Karen DeYoung

It's caused a lot of confusion in South Korea where no one can understand what seemed to be a sort of doomed effort from the start was undertaken.

And it's also caused a lot of consternation in the United States, which considers South Korea a sort of model democracy in East Asia and has a number of agreements on the security front with South Korea.

It provides for joint exercises, intelligence sharing, high-level consultations, and basically security cooperation. And it's part of turning toward China as what the Pentagon calls the pacing threat of American securities.

If there were a government that is not quite as friendly to the United States as the Yoon government is now, I think that would be a challenge for the incoming president. President-elect Trump has congratulated himself on his relationship with North Korea during his first term and has indicated he would try to follow up on that.