Expanding diplomatic frontiers to Indo-Pacific

President Yoon Suk Yeol embarks on a five-night, seven-day trip to Indonesia and India Tuesday. He will participate in the Asean Plus Three summit in Jakarta and move on to New Delhi to attend the Group of 20 Summit this weekend. In an interview with the Associated Press earlier, the president expressed the need for the international community to deal with the deepening North Korean nuclear and missile threats and closely cooperate with one another. Yoon wants to use the diplomatic stages of the Asean and G20 summits to demand international coordination to tackle the uninterrupted provocations from the North.

Whether Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend the G20 summit is not clear. But given the scheduled attendance of Prime Minister Li Qiang in the Asean summit, what concerns us is whether a high-level meeting will be held among South Korea, China and Japan in Jakarta — and in what format. Whether the leaders of South Korea, the United States and Japan will have another tripartite summit after an earlier one at Camp David is also attracting attention.

At the first exclusive trilateral summit last month at the presidential retreat in Maryland, the three leaders underscored cooperation with the Asean and island states in the Pacific and agreed on policy coordination with countries in the Indo-Pacific theater. Under the same context, President Yoon must fully explain his administration’s new Indo-Pacific strategy and seek cooperation from those countries to help strengthen Korea’s diplomacy as a middle power.

The government’s Indo-Pacific strategy is aimed to maximize national interests with Asean and India, whose power grows on the international stages. To accomplish that goal, the government must recognize the importance of India, whose population exceeded that of China’s last year and has emerged as the biggest market, and reinforce bilateral relations. South Korea also needs to strengthen economic cooperation with Vietnam and Indonesia to find new business opportunities after China’s economy has shrunk.

The presidential office at Yongsan said that Yoon will aggressively push for solidarity with members of Asean, engage in diplomacy befitting its status as a global middle power, and make an all-out effort to host the 2030 Busan Expo during the visits.

Yoon also plans to have consecutive bilateral summits with the heads of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Cambodia, Cook Islands, India, Spain, Argentina and Mauritius to seek their cooperation in bringing the Expo to Busan. We hope he helps bolster our security and restore economic vitality through the Asean and G20 summits in Jakarta and New Delhi.