What the US can expect from South Korea’s incoming president

Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s president-elect, will be the first new leader of a U.S. ally in the post-Ukraine era. Russia’s invasion is far from over, and may be transpiring on another continent, but its impact will be felt far beyond the immediate neighborhood.  Comforting assumptions about a “rules-based international order” have been brutally shattered, hard men stalk the world and nations commit unprovoked aggression.

The still-divided Korean Peninsula should have been a stark reminder of these realities.  The West, however, looked aside even when Russia portioned modern-day Ukraine by force in 2014, annexing Crimea and creating two “autonomous republics.” Whether Ukraine, now locked in mortal combat with a nuclear power, will be further partitioned remains to be seen.

President-elect Yoon need not look far to grasp the potential impact of conventional war against nuclear powers. The North Korean prison state has a growing nuclear arsenal, and the Peninsula borders China and Russia, two other nuclear powers. Northeast Asia is a crowded nuclear neighborhood. Fortunately, leading a U.S. treaty ally, Yoon will have our long, strong commitment to defend his country and American forces garrisoned there. 

South Koreans weren’t always so fortunate. They have never forgotten Dean Acheson’s words in January 1950 that drew the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia and excluded South Korea. In June, the North invaded. Koreans haven’t forgotten that either. Thirty years after the Soviet Union dissolved, Ukraine was also on the wrong side of a Washington-drawn line. Coincidence?

Yoon will lead a deeply split country. In this century, Seoul’s presidents have alternated between those advocating a “sunshine policy” toward Pyongyang and those taking a harder line. Yoon is of the latter school, but his victory margin was under 1 percent of the popular vote, and South Korea’s National Assembly has a substantial “sunshine” majority until the next legislative election in 2024.

Russia’s naked aggression, however, affords Yoon’s People Power Party a strong opportunity to overcome internal foreign policy divisions and achieve its campaign pledges of higher defense budgets; closer relations with Washington; and more cooperation with other like-minded Indo-Pacific states. 

As Yoon’s May 10 inauguration approaches, Ukraine’s grinding war will remind his transition team that, pressing domestic economic priorities notwithstanding, South Korea needs a more resolute national security policy. Inevitably, North Korea will be the central focus. Yoon should prioritize Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, which his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, always seemed to be sliding away from.  This is not to diminish reunifying the Peninsula as a policy goal, but to recognize that reunification will only come with the disappearance of Pyongyang’s hereditary communist dictatorship.

That brings us to Korea’s real problem: China. Beijing is responsible for the North’s intransigence and is the ultimate guarantor of its very existence — realities that can no longer be ignored, either in Washington’s relations with Beijing or Seoul’s. Both South Korea and America have extensive economic relations with China, making any strategic dispute potentially difficult. But it is better to understand and consider how to mitigate such costs now, not later. Moreover, any serious effort at reuniting the two Koreas in the manner of the German model, with the South essentially absorbing the North and transforming its society, requires Chinese acquiescence at least. 

The evolving China-Russia entente will see the Korean Peninsula as a major focal point. Geography so dictates. As the Ukraine crisis pounds on, Beijing is scrutinizing how Washington and the West as a whole perform, to understand better the implications for its aspirations in the Indo-Pacific.

Yoon will take office with the entente in its early stages, but Koreans have deep historical memories of how the post-1949 USSR-PRC axis empowered Kim Il-sung’s invasion of the South, four subsequent Cold War decades of threats and dangers, and Pyongyang’s continuing threat. With one of the entente’s partners perfectly content to use force across its borders, Yoon and his advisers can hardly miss the point. The spate of North Korean ballistic missile launches this year simply underlines that Pyongyang’s nuclear menace, by endangering the United States itself, also gravely threatens South Korea and others, not to mention the North’s substantial conventional capabilities.

The real question is not whether Yoon understands the risks he faces, but whether Washington does. The lessons from Ukraine to date are mixed. The Biden administration’s rhetoric has far exceeded its performance, utterly failing to deter Vladimir Putin’s invasion, and now seemingly deterred itself from acting effectively in response to Putin’s aggression. Republicans, almost unanimously, have at least escaped their recent aberrations to oppose Russia’s invasion. Obviously, however, they don’t hold executive power, which is the only true test of insight and resolve.

Fortunately, Japan has had no trouble getting the point. In the first call between Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and President-elect Yoon, both pledged closer cooperation with the U.S. Their conversation was only an initial formality, but even so it signifies significant progress in badly damaged Seoul-Tokyo relations. Historical animosities between the two countries are deep, but the current moment may be opportune to begin drawing a line under that history.

In the Indo-Pacific, there is considerable creative ferment underway, from the emerging India-Japan-Australia-America Quad to the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine project.  These and other rising combinations recognize the overarching threat China poses, but hardly constitute what the region has long lacked, namely dense alliance structures like NATO.

South Korea can easily participate in what European theorists call in their region “variable geometry” without risking China’s ire, at least for now. And if China’s ire is aroused, Seoul should understand that tolerance for dissenting viewpoints is not one of Xi Jinping’s strong points. The one trouble spot where South Korea must step up, Chinese ire or not, is Taiwan. Tokyo understands that an attack on Taiwan is an attack on Japan, and Seoul must draw the comparable conclusion for South Korea.

President-elect Yoon can expect only a limited honeymoon. He and his team, obviously contemplating major foreign and defense policy changes, must keep Ukraine top of mind. If so, they can contribute significantly to helping Washington and the West generally in the uncertain and threatening security environment now before us.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.