Is South Korea’s new Indo-Pacific strategy finally forthcoming?

12 May 2022

In contrast to the previous Moon Jae-in administration of the Republic of Korea (ROK), which was all but reluctant to join forces with the US’ Indo-Pacific initiative, the new Yoon Suk-yeol government in Seoul, which just took office on 10 May, is highly likely to take on a new broader regional strategy with a comprehensive Indo-Pacific framework at its core. In this respect, the impending Yoon-Biden Summit, scheduled to take place on 21 May in Seoul right before the Quad Summit in Tokyo, will be a turning point for Seoul’s new Indo-Pacific journey.

Other than the inter-Korean peace overtures by President Moon that culminated in a series of historic summits with Pyongyang in 2018-2019, the New Southern Policy (NSP) first unveiled in November 2017 was the most notable and proactive foreign policy under his presidency (2017-2022). Pursued vigorously as Moon’s presidential agenda, the NSP was Seoul’s most prominent and sustained diplomatic attempt to deepen its ties with Southeast Asia and India in the ROK’s recent diplomatic history.

However, the NSP did not amount to a South Korean version of an Indo-Pacific strategy, as Seoul avoided adopting its own Indo-Pacific framework in the NSP. The Moon government deliberately distanced itself from the US’ Indo-Pacific initiative and focused primarily on promoting bilateral relations with ASEAN countries and India. Also, the NSP was imbalanced in its core policies in that most of Seoul’s activities under the Policy were confined heavily to the domain of economic and functional cooperation on a bilateral basis. Furthermore, Seoul did not clearly articulate its strategic outlook, and deliberately avoided strategic engagements in regional political and security affairs.

A regional initiative without strategic engagements

Unlike the Indo-Pacific strategies of other like-minded states such as the US, Japan and Australia, the NSP in itself was not a “security-initiatives-first approach” that would frame Seoul’s policy responses to security threats as the main challenge to the regional order. Seoul also took great care in avoiding the US’ Indo-Pacific narratives or explicitly anti-China rhetoric — for example, concerning the importance of upholding the freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea. In addition, while US allies put a priority on coordinating alliance cooperation in their engagement in regional security affairs, Seoul deliberately avoided sensitive regional security issues and chose to focus only on ‘non-traditional security cooperation’ on a bilateral basis with NSP partners.

Given his publicly stated positions and strategic orientations, the Yoon government is expected to prioritise expanding and substantiating its cooperation with Washington, not only at the bilateral level but also regarding the US regional Indo-Pacific agenda.

As a consequence, South Korea has largely been absent from the international efforts of like-minded states to bolster rules-based order in the emerging Indo-Pacific regional architecture. In this respect, the NSP underperformed as a broader regional strategy, because it voluntarily constrained its own strategic potential and constricted its strategic wherewithal. How the Moon government put the NSP into practice was politically naïve and strategically suboptimal. The strategic underperformance of the NSP as South Korea’s regional initiative was more of an agency problem than caused by the external geopolitical structure. It was Moon’s policy choices, not the external structural constraints of great power competition, which dwarfed South Korea’s strategic role and relevance in regional political and security affairs despite its growing economic prowess as the world’s tenth-largest economy.

These imbalances and self-abstentions in Moon’s initiative chiefly stem from the strategic straitjacket that Seoul imposed on itself in the hope of avoiding the geopolitical pitfalls of strategic competition between Washington and Beijing. Underlying this strategically underperforming approach was Seoul’s security outlook. Moon’s single-minded focus on North Korea led to a neglect of the increasingly perilous geopolitical reality in the Indo-Pacific region. In the prevailing strategic perception that shaped Moon’s security outlook, the most pressing strategic challenge for Seoul was how to manage its relations with, and secure a degree of autonomy from, both Washington and Beijing. In the words of former Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, Seoul has been “caught in the crossfire” between the two great powers.

In fact, in recent years, Seoul has been pulled apart in opposite directions – both by Washington, which expected Seoul to join in its Indo-Pacific initiative against China, and by Beijing, which put strong pressure on Seoul not to take a side but to stay neutral. The Moon government insisted that its relationship with the US and China is “not a subject of choice”, but in reality, Seoul framed the issue as a matter of taking sides between the two, and reacted simply by holding off choosing a side or making hard choices. That is, the Moon administration responded to the geopolitical ‘crossfire’ by taking a position of ‘strategic ambiguity’ on the one hand, and by implementing the NSP in a limited and purely functional manner on the other.

Will Seoul finally take on the Indo-Pacific?

Compared to Moon, South Korea’s new President Yoon seems to have a radically different strategic outlook and is therefore expected to make quite different choices in his key foreign policies. In particular, his approach to managing the relationships with the US and China, as well as his policies on regional affairs in the Indo-Pacific would be quite different to Moon’s. Criticising Moon’s approach of strategic ambiguity and calling it an approach “guided by a parochial and shortsighted conception of national interests”, Yoon emphasised that “South Korea should no longer be confined to the Korean Peninsula… [and] step up to the most important global challenges of our time”. Also, highlighting a deeper alliance with Washington as the central axis of Seoul’s foreign policy, he has vowed to seek a “comprehensive strategic alliance with Washington”, and “actively promote a free, open, and inclusive order in the Indo-Pacific”. In addition, he recently made a strong case that Seoul should “take on a greater role in fulfilling our responsibility as one of the top 10 economies in the world”.

Given his publicly stated positions and strategic orientations, the Yoon government is expected to prioritise expanding and substantiating its cooperation with Washington, not only at the bilateral level but also regarding the US regional Indo-Pacific agenda. In this respect, Yoon is likely to expand Seoul’s role in the issues of regional peace and security and to make greater endeavours to coordinate with other like-minded countries. However, this will be a challenging task for Yoon, because unlike other US allies like Japan and Australia, Korea has hardly participated in Indo-Pacific coordination until now. It remains to be seen how Seoul will manage its relations with China if, for example, it takes a clearer diplomatic position on regional security issues like the South China Sea, or takes on some coordinated actions with the US on major regional security issues.

Given his strategic outlook and policy orientations, it is unquestionable that Yoon and his foreign policy team will prioritise dealing with the most pressing challenges in the current geostrategic landscape of the Indo-Pacific region. It is also highly likely that, after completing a review of the outgoing Moon government’s policy, he will announce a new and more comprehensive regional strategy with ROK-US Indo-Pacific coordination at its core. However, the Yoon government’s specific policy choices will largely depend on how he articulates his regional vision and strategy toward the broader Indo-Pacific, as well as on how much strategic weight he places on coordination with like-minded countries in his overall Indo-Pacific framework.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Wongi Choe is a professor at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul. His recent works focus on why and how ROK engages (or not) in Indo-Pacific affairs. This article is excerpted from the author’s forthcoming chapter in an edited volume on South Korea’s regional initiative, New Southern Policy. Image Credit: Flickr/Republic of Korea.