Caught in a rip: South Korea and the Taiwan question
Every Australian kid grows up knowing what to do when caught in a rip. When the weight of the Pacific crashes onto the beach and funnels back through a narrow channel, it drags everything with it out to sea. One moment you’re standing firm on the sandbar, the next your feet are swept away and you’re being pulled toward Vanuatu. In that moment you face three choices: fight the current head-on; surrender and let it carry you wherever it wants; or ride with it just long enough to slip free, before circling back to shore.
During the Biden Administration and now under the second Trump Administration, South Korea’s strategists have had their feet washed off the strategic sandbar and are caught in a rip.
The rip South Korea faces is the looming prospect of a Taiwan contingency. The prevailing current is Washington’s demand that allies fall into line should conflict erupt.
Given its geography, economic dependence on China, and its ever-troublesome neighbor to the north, South Korea has long played the role of the cautious child with floaties, splashing along the shoreline while others ventured deeper. Now, in a poor swimmer’s nightmare, the Biden and Trump administrations have tossed South Korea straight into the center of the rip. The full force of U.S. expectations is dragging it out to sea.
Should South Korea swim against the rip; let the rip decide its fate; or swim with the rip to escape its full force, before circling back to shore?
Swimming against the rip. For decades, there’s been activists who tried to swim directly against the rip—trade unionists, extreme leftists, and a handful of intellectuals who framed the alliance as the root of subordination and insecurity. They paddled hard, arms thrashing against the weight of the ocean, insisting that decoupling from Washington or pivoting toward Pyongyang or Beijing could deliver true autonomy. But like swimmers fighting the ocean, their strokes exhausted them. National security zealotry, tides of institutional dependence, elite consensus, and U.S. leverage was too strong.
Instead of escaping the rip, those who swim against it are left politically stranded—marginalized in mainstream discourse, dismissed as unrealistic, and ultimately too tired to mount serious resistance when the next wave of alliance orthodoxy crashed ashore. Don’t swim against the rip, you’ll drown.
Letting fate decide. The mainstream consensus in South Korea is that Seoul’s interests and Washington’s are not just aligned, but identical. Whatever the U.S. position, it becomes the Korean position—no questions asked. This mindset is the product of epistemic capture.
Epistemic capture occurs when a policy community so thoroughly internalizes the worldview, language, and priorities of a dominant partner that it loses the ability to generate independent perspectives. Unlike simple influence, which still leaves room for negotiation, capture predetermines the entire framework of debate: the categories of thought, the assumptions about threats and allies, even the very definition of “rational” strategy all mirror the stronger partner’s outlook.
In South Korea, epistemic capture has been cemented by decades of alliance management, educational exchanges, youth programs, and institutional dependency on U.S. security thinking. To comment on strategy is to depend on think tanks, corporate partners, academia, or government funding—most of which come from entities unwilling to back anyone who strays too far from the alliance line.
The result is a strategic community that rarely asks whether Taiwan is vital to Korea’s survival. They debate only the modalities of support, never the premise. Compliance is achieved without coercion, narrowing the scope of imagination before genuine debate can even begin.
The danger is that this consensus comes at a moment of profound upheaval. U.S. primacy is eroding, Washington’s interests in the region are declining, China’s role as a cornerstone of the future regional and multilateral order is expanding, Japan is rearming, and middle powers from India to Indonesia are reassessing their strategies.
Even the U.S.–ROK alliance is no longer stable; American politics now treats alliances as transactional, subject to tariffs, troop withdrawals, or demands for cash. To bet everything on alliance solidarity in such a moment is a high-risk strategy.
After years of sidestepping the U.S.–China confrontation, South Korea now finds itself in the center—indeed, on the frontline. It’s as if Seoul showed up late to the party, already drunker than everyone else, and picked a fight with the biggest man in the room. Should war break out over Taiwan, South Korea would face massive Chinese retaliation—economic, cyber, and potentially military. Deterrence against North Korea would collapse overnight.
In the face of a nuclear threat from the North or a wider conflict with China, U.S. assurances are meaningless. Korea, as it exists today, would cease to exist. Think Ukraine, add Gaza, and multiply it by ten.
And yet, these risks are barely discussed in Korean policy circles. The epistemic capture is so complete that letting the rip wash the country out to sea feels like the only choice.
Swimming with the rip. Beneath the mainstream consensus—and largely invisible to most U.S. analysts—are a number of South Korean strategists who choose to swim with the rip to escape its full force, before circling back to shore. They understand that outright resistance is futile: the institutional current of the alliance is too strong, and the cost of open defiance too high. Yet they also recognize the danger of blind compliance.
By moving with the current, they conserve their energy, adopting the language of alliance solidarity and nodding along with Washington’s Taiwan framing, all the while waiting for the chance to angle sideways and reassert Korea’s priorities. They stress Korea’s role in supporting U.S. forces from the peninsula and frame Seoul as an enduring, existential threat to China through the instability of a collapsed or insecure North Korea.
All the while, they are biding their time. Whoever emerges dominant in the region—Washington or Beijing—it is better for Korea to be aligned with the winner. This is tactical navigation: an effort to avoid drowning while still seeking a path back to strategic ground that serves Korea’s own interests, rather than merely reinforcing America’s.
In the end, South Korea’s dilemma is not whether it can outswim the rip, but whether it even recognizes that it is caught in one.
The choice between fighting, surrendering, or navigating tactically will determine not just its role in a Taiwan contingency, but the very survival of its sovereignty as a middle power in an unraveling order.
For South Korea’s strategists, to swim blindly against the current is suicide, to drift passively is submission, and to swim with the rip requires foresight and courage that few in Seoul have yet shown. Debate on the topic is not readily welcomed. The tragedy is that by the time South Korea’s strategic community seriously debates the risk, the shoreline will have already disappeared from sight.
