By Tom Fowdy
On June 3, Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party was elected president of South Korea, ending a six-month window of political turmoil that started with Yoon Seok-yeol's disastrous attempt at declaring martial law, culminating in his removal. Lee's relatively comfortable victory, despite not being the most popular individual even for his own party voters, was endemic of the shockwave the attempted coup had caused in Korean society at large.
With Yoon's regime gone, Lee's Presidency will usher in a course correction in South Korean foreign policy and diplomacy. While his predecessor preferred antagonism towards North Korea, passive aggression towards China, and alignment towards Japan and the United States, Lee Jae-myung, as is typical of the Democratic Party of Korea, prefers a more conciliarity posture towards the former two. South Korean liberals in particular seek to build limited peace with Pyongyang and expand ties where possible, reverting to the heavily McCarthyist and anti-Communist posture taken by the People Power Party (PPP) Conservatives.
Over the past few years, the initial peace regime towards North Korea built by the Moon Jae-in Presidency of 2017-2022 has collapsed. There are many structural reasons why: First, the United States is the geopolitical keyholder of ties between North and South Korea by virtue of having military supremacy on the peninsula and leverage over the application of sanctions both unilaterally and at the United Nations level. Talks between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump famously failed to make headway because the US policy insisted on total denuclearisation as a precondition for any concessions, which is strategically unacceptable to Pyongyang.
Second, the world changed, for the worse. The COVID pandemic came in 2020, with North Korea shutting itself down to the world immediately (opportunistically, should I say). Then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Both events transformed the geopolitical climate into a hostile, multipolar environment of competing states. This has given North Korea political space to strengthen its political ties with the Russian Federation, more bandwidth to expand its nuclear capabilities, and more leverage to avoid having to submit to Washington's demands. Overall, these global, structural changes also allowed Kim Jong-un to stamp out domestic reform, reverse creeping liberalisation, and harden his rule.
By the time this shift occurred, Yoon Seok-yeol had been elected to office in the South and hastily dismantled Moon's legacy for a more hostile approach. The DPRK responded by symbolically ripping up its longstanding position for co-existence with South Korea, and trolling the south on a grand scale by sending hundreds of balloons filled with excrement. These changes will make it more challenging for Lee Jae-myung to restart a "peace" approach with North Korea, not least because Pyongyang does admittedly demonstrate vindictiveness when things don't go its way.
Typically, North Korea makes agreements, but then, as soon as the South does not do what it wants, it resorts to performative hostility. For example, Moon's government invested in a $30 million or so liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea blew it up just a year later. The limits of North-South engagement are real, and thus while Lee can stabilise things, there's only so far he can go. Beyond the North Korea issue, he is likely to engage China more too and is likely to expressly reverse the pro-Japan push of Yoon. Similar to what Moon did, it is likely Lee will deliberately create tensions by digging up the comfort women and wartime labour issues again. While this is domestic theatre, it is also structurally necessary from a foreign policymaking point of view as alignment with Japan is usually oriented against North Korea, and Tokyo and the US subsequently seek to "lock in" the South. Thus, the Democrats deliberately shift this balance by engaging Beijing and Pyongyang more.
Ultimately, my experience has shown me that South Korean administrations can simply flip switches to weaponise nationalistic sentiment against certain countries very quickly, a phenomenon which, while not unique to South Korea, is exacerbated more severely due to the hyper nationalistic nature of Korean society and its preference for social conformity. We have seen how these public opinion cycles have been used against both Japan and China, which are both rooted in the inherent trauma and insecurity of Korean identity in the historical legacies of Chinese and Japanese dominance, respectively.
Thus, for South Korean foreign policy, even as it is aligned with the US, everything becomes a preference of "which" country the administration will choose to tilt towards and antagonise. This time round, it will be more peaceful gestures to North Korea, likely again goading the Trump administration to engage with Kim, a cordial attitude to Beijing, and likely coldness towards Japan. However, we might be fooled into thinking any of this will make a change to the country's status quo. It never has, and in this geopolitical era, with North Korea's 1990s and early 2000s isolation gone, it probably never will.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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