[Column] Putting Korea back in the diplomatic game

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[Column] Putting Korea back in the diplomatic game

Michael Green

The author is CEO of the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

One of the great anomalies of the previous five years was the disappearance of Korea from the great game of geopolitics that had emerged with China’s new bellicosity and Russian revanchism. From Japan’s “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” to the announcement of the U.S.-U.K.-Australia Aukus agreement, the elevation of the Quad to a summit, and the proliferation of Indo-Pacific strategic approaches from Europe to Southeast Asia, there has been an explosion of diplomatic activism all around Korea.

And what did Korea, the country with the world’s ninth largest GDP, do over this same period? Basically nothing. Under the self-defeating rubric of “strategic ambiguity,” the government of Moon Jae-in stayed away from everybody and everything. While the other major and middle powers that should be Korea’s peers were building deep ties through minilateral and multilateral arrangements, the Moon government remained myopically fixated on using diplomacy with third countries to try to convince the Americans to make concessions to Pyongyang.

Thus European or Australian diplomats eager to engage with Seoul on the fluid geopolitics of the region were instead treated to requests that they pressure Washington to relax pressure on Pyongyang. Naturally, these close allies reported these diplomatic entreaties to Washington, steadily decreasing confidence among all the major democracies in Korea’s seriousness about shaping the contested geopolitical environment emerging around them all.

The Foreign Ministry would be quick at this point to explain that Seoul participated in the Mikta (Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey, Australia) grouping, but what exactly has Mikta achieved? The meetings largely consist of comparing the diverse experiences diverse middle powers — an interesting discussion perhaps but hardly the concerted action by like-minded countries one sees with the Quad, Aukus, or other minilaterals.
 
President Yoon Suk Yeol delivers an address on the 104th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement in Seoul. In the speech, he said, “Japan has transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner that shares the same universal values with us.” [YONHAP]

The Moon government can also point to the New Southern Policy (NSP) announced in 2017, but this too was more labelling than actual strategy. Samsung and other Korean conglomerates were already well into their own diversifying of production and supply chains away from China and towards countries like Vietnam. Korea has an excellent diplomatic toolkit — the Korea International Cooperation Agency (Koica) — but the NSP did not add much new to what Koica was already doing.

Fearful of offending China, the Moon government kept the NSP unilateral and thus lost opportunities for alignment with other like-minded states beyond explaining what Korea itself was doing. Perhaps in its final months, the Moon government realized the folly of this approach because Moon did have a visit to Australia that signaled the kind of diplomatic activism and alignment required in the new environment. But it was too little too late.

In its first ten months in office, the Yoon government has shown that Korea is back. His team of veteran foreign policy strategists quickly escaped from two flawed assumptions behind the Moon government’s approach to the world. The first flawed assumption by the previous government was that ignoring regional and global geopolitics would put Korea in a better position to deal with North Korea. Yoon’s team knows that the opposite is true — that building strategic partnerships in a time of perilous geopolitics expands Korea’s options to deal with Pyongyang’s provocations.

The second flawed assumption by the previous government — and many in the Park government before that — was the belief that Asia has become a bipolar theater in which the major strategic decisions will be made by Beijing and Washington as the other powers sit by hedging or hiding. The United States and Beijing are the two most powerful countries in military and economic terms, to be sure, but the Indo-Pacific is increasingly also a multipolar theater in which concerted action by major and middle powers like Korea, Japan, India or Australia can shape the environment. The bipolar assumption of Moon gave Korea no agency. The multipolar recognition of Yoon gives Korea new options to secure its future and reinforce stability.

Yoon’s government has seized on these opportunities, beginning with his participation with the leaders of Japan, Australia and New Zealand in the June 2022 NATO Summit. Because Yoon and his Asian colleagues took the security of Europe seriously after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe is now looking more seriously at how developments on the Korean peninsula or China impact them. The December 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy of the Yoon government then signaled that Seoul will align with the other maritime democracies to make the region more resilient — for the first time in three administrations.

Some have noted that China was barely mentioned in Seoul’s new strategy, but the same was true of the White House Indo-Pacific Strategy announced in early 2022. Korea and other like-minded states do not have to be “against” China: they can be “for” the Indo-Pacific and, with those diplomatic, security and development investments, help to blunt China’s coercion or revisionist advances.

Now Yoon’s government is showing real progress with the most important and most difficult Gordian knot at the center of this game — Japan. In November, Presidents Biden and Yoon and Prime Minister Kishida of Japan met in Cambodia and announced the trilateral partnership for the Indo-Pacific, building on a steady resumption of trilateral diplomatic coordination on North Korea and defense cooperation started at the beginning of the Yoon administration.

The initiation of the trilateral U.S.-Korea-Japan economic security dialogue at the end of February demonstrates that the two technology powerhouses in the Western Pacific will steadily align strategies with the United States and other like-minded states around supply chains, semiconductor technology controls and other critical areas of the new geopolitical game. As President Yoon put it on March 1: “Japan has transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner that shares the same universal values with us.” This is both true and politically brave, given distrust of Japan among many of Yoon’s fellow citizens.

The Japan puzzle will be more difficult than the other pieces of Yoon’s successful strategy. Tokyo and Seoul were wise to decouple economic and security cooperation from the contentious issues surrounding history and accountability for the past. The Blue House would ideally like to settle these issues once and for all with a compensation scheme for victims that would allow face-saving for Tokyo, but the skepticism in Japan runs very deep. Japanese corporate leaders want good relations with Korea, but are loathe to put any funds voluntarily into a settlement.

Legally, this runs the risk of opening them up to further pressure from other wartime victims’ descendants across Asia and the United States. They also worry that the far-right extremists in Japan will target them with sound trucks and social media attacks. And they will note that the Moon government reversed previous agreements made by the Park Geun-hye government with Japan so how can they be sure this will not just happen again?

Kishida’s relatively low level of public support also narrows Tokyo’s room for maneuver. So, despite the impressive progress in bilateral relations, the Japan piece of the strategy will take delicate diplomacy and political wisdom going forward. But if Yoon sticks to his strategy, he will get help from the United States and others and the common cause with Japan will steadily yield results in bilateral relations.
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