A continued fractious US–China relationship has led South Korea, as an innovative middle power, to maintain a policy of de facto strategic ambiguity to maximize its regional economic and political interests without compromising its alliance relationship with the US.
With rising US–China tensions, South Korea has had to use all of its diplomatic and policy ingenuity to continue its longstanding policy of sustaining its economic relationship with China, while maintaining and enhancing its security partnership with the US. In the final months of the Trump administration, it became evident that geopolitical and economic rivalry was propelling the US and China towards a more adversarial and fractious relationship. The US president, as well as senior cabinet officials, used public statements and official policy documents to argue that China represents the clearest and most present danger to US national security interests. This threat to the US can be seen in a variety of contexts, including direct and indirect forms of power rivalry – for instance, territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas; Chinese cyberwarfare to destabilize the US and other liberal democracies; authoritarian attempts to crack down on dissent in Hong Kong or to brutally repress the ethnic and religious identities of local communities in Xinjiang and Tibet; and competition for dominance in the high technology sector and in space exploration.
Rivalry between China and the US is also evident in competing models of economic development and the promotion of new global institutions (such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or China’s Belt and Road Initiative), as well as in incidents of Chinese actors stealing US intellectual property. Underpinning these tensions is an apparent effort by the Chinese leadership, framed in cultural, nationalistic and ideological terms, to challenge and modify the very norms and assumptions that shape the international order.
The clearest expression by the US of this pessimistic vision was a 74-page document setting out in stark terms (as its title made plain) The Elements of the China Challenge. It was formulated in the closing stages of Donald Trump’s presidency and published in November 2020 by the US State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (hereafter referred to as PPS). The document self-consciously and misleadingly echoed the language of a much earlier Cold War-era effort to define the core factors shaping the behaviour of a previous rising geopolitical rival to the US: the Soviet Union.
The Trump administration, via the PPS paper, boldly and confidently presented its position as a long-overdue corrective to the views of previous US administrations, both Republican and Democratic, that saw China as a country (notwithstanding its authoritarian character) with which the US could and should engage constructively. Those views were based on the assumption that China’s economic growth and gradual integration with the international community would help to moderate its more disruptive tendencies.
The Trump administration boldly and confidently presented its position as a long-overdue corrective to the views of previous US administrations that saw China as a country with which the US could and should engage constructively.
By contrast, in the PPS analysis, China represented an existential challenge not only to the US, but also to its allies and global partners. The document described the US and other countries as ‘captive to the conventional wisdom’, and as being ‘largely unaware of or indifferent to the long-term strategic competition launched by the CCP [the Communist Party of China] and affirmed with increasing boldness by’ President Xi Jinping.
Adopting a moralistic or arguably a somewhat hubristic tone (given the Trump administration’s own authoritarian predisposition), the document noted, ‘In the face of the China challenge, the United States must secure freedom.’
In the wake of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election and with the transition to a new Democratic administration under Joe Biden’s leadership, this Chatham House research paper has two primary goals: to document the changing nature of Sino-US relations amid the transition from Trump to Biden; and to make a preliminary assessment of how the South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in has managed its ties with both the US and China during the Trump presidency.
The question of how the Sino-US rivalry affects relations between Washington and Seoul is important not only because of the prominence and longevity of alliance ties between the two capitals, but also because of the divergence of opinion between their government leaders. South Korea has a complicated relationship with China, which militates against embracing the idea of an inevitable clash of interests that is at the heart of the Thucydides trap narrative, notwithstanding the importance of the US–South Korea alliance. Deep historical and cultural ties with China that pre-date the emergence of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, their geographical proximity, economic convergence and the mediating role that China can play in addressing South Korea’s most pressing strategic challenge – namely the threat from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) – all undermine the idea of Seoul aligning too closely with the US in any future stand-off between Washington and Beijing.
The following analysis, after describing current Sino-US relations, examines how the progressive administration of President Moon Jae-in is seeking to navigate between the sometimes competing policy priorities of maintaining a strong and cooperative alliance with the US and of avoiding escalating tensions or a more explicitly conflictual relationship with China. The goal for successive South Korean governments, whether conservative or progressive, has been simultaneously to sustain cooperation with the US while carefully balancing the economic and security-related opportunities and challenges associated with a rising China. Harmonizing these sometimes conflicting objectives is no simple task, precisely because the issues involved are of key importance among the South Korean state’s strategic priorities.
The Moon administration has been broadly successful in avoiding an unpalatable and potentially false zero-sum choice between the US and China, notwithstanding the Manichean, inherently adversarial language of the Trump PPS report. This has been possible thanks to South Korea’s adoption of a policy of intentional strategic ambiguity when it comes to China, while enhancing its alliance autonomy within the framework of a more transactional relationship with the US – all within a context of multilateral and bilateral policy entrepreneurship that highlights South Korea’s long-standing aspiration to demonstrate its capabilities and dynamism as an innovative ‘middle power’.
A number of prominent strategic issues (explored in the analysis) demonstrate the success of the South Korean government in walking the narrow policy tightrope between the US and China – most notably the issue of ballistic missile defence and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) deployment; engagement with the DPRK and facilitating diplomatic dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang; and the development of Seoul’s New Southern Policy and closer ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as a means of avoiding explicit involvement in Washington’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy.
