On Wednesday, President Joe Biden hosted just the second state dinner of his presidency, formally welcoming South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol to Washington. It followed a leaders’ summit celebrating the 70th anniversary of the 1953 Korea-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty. The summit helped reassure Korea of U.S. defense commitments in the face of more belligerent North Korean behavior, and it reinforced Seoul’s commitment to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. More than a hundred top-level Korean business executives accompanied Yoon, illustrating the interdependence of the two economies.

This year also marks the 120th year of Korean immigration to the U.S., which began with nearly 8,000 Korean plantation workers who arrived in Hawaii between 1903 and 1905. As their plantation contracts ended, Hawaii then became the source of Korean emigration to the West Coast. Other waves of immigration followed World War II, so that now there are an estimated 2.7 million Korean Americans, the largest Korean community outside the Korean peninsula itself, more than in neighbors China, Japan or Russia.

In observation of these anniversaries, the East-West Center has just released an updated edition of its bilingual publication Korea Matters for America. One has only to glance at the headline data to appreciate the depth of the two countries’ interactions: nearly $200 billion in two-way trade, $110 billion in foreign investment in each other’s country, 450,000 U.S. jobs supported by Korean business activities, and 112 sister-city/state relationships, including 5 with Hawaii locations. The two governments are partners in APEC, the G20, the OECD and countless other regional and global organizations. They work together on international security, vaccines, climate change, democracy promotion and many other initiatives.

This was unimaginable in 1953, when few held hope for war-torn Korea’s economic and political development. When I first visited Seoul 16 years later, the annual per capita income was still less than $250, a fraction of Japan’s. City traffic consisted mainly of buses, trucks and jeeps, and the side roads nearer the airport were unpaved.

By my second visit in 1980 it was unrecognizably transformed, and later that decade underwent a democratic revolution to become one of Asia’s few stable democracies. South Korea today is the world’s 10th largest economy, ahead of Russia. Its per capita GDP is above Japan’s on a ‘purchasing power parity’ basis.

Korean and American politics often seem out of sync. Korea had a conservative president during much of the Obama era, a liberal president during the Trump era, and the conservative Yoon now. Although Korea-U.S. relations have had ups and downs, today the countries’ common democratic and economic values and largely compatible views about the challenges ahead in a darkening world have put their relationship on the strongest basis in years.

Washington deeply appreciated President Yoon’s domestically courageous step of seeking a rapprochement with Japan, strengthening relations between U.S. allies in Northeast Asia at a critical time. It is indeed a year to celebrate the growing and resilient Korea-U.S. connections that touch the lives of many across both of our countries, especially here in Hawaii.

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KOREA MATTERS

On Wednesday, the East-West Center, University of Hawaii Center for Korean Studies, and the South Korean Consulate will hold a public discussion on “Korea Matters for Hawaii,” featuring a panel including Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke.

Visit EastWestCenter.org.

Charles E. Morrison is a senior fellow and former president of the East-West Center.