scarlatoiu, president and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told me. “He was expected to engage in his first significant diplomatic endeavor to prioritize trade and tariffs. A one-on-one meeting with Trump was the test in the eyes of the public.”
The cancellation — many in South Korea think their president was snubbed — is bound to bolster Lee’s more anti-American advisors. As Scarlatoiu points out, Lee “has allowed two camps to form within his national security and foreign policy teams.”
There are the officials keen on strengthening relations with Washington, and those advocating “independent politics,” a move away from America and toward China and North Korea.
“Perhaps this balancing act is an attempt to preserve the U.S.-South Korea alliance while resuscitating South Korea-China relations,” Scarlatoiu said.
Lee has affirmed the military alliance with the U.S. — America is the only nation committed to defend the South — but he almost certainly wants American troops off South Korean soil.
Before presenting himself as a moderate in the recent presidential campaign — Lee unsuccessfully ran for president in 2022. In that campaign, he wanted to end the alliance, formed in 1953 just months after the Korean War armistice, and move Seoul firmly into China’s and North Korea’s camp.
After all, while campaigning for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party of Korea in July 2021, he called American troops in his country an “occupying force.” Worse, Lee charged America with keeping Japanese rule in place in Korea, a highly explosive charge.
“Pro-Japanese collaborators worked with U.S. occupying forces to maintain the same ruling structure,” he said, referring to the hated Japanese colonial period. “We were unable to purify the country of its pro-Japanese remnants, and they remain to this day.”
Lee’s leftist Democratic Party of Korea, known as Minjoo, has had a long history of undermining ties with Washington. Many in that party have worked to merge the two Koreas into a unified state. The previous Minjoo president, Moon Jae-in, often refused to acknowledge that the Republic of Korea even existed.
Lee’s current commitment to the alliance, therefore, looks like a short-term accommodation.
The Trump administration, for its part, is also seeking an accommodation. The White House pronounced on the day of voting that South Korea “had a free and fair election.” That statement looks meant to placate Lee, but it is an assessment that many in the South do not accept. Since June 3, there has been a series of marches protesting election fraud.
“In sum, it was the largest election heist in Korean history,” Morse Hyun-Myung Tan, who led the Election Monitoring Team, a group of Americans observing the June 3 balloting, told me.
Tan asserted that there were precincts with more “votes” than registered voters, pristine stacks of unfolded ballots for Lee Jae-myung when the law required the folding of ballots, non-Korean citizens from China and Vietnam publicly boasting in their social media posts about voting and people voting multiple times with fake identification cards.
“There was cheating using both physical ballots and electronic ‘ghost’ ballots manufactured by algorithm,” said Tan, a former American ambassador.
“In Deogyang District in Goyang City, a video captured an image of a vote-counting machine recording over 3,178 ballots in a row for Lee Jae-myung,” Tara O of the East Asia Research Center noted in comments to me. O said the National Election Commission, instead of investigating allegations of fraud, has been prosecuting those presenting evidence of ballot rigging.
Unfortunately, both sides of the conservative-progressive split in South Korea have resorted to election fraud, but this decade, the rigging has become especially pronounced.
“In the previous three national elections — 2020, 2022 and 2024 — results have not matched late polling, an indication of persistent fraud,” Tan told me.
Lee will undoubtedly be able to avoid a recount, but he will have great difficulty getting beyond the fraud controversy so that he can govern effectively. The risk is that the new president abandons any attempt to retain the support of conservative and centrist South Koreans and instead governs like an anti-American, pro-China, pro-North Korea leftist.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America” and “The Coming Collapse of China.”