Economic interdependence, the strategic challenge of North Korea, and historical and cultural affinities, compel South Korea to avoid antagonizing China while simultaneously maintaining and enhancing its alliance partnership with the US.
Neither balancing nor hedging
Deteriorating bilateral relations between the US and China highlight what has long been a critical challenge for South Korea in gauging its strategic options in Northeast Asia: how best to balance its traditional alliance partnership with the US against the opportunities – primarily economic and diplomatic – offered by deepening ties with China, its increasingly powerful continental neighbour.
Since the late 1980s, when South Korean President Roh Tae-woo sought the normalization of diplomatic relations with China (finally realized in 1992), four key factors have largely conditioned Seoul’s overtures towards China: the strategic challenge of North Korea; the trade and investment opportunities offered by a liberalizing and rapidly growing China market; shared cultural, educational and historical experiences, which (in the words of Seoul National University professor Chung Jae-ho) have acted ‘as a strange magnet’ pulling together China and South Korea; and the policy preferences of individual South Korean presidents.
When assessing the competing importance of these four factors and framing its policy preferences, South Korea is acting as a middle power with arguably at best partial impact on the actions of the world’s two leading economic, security and political actors. South Korea’s actions have been influenced by three primary considerations: the relative power of the US and China; the intentions of leaders in Beijing and Washington, particularly as they relate to the Korean peninsula; and the appetite of elites and public opinion in South Korea to carve out a more independent and autonomous posture in foreign affairs. That latter consideration rests on a sentiment conditioned by the historical experience of great power rivalry and centuries-old sensitivity at having Korea’s fate determined by external actors.
South Korea is acting as a middle power with arguably at best partial impact on the actions of the world’s two leading economic, security and political actors.
Predictably, and consistent with past behaviour, Seoul has had to walk a narrow policy line between Washington and Beijing. In so doing, it has been not so much balancing or hedging in an effort to guard against an unpredictable strategic future, but rather selectively opting for policies that alternately or simultaneously involve cooperation (and occasionally conflict) with either or both partners. For example, Donald Trump’s call in 2020 for an expanded G7 to include Australia, India and South Korea bolstered Seoul’s desire for international recognition and enhanced status commensurate with its increasing economic power. But the move could also provoke pressure from Beijing if Chinese leaders perceive it as part of a new Cold War ‘containment’ strategy. Closer economic convergence between South Korea and China is commercially attractive – whether in the framework of the annual trilateral meetings with both countries and Japan (originally scheduled to take place at the end of 2020 in Seoul, but delayed at the time of writing), or in a variety of bilateral economic partnerships, such as Samsung’s memory chip sales to Huawei. However, such convergence would likely fall foul of Washington’s concerns about the surveillance and security risks associated with collaboration on and support for Chinese 5G data initiatives. This economic convergence in critical technologies has led to worries by some in South Korea that the US might use its defence relationship with South Korea, particularly over the issue of US troop commitments on the peninsula, to limit South Korean commercial collaboration with Chinese telecommunication firms.
These recent policy tensions have encouraged decision-makers in Seoul to embrace deliberate policy ambiguity (for example, on sensitive issues such as Hong Kong or Taiwan). Domestically, however, this is not a politically risk-free option as younger voters may begin to tire of a posture of accommodation with both Pyongyang and Beijing. To offset these risks, the Moon administration is receptive to developing a more explicitly independent stance on a range of separate critical issues. These include bolstering the country’s defence autonomy (its 2021 defence budget is set to rise by 5.5 per cent to a record $44 billion); fostering closer ties with Southeast Asia; and embracing new multilateral initiatives such as a new Northeast Asia Cooperation Initiative for Infectious Disease Control and Public Health – a programme that Moon announced in his UN General Assembly speech in September 2020. Such a policy of creative multilateralism is an increasingly competitive activity given the appetite on the part of other regional rivals such as Japan to advance similar initiatives. But the Moon administration has continued to capitalize on the long history of strategic entrepreneurship and foreign policy autonomy that is typical of past and present South Korean administrations, especially in the years since the end of the Cold War.
Seoul’s policy entrepreneurship and foreign policy activism
Successive South Korean presidents have demonstrated their desire to define themselves as strategic innovators when it comes to foreign policy. Roh Tae-woo’s Nordpolitik in the early 1990s is one example of this tradition, reinforced most notably by the ‘Sunshine Policy’ of Kim Dae-jung and comparable initiatives under Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in. In the mid-1990s, following South Korea’s accession to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Kim Young-sam’s articulation of a strategy of ‘globalization’, or segyehwa, signalled very clearly the appetite to raise the profile and status of South Korea internationally and especially regionally. Lee Myung-bak gave substance to this idea with the launch of the country’s New Asia Initiative (NAI) in 2009, and his successor Park Geun-hye built on this with the launch of her Eurasia Initiative in 2013. Aimed at taking advantage of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Eurasia Initiative’s connectivity agenda envisaged ambitious new trade, investment and transport links between the two Koreas, China and extending westwards across Asia towards Europe. Allied to this commitment to bolster physical ties across continental Asia has been a focus on new structural and institutional projects such as the Park administration’s promotion of a Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI) and a foreign ministry-led middle governance push to enhance cooperation between Mexico, India, South Korea, Turkey and Australia (MIKTA). The Moon administration has demonstrated a similar eagerness to display its institutional innovation capacity with the launch of its New Northern and New Southern Policies in 2017.
At the heart of this proliferation of initiatives has been the desire on the part of South Korea’s leaders to capitalize on the country’s identity as a middle power. This identity is in part a function of relative size and geographical position, but is equally associated with more abstract issues of non-alignment and a wish on the part of Koreans historically to avoid being trapped in great power rivalries, whether during the Cold War or 19th century colonial and imperial rivalries. In the more fluid post-Cold War environment, there is arguably more opportunity and need for South Korea to play a strategically innovative role – particularly in light of the Trump administration’s more unilateralist, transactional approach that threatened to weaken traditional US alliance ties. A strategically innovative role for South Korea would see it seeking to contribute constructively in the building of a new and more robust regional architecture in East and Southeast Asia.
It is open for debate whether South Korea’s leaders are able to translate their ambitions for enhanced regional and global influence into meaningful and discernible international power and status commensurate with the country’s economic capacity. Critics might argue that South Korea’s rhetoric is not always matched by its delivery, and the very frequency with which new South Korean administrations embrace new policy initiatives hints at the limitations of this approach. It is beyond the scope of this paper to assess definitively and comprehensively the strengths and weaknesses of Seoul’s policy entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, the three sets of issues explored below are evidence of the Moon administration’s innovativeness and its capacity to promote South Korea’s national interests in the face of the considerable constraints imposed by the actions of larger, more powerful states, such as the US and China, as well as when offsetting the challenges associated with militarily threatening neighbours such as North Korea.
US–South Korea alliance credibility and missile defence
Notwithstanding Seoul’s wish to maximize its strategic autonomy via multilateral policy innovations, South Korea remains tightly linked to the US when it comes to addressing its principal security challenge – the military threat from North Korea. One means of addressing this threat, in addition to the long-standing reliance on US forces deployed on the peninsula, has been the protective umbrella of extended US nuclear deterrence. This deterrence has been enhanced in two ways since the Park administration’s decision to accept the deployment in 2016 of a limited number of THAAD missile batteries to South Korea. One of these ways was by safeguarding the joint military assets of US and South Korean forces within South Korea against a potential attack from the north. The other was by helping to address the growing security challenges posed by a second regional actor, China, which threatened US strategic assets in East Asia and the Western Pacific. For many years, US policymakers have sought to persuade South Korea to join in a more integrated ballistic missile defence framework along with the other main US regional ally, Japan. South Korea has resisted such moves, hesitant about being drawn into a partnership with Japan (a country with which it continues to have a number of intractable territorial, cultural and historical disputes). It is also eager not to be seen by China as aligning too closely with the US in anything approaching an anti-Chinese military initiative.
For many years, US policymakers have sought to persuade South Korea to join in a more integrated ballistic missile defence framework along with the other main US regional ally, Japan.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that following the 2016 THAAD deployment, Beijing swiftly retaliated against Seoul, punishing the country economically by restricting commercial operations for South Korean firms based in China (most notably the Lotte Department Store chain), while also abruptly suspending lucrative Chinese tourist trips to South Korea, which had been an important source of revenue to local business groups. Chinese military planners have been particularly concerned at the ease with which the THAAD missile batteries can be programmed, both to guard against the ballistic missile threat from North Korea and to track Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) launched from northern China, as well as to assist the US in any potential conflict over Taiwan.
Despite its desire to maintain a close economic relationship with China (South Korea’s largest trade and investment partner), the Moon administration was surprisingly willing in 2017 to maintain the THAAD deployment initiated by the outgoing Park administration, using an environmental impact assessment study as a justification for avoiding an abrupt cancellation of the deployment. Ostensibly, the president bent in the face of Chinese pressure on this issue by announcing a policy of ‘three noes’ in autumn 2017, pledging no further THAAD deployment, no South Korean integration into US missile defence in the region, and no trilateral security alliance with the US and Japan. In reality, however, this rhetorical commitment had limited impact on South Korea’s substantive strategic policy choices and, sotto voce, the South Korean government has continued to strengthen its security partnership with the US, including in the field of missile defence. The progressive Moon administration was not only willing to risk provoking Beijing’s ire; it also chose to risk paying a potentially high political price by upsetting its traditional left-wing domestic political supporters who have typically been reluctant to see the country pursue an assertive military posture, especially one that involves close alignment with the US.
An overly one-dimensional image of the Moon administration would frame it as wishing to reach out in an unqualified manner to its Asian neighbour, and continuing to seek a reciprocal visit to Seoul by Xi (Moon made an early visit to Beijing in 2017 shortly after taking office). The more sobering and nuanced reality is of a defence and political community in South Korea that is worried about Chinese efforts to boost disputed territorial claims with the South (over Ieodo, or Socotra Rock), and about periodic efforts by the Chinese air force to challenge the limits of South Korea’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ). Backing and indeed extending THAAD deployments, as Moon has done during his time as president, not only bolsters US extended deterrence commitments to South Korea; it also, psychologically and materially, represents a useful insurance policy to guard against the potential risk of being abandoned by its senior alliance partner. This risk increased significantly during the Trump administration, given Trump’s willingness to flirt openly with the possibility of US troop withdrawals from the peninsula as a way of incentivizing North Korea to compromise in talks with the US. That tactic also aimed to put renewed burden-sharing pressure on South Korea to take on a much greater share in host nation support as part of the fractious and contentious Special Measures Agreement (SMA) talks between Washington and Seoul.
The evolving South Korean position on missile defence is also consistent with a general desire by its military to enhance the country’s defence autonomy. This desire is reflected in several trends and approaches: the steadily rising defence budget; continuing pressure to assume wartime operational control (OPCON) of South Korean armed forces from the US; an incremental relaxation of the US-mandated restrictions on the permissible range of South Korean missiles targeting North Korean forces; technological initiatives designed to allow the South to develop its own munitions and fighter aircraft capacities; and a general shift in Seoul’s strategic thinking enabling it since 2016 to explicitly promote a ‘Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation’ plan, that would allow South Korea to contemplate aggressive decapitation strategies designed to target and eliminate the North Korean leadership.
Moon’s cautious embrace of missile defence suggests a willingness in Seoul to tolerate some limited tension with Beijing. For now, the political costs of this approach at home have been minimal. Moon’s governing Democratic Party secured a dramatic landslide victory in the April 2020 National Assembly Elections, and while the South Korean public was sceptical towards the Trump administration, overall support for close ties with the US have remained high. On balance, China’s influence and its reputational standing within South Korea have been dented because of its heavy-handed pressure tactics. Attitudes towards China as a favourable partner to South Korea have fallen sharply from 50 per cent of the South Korean public in 2015 to 20.4 per cent in 2020. Currently only 6.6 per cent support cooperation with China in the event of a Sino-US conflict, whereas 43.4 per cent would back cooperation with the US.
The partial embrace of missile defence is also evidence of Seoul’s policymaking agility in simultaneously finessing relations with both the US and China. Nominally justified in terms of confronting the strategic threat from North Korea, THAAD deployment has allowed South Korea to shore up vulnerable security ties with the US, to gradually advance its defence autonomy, and to guard implicitly against the slowly developing military challenge from a rising China – but without prompting an explicit rupturing of ties with Beijing.
