Author: Kuyoun Chung
As great power competition intensifies, South Korea is coming under pressure to choose between the United States and China. At the same time, recognising its waning dominance in the region, Washington is probing the willingness of allies and partners to join a like-minded democratic coalition in confrontation with China.
The anti-access environment — layered by Chinese anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles, armed combat aircraft and submarines — is weakening the US capacity to maintain stability in the region.
China is realigning the US-led economic architecture to solidify its supply chains and increase the economic interdependence of other countries in the region. Hoping to become an indispensable player in East Asia, Beijing is also using its economic clout to weaken the cohesion of the US-led alliance system and bring US allies and partners closer to its orbit.
There is now a sense of urgency for the United States to forge and strengthen a more extensive web of like-minded ‘Indo-Pacific’ democracies. Such a coalition would be instrumental in slowing down the pace of geopolitical flux and reinforcing the hard power behind the liberal order that the Biden administration intends to restore.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) — comprising the United States, India, Japan and Australia — and Quad-plus, intend to multilateralise the US-led hub-and-spoke bilateral alliance system and encourage spoke-to-spoke cooperation. This is what the United States envisions as part of a networked security architecture.
But US allies and partners in the region have been reluctant to join this effort. The uncertain end-state of US–China competition — as well as concern over potential Chinese economic coercion — are impacting their decision. While US–China competition continues to serve as an organising principle for US foreign policy under the Biden administration, the prospect of complete decoupling and disengagement between these two great powers seems remote.
Washington may need to take a more nuanced approach and carefully distinguish like-situated countries, which mostly worry about the risk of great power competition, from like-minded countries, which are more willing to resist the decline of liberal order. Though these two groups are not necessarily exclusive, they prioritise different foreign policy goals according to their primary concern, different threat perception, economic interest and the level of resilience to resist Chinese coercion.
The United States needs to balance these potentially countervailing frames when mobilising allies and partners in the region to build a more inclusive and layered regional architecture. The Biden administration’s commitment to renewing US global leadership with strong reassurance measures will sustain this architecture, which was non-existent under the Trump administration’s ‘America First’ foreign policy.
Against this backdrop, South Korea, like other middle powers in the region, has hedged against the risk of great power competition and focused on its own foreign policy priority — North Korea. The Moon Jae-in administration prioritises foreign policy goals aimed at improving inter-Korean relations as a way to denuclearise the North’s nuclear weapons and sustain the peace process on the Korean Peninsula.
As long as North Korea is the core driver of South Korea’s foreign policy, Seoul needs to maintain a good relationship with China — North Korea’s main benefactor — to preserve the momentum of inter-Korean dialogue. This explains Seoul’s relatively accommodating foreign policy attitude towards China.
China’s economic coercion during the THAAD deployment dispute in 2016 drove a wedge in US–South Korea relations and revealed Seoul’s economic vulnerability to China. The recent Chinese request for South Korea to join Beijing’s global data security initiative seemed another attempt to keep South Korea from joining the US Clean Network initiative.
Despite such pressure from China, Washington’s hope of building on the Quad or the Quad-plus with South Korea may not be immediately fulfilled. Another factor explaining South Korea’s reticence towards the Quad is that — for now — it does not want the Quad-plus, or even an expanded Quad, to serve as an instrument to develop a regional block that further accelerates the pace of decoupling.
South Korea’s lukewarm attitude towards the Quad-plus does not imply a diminishing commitment to the US–South Korea alliance. South Korea still wants to deepen bilateral relations with the United States beyond the traditional military domains. South Korea is also likely to channel its support for the Biden administration’s forthcoming strategy on the Indo-Pacific, as it aligned its New Southern Policy with the Trump administration’s ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy.
But if China continues to encroach on South Korea’s vital security interests indefinitely, a time may come when Seoul is no longer a ‘weak link’ in the US-led East Asian security triangle.
Kuyoun Chung is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Kangwon National University, Chuncheon.
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