Trapped Into An Existential Cage: Korea’s Hedging Between China and The US

Since taking office, President Biden has made clear that his administration’s primary foreign policy challenge was China’s increasingly aggressive actions that threaten the international order cultivated over decades by the United States. Although the war in Ukraine has modified the set of priorities, China’s “challenge” remains exceptionally important for the current American administration, which has gradually framed the relationship with Beijing as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. This fierce competition between China and the US has had, of course, several implications for all other actors in the Indo-Pacific region: the Republic of Korea is undoubtedly one of these. Seoul, in fact, has close security and economic relations with both Beijing and Washington, and, up to this moment, because of the uncertainty that lies at the very foundation of US-China rivalry, it has preferred not to show any particular inclination on who to affiliate with. This attitude is originated by the fact that in the security realm South Korea has always been inclined to align with the United States, while, on the other side, Beijing has surpassed the US as Seoul’s number one economic partner, in 2004. In addition, China has always played an important role for South Korea given its close relation with North Korea. This equation – US major security ally and China largest trading partner – has forced Seoul not to take any precise position. Against this backdrop, this contribution aims at looking at South Korea’s ambiguous position by adopting the theoretical lens of “hedging”, which can be defined as “insurance-seeking behavior under situations of high uncertainty and high stakes, where a national state avoids taking sides and pursues opposite measures vis-à-vis competing powers to have a fallback position” (as defined by C.C. Kuik, “Getting Hedging Right: a Small-State Perspective,” in China International Strategy Review, 3(2), 2021, pp. 300-315). Under this light, the strategies of the two most recent South Korean administrations (Park Geun-hye, 2013-17 and Moon Jae-in, 2017-22) will be scrutinized, in order to demonstrate how and why – given high uncertainty circumstances – Seoul has “instinctively” decided to hedge. In addition, the current administration’s position will be carefully examined, to understand whether President Yoon Suk-yeol will abandon this posture by choosing to align with the United States and Japan, while adopting a non-confrontational attitude towards China. During the electoral campaign, in fact, Yoon has pledged to strengthen the military alliance with the United States by not only allowing the deployment of additional THAAD (a system that was highly criticized by China during Park Geun-hye’s presidency) but also supporting South Korea’s participation in security “platforms” such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Although Yoon accepted that China is an invaluable trading partner for Seoul, he believes that countering China’s rise through the strengthening of the alliance with Washington serves South Korea’s national interests well. However, it remains to be seen if and to what extent Yoon will modify South Korea’s attitude or will keep the “hedging” strategy implemented by his predecessors in order not to infuriate Beijing, as it has recently happened with the South Korean president snubbing Nancy Pelosi after her debated visit to Taiwan. Finally, it will examine whether the Yoon administration is convinced, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that it is imperative for South Korea, a middle democratic power, to cooperate closely with other democratic countries to defend the regional status quo.