While North Korea tends to crowd coverage of the Korean peninsula, Seoul pursues a robust, nuanced but increasingly complex foreign policy. The United States is eager to corral the South into its alliance of democracies to forge a buffer against China’s rise. But South Korea, less convinced of the dangers of a rising China, continues to do what it has for hundreds of years: pirouette between greater powers, a move the Koreans have sought to master again and again.
Anxieties about shaky US leverage and influence on the Korean peninsula were manifest during the Trump years, revealing greater daylight between Washington and Seoul than perhaps either side cared to admit. Now, under the Biden administration, middle powers like South Korea may have a new and elevated opportunity to press their claims.
At their first summit, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in — just the second foreign leader invited to the White House — convinced US President Joe Biden to lift all limits on South Korean missile development as well as appoint a North Korea policy pointman, Sung Kim, to liaise and coordinate on North Korea policy with Seoul. The two also agreed to a COVID-19 vaccine partnership and committed to build on South Korea’s competitive advantages in next-generation and emerging technologies such as AI, 5G, semiconductors and clean energy.
The United States was able to diminish concerns of friction between it and its mainland Asian ally, and Seoul granted direct references to the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea in the Biden–Moon joint statement, pledging to ‘oppose all activities that undermine, destabilize, or threaten the rules-based international order and commit to maintaining an inclusive, free, and open Indo-Pacific’ — the first such reference and one that mimicked the US–Japan joint leaders’ statement a month earlier.
Taking advantage of its relaxed missile limits, the Moon government showed off South Korea’s biggest military advancement in years, testing a submarine-launched ballistic missile in September and a new space launch vehicle in October, among other assets that undergird Seoul’s highest-ever defence budget. China can’t be blind to the fact that US ally South Korea has been given the green light to develop missiles that can reach its capital city and major coastal population centres — especially after Seoul entered the Taiwan discussion.
The United States and the US alliance retain solid South Korean public support. A Chicago Council survey just before the Biden–Moon summit showed that three in four South Koreans believe the US military presence in Asia increases regional stability, and 83 per cent identified China as a security risk. After China responded to South Korea’s deployment of the THAAD missile defence system in 2017 with de facto economic sanctions, the United States stepped in to fill some of the gap, revising the Korea–US free trade agreement and inviting greater States-based manufacturing of South Korean semiconductors.
While the South Korean public aligns with the US-led order, South Korea’s policymakers seem comfortable balancing between Beijing and Washington. Moon’s belief in economic and diplomatic engagement with North Korea before denuclearisation — a position China has advocated at the United Nations — puts him at odds with Washington’s maximum pressure strategy. And friction between Seoul and Tokyo undermines alliance coordination. Washington may not want to hand over operational command of US Forces Korea, a long-held South Korean aim, while there are any questions about South Korea’s commitment to US objectives in the region and its ability to coordinate freely with support forces in Japan.
These issues are the theme of the latest East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ), The Korean Way, launched today. Whether it be societal transformation, the embrace of future technologies or foreign policy, South Korea’s capacity to continue doing things its ‘own way’ will be the primary test for the country’s policymakers and citizens alike in coming years.
The political faultlines at home are also challenging for South Korean voters as they prepare to elect a new president in March 2022.
As Hyung-A Kim explains in this week’s lead article from EAFQ, concerns about economic mobility and an out-of-touch leadership class are foremost on voters’ minds. Disillusionment with the governing Democratic Party (DP), spurred by questionable real estate control policies and scandals involving members of Moon’s cabinet, means that next year’s election results are ‘likely to lean towards the candidate who captures the voters’ demand for fairness and justice’.
Kim points to former justice minister Cho Kuk as representative of the sorts of problems that have plagued the Moon administration’s popularity. Cho was forced to resign ‘after his wife was found to have rigged the university admission process in favour of their daughter’, which ‘particularly incensed young voters who struggle for upward mobility in South Korea’s rapidly ageing and competitive society’.
DP candidate Lee Jae-myung and conservative People’s Power Power (PPP) torchbearer Yoon Seok-youl are both candidates who don’t seem to have the full support of their respective parties. Lee narrowly secured a party primary victory in October amid a snowballing land development scandal, while Yoon won a similarly narrow victory among conservatives put off by allegations of abuse of power while Yoon was the country’s top public prosecutor. As a newcomer to politics — and until recently a member of Moon’s administration — Yoon doesn’t appear to appeal to young voters either.
Although over 80 per cent of South Koreans are now vaccinated and the country managed to contain COVID-19 better than other democracies, Kim writes that there is growing exhaustion with Moon’s pandemic responses: ‘Unless his Living with COVID-19 plan succeeds, the public backlash against the government and the ruling Democratic Party will be costly given the host of other problems that South Koreans have faced over the past five years’.
The postwar international order which has delivered East Asian nations economic prosperity and political security is now less certain. As a substantial middle power central to Asian geopolitical equilibrium, South Korea has the capacity and interest to help ensure maintenance and the development of that order. Outgoing president Moon displayed something of the promise that his country offers in terms of creative new diplomacy, though his achievements are likely to fall well short of his ambitions. Hopefully his successor will bring some of the same imagination to the quest to find a Korean way.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.