South Korea

Rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine will have both economic and political implications for South Korea. 

In South Korea, gender equality and the feminism movement have become politicized and polarizing issues, especially among the younger generation, leading up to the March 9 presidential election.

Real estate has emerged as a pressing domestic issue in South Korea. Concerns about increased housing prices and uncertainties within the real estate market will shape voter preference in the upcoming presidential election. 

The ongoing South Korean presidential race holds significant sociopolitical implications for the future of democracy as democratic backsliding has now become an undeniable reality in South Korea. 

Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming presidential election in South Korea, the country’s politics will continue to be characterized by three unchanging elements that weaken South Korean democracy. 

U.S and South Korean polling on North Korea show strong support for denuclearization negotiations and summitry. How will growing consensus in public opinion impact U.S.-South Korea policy coordination toward North Korea? 

Last week’s summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Moon Jae-in aimed to bolster the alliance across a range of issues, with notable moves on supply chain resiliency and North Korea.

The Joe Biden administration has framed its main foreign policy paradigm primarily in terms of competition between democracy and authoritarianism, emphasizing cooperation among like-minded allies as its fundamental strategy for confronting China. There should be no questions as to where South Korea stands, both as a security ally and a vibrant democracy. And when South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in meets with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House Friday afternoon (local time), the decades-long U.S.-South Korea alliance will have an opportunity to address two distinct challenges to the proposition that the alliance is sustained by shared democratic values. The first challenge stems from the Biden administration’s conflation of shared values with shared interests in defining its approach to China and its expectations for allies. This approach has put considerable pressure on Seoul to join in a U.S.-led coalition to confront China’s challenge to the rules-based order. South Korea is an obvious candidate for membership in the Quad, especially given that last year the country had touted itself as a model in its initial pandemic response and in view of the potential importance of South Korean semiconductor production to supply chain resilience. But despite having the potential to forge extensive value-based cooperation in many functional areas, the Moon Jae-in’s government has expressed almost no public interest in joining the Quad. Instead, South Korea has thus far clung to choice avoidance as its primary approach to Sino-U.S. rivalry. The Biden administration’s framing of the Quad summit as an opportunity for cooperation among like-minded nations to provide public goods in the Indo-Pacific by emphasizing pandemic response, has helped to ease South Korean concerns that joining would label the country as part of an anti-China coalition. But South Korea’s geographic proximity to China and fear of economic retaliation from its largest trading partner have induced policy paralysis in Seoul. Also, South Korea retains an abiding interest in preventing China from exercising a veto power over inter-Korean reconciliation efforts by further enabling North Korean hostility. Seoul has tried to square the circle by aligning its policy approach to Southeast Asia with the U.S. Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, and hedging in relations with Beijing by holding out the possibility of economic cooperation in infrastructure projects through China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Asian International Infrastructure Bank. South Korea’s approach to values-based cooperation is akin to a shy student that aces the test, but who goes to great lengths to avoid class participation. The second challenge to values-based U.S.-South Korea alliance cooperation relates to the Moon administration’s conciliation of North Korea with regard to efforts to promote information penetration inside North Korea. Following inter-Korean pledges not to slander each other, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong issued belligerent statements last year aimed at North Korean defectors in South Korea who sent leaflets across the border. In December 2020, South Korea’s National Assembly passed a vaguely worded anti-leaflet law imposing harsh penalties on the spread of outside information into North Korea of virtually any type of information from almost any location. The law rests on the premise that prevention of North Korean retaliation superseded both the rights to freedom of expression of those sending the information, and those in North Korea who suffer under the regime’s control over dissemination of information. The Moon administration’s support for the anti-leaflet law pits South Korean appeasement of the Kim Jong-un regime against Biden’s strong emphasis on human rights promotion and freedoms of expression. A U.S. Congressional hearing on the matter elicited bipartisan pleas for South Korea’s legislature to reverse course and rescind the law, and the South Korean government has acknowledged deficiencies in the draft law by pledging to make revisions. However, Moon’s progressive supporters in South Korea view external criticisms of South Korean law-making as U.S. meddling in South Korea’s domestic affairs, while conservative critics see Moon as simultaneously appeasing the Kim regime and betraying the very pro-democratic values on which he has fashioned his political image. Moon’s first face-to-face meeting with Biden provides a clear opportunity for them to address these cleavages and shore up the foundations of the alliance. As a first step, the Biden administration should welcome South Korean proposals for a vaccine swap to meet Moon’s domestic need to increase vaccine availability in South Korea, in return for South Korean engagement with Quad priorities through enhanced roles in supply chain resiliency and in production and distribution of vaccines within the region. On the human rights front, Biden and Moon should stand firm on preserving freedoms of expression as a distinguishing characteristic of democracies and by speaking out on North Korean human rights abuses; while acknowledging Kim as an inevitable counterpart for addressing mutual security concerns such as denuclearization and reduction of inter-Korean military tensions. These joint actions will align the interests of the two countries, while affirming common democratic values as the bedrock for U.S.-South Korean cooperation.

In a speech to a joint session of Congress marking his first hundred days in office last month, U.S. President Joe Biden described his North Korea policy as a combination of “diplomacy, as well as stern deterrence.” Hours later, Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the White House intends to adopt the classic middle ground policy option of a “calibrated, practical approach”—framed between former Presidents Barack Obama’s “strategic patience” and Donald Trump’s “grand bargain.” “Our goal remains the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. With a clear understanding that the efforts of the past four administrations have not achieved this objective, our policy will not focus on achieving a grand bargain, nor will it rely on strategic patience.” Psaki said. “We have and will continue to consult with the Republic of Korea, Japan, and other allies and partners at every step along the way,” she added. Having emphasized coordination with alliance partners Japan and South Korea, it is unsurprising that the policy outcome would wed South Korea’s desire for a diplomatic breakthrough with Japan’s strict emphasis on deterrence. Biden’s policy review laid out the instruments in the U.S. foreign policy toolbox and reasserted “complete denuclearization” as the enduring U.S. bottom line, but failed to satisfactorily address the main problem that has bedeviled decades of policy toward Pyongyang under successive U.S. administrations: how to dissuade North Korea from pursuing unremitting nuclear development objectives to guarantee regime survival, stand equivalent to the U.S. as a nuclear power, and reshape the regional strategic environment in North Korea’s favor. To be fair, no U.S. administration has found a satisfactory answer to this question since U.S. satellites began surveilling North Korean nuclear efforts in the 1980s. But this failure is more indicative of North Korea’s isolation, persistence, and weakness than of U.S. policy. A North Korean regime dependent on economic support from China needs to showcase its nuclear accomplishments as a basis for internal legitimacy, as a deterrent against “hostile forces,” and as an obstacle to South Korea-led unification of the Korean Peninsula. U.S. assurances that it is not hostile to North Korea cannot bring peace to the Korean Peninsula, unless North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is willing to abandon his revisionist aims. Due to Kim Jong-un’s persistent commitment to nuclearization, even capping North Korea’s nuclear development en route to “complete denuclearization” appears to be an impossible task that is only achievable through the inordinately costly course of regime change. Increasingly severe UN sanctions have slowed North Korea’s nuclear development, but failed to halt it. Diplomatic proposals to negotiate a cap and freeze might induce a measure of North Korean voluntary self-restraint—until the next U.S. administration comes along. The North Koreans, despite a few weeks of perhaps genuine doubt during the crescendo of “fire and fury” and Trump’s threats of North Korean annihilation during late 2017, concluded long ago that their nuclear deterrent will forestall a military invasion. One might hope that North Korea’s quarantine and self-induced economic distress would change Kim’s mind and open the door to diplomatic talks, but he appears to have dismissed the Biden administration’s early dialogue feelers and doubled down on economic recentralization and nuclear development at the Eighth Party Congress in January. North Korea’s economic distress may induce its diplomats to accept assistance in return for participation in diplomacy, but the regime has underscored that it will not succumb to external diplomatic pressure. Not to mention that Pyongyang had already warned Washington earlier this month that the U.S. “will face worse and worse crisis beyond control in the near future” if Biden’s administration is to follow its approach. “Now that what the keynote of the U.S. new DPRK policy has become clear, we will be compelled to press for corresponding measures, and with time the U.S. will find itself in a very grave situation,” North Korea said in a statement issued by its state news agency KCNA. The Biden administration’s decision not to appoint a special negotiator for North Korea reflects low expectations for North Korea to return to denuclearization negotiations at this time. Instead, the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence anticipates that North Korea will likely pursue provocative actions, before it will be willing to return to the negotiating table.  In the meantime, Pyongyang will likely continue its three decade-long effort to nuclearize its way to prestige and equivalency, with the United States through mutual nuclear deterrence. This is a formula for stalemate in negotiations that pits U.S. denuclearization objectives against North Korea’s nuclear development, with the North perceiving its steadily expanding fissile material stockpiles and missile development as counter-leverage against U.S. “maximum pressure.” Unless the Biden administration can find a way to induce or impose self-restraint on the expansion of North Korea’s arsenal, the dimensions of the North Korean nuclear challenge will only continue to grow.

The upcoming South Korea-U.S. summit meeting in Washington, D.C. should serve as an opportunity to forge a symbiotic "vaccine alliance."