During his two years in office, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has espoused the need to uphold a rules-based international order and maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific. He rejected his predecessor’s timid fence-sitting policy of trying to balance South Korea’s security and economic relationships with the United States and China. Instead, Yoon declared that South Korea must never compromise on its core security interests and vowed to strengthen its alliance with the United States to counter the growing Chinese threat to the region.

In response to growing fears of Chinese military action against Taiwan, Yoon pledged South Korea would assume a greater international security role and join multilateral initiatives to defend democracies against attack or coercion. Seoul gradually became more forthright in articulating its concerns about a potential military contingency in the Taiwan Strait and increasingly defined Taiwanese security as directly affecting that of South Korea.

Yet, despite this new-found advocacy for regional security, South Korea remains reluctant to criticize China directly or define the measures it would undertake to uphold those values against regional threats. Seoul remains reluctant, if not resistant, to defining the role it would play if China were to invade Taiwan. Seoul’s reticence is due to its focus on the existential North Korean threat, fear of economic retaliation from China (its largest trading partner) and the perception that Taiwan is far away and not a South Korean responsibility.........

© The Korea Times