Since South Korean President Park Geun-hye took office last year, the South has been undergoing transformation in its foreign policies, despite escalated tensions between the two Koreas, a tough international environment and a still sluggish world economy. While the US remains its top diplomatic priority, Seoul has switched from prioritizing Japan as the second most important subject of foreign relations to prioritizing China.

 Seoul has engaged in ever closer relations with Beijing owing to economic development needs.

South Korean public opinion deems that Seoul cannot survive by counting only on its alliance with Washington in the current multipolar era, but at the same time there are worries that the country can hardly play an effective role without US support.

Created in the Cold War era, the US-South Korea alliance served as an important pillar of Washington's security strategies in the Asia-Pacific region. The two then began to adjust the structures and functions of their alliance to adapt to a new Northeast Asian architecture in the post-Cold War stage.

The unequal alliance has gradually turned into a relatively equal partnership, and Seoul has gained more independence in diplomacy.

South Korea successfully hosted the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988 and was admitted to the UN simultaneously with the North in 1991. Its independent multilateral diplomacy has helped improve its own status on the world stage.

Meanwhile, Seoul has been emphasizing defense autonomy. It resumed peacetime operational control in 1994, and the structure of the US-South Korea alliance will be fundamentally changed once it regains wartime operational control.

Seoul's growing independence is an indispensable consequence of both its social development and the strife and compromise between the two allies. After the end of the Cold War, the US has also been adjusting its Asia-Pacific strategies.

The US government reduced the number of troops in South Korea. It is natural for the two to make adjustments to the structure of their alliance given alleviated security pressures.

However, since the strategic pattern of Northeast Asia has not witnessed fundamental changes, the South is unlikely to steer clear away from the US. Seoul has merely displayed a growing sense of diplomatic independence, and the fear that South Korea will break away from the US is misplaced.

South Korea and Japan are not allies, but they are engaged in a de facto quasi-alliance because during the Cold War era both signed security treaties with Washington and needed to tackle the supposed threats from the Soviet Union, China and North Korea.

In light of geopolitical changes in Northeast Asia after the Cold War, the quasi-alliance between Seoul and Tokyo to protect themselves from Beijing is losing steam. South Korea has increasingly been lurching to China and estranging from Japan, partly due to historical issues.

To achieve its strategic goals in Northeast Asia, Washington is sparing no effort to bring Seoul and Tokyo together and is reluctant to see Beijing and Seoul getting closer.

Recently, Tokyo has been flattering the South and declaring the hope of holding high-level talks under the pressure of the Obama administration.

In the new century, South Korea has adjusted its China policy several times partly due to the influence of US ally. While the Cold War legacy still haunts the Korean Peninsula, the Abe government reiterates "values diplomacy" and adopts a typical Cold War mentality by telling enemies from friends according to ideology.

In order to safeguard peace and security on the Korean Peninsula, China does not oppose the US-Japan and US-South Korea alliances, but it firmly objects to any collusion that sabotages stability and targets China.

Within the unchanged framework of Northeast Asian geopolitics, Washington and Seoul should refrain from worrying that they may break away from each other. But Seoul's intimate cooperation with China and gradual estrangement from Japan are positive signs of its values of independent diplomacy.

The author is vice director and researcher with the Center for Northeast Asian studies, Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn