Misunderstanding Seoul in Washington

John Mearsheimer normally makes a lot of sense to me. His work is easy to follow and his ability to communicate to an audience unparalleled. But when talking about the Korean Peninsula, he tends to leave a lot out.

In a recent podcast (I actually looked for which one it was, but he does so many, I can’t find it!), he reiterated the foundational principle of the structural realist worldview: weaker states prefer to ally with distant great powers rather than nearby ones. This logic, he argued, explains South Korea’s consistent preference for alliance with the United States over accommodation with China.

Put simply, geography matters. Nearby powers are threats; distant powers are useful hedges. This is not irrational behavior—it’s a structural imperative of international politics.

But here’s the problem: that framework assumes that Korean leaders see the world in the same way American and European realists do. It presumes a universal mindset grounded in European experiences and strategic traditions, and it maps those directly onto East Asia.

It’s a tidy model, and it works well for explaining much of the world. But it only scratches the surface of how Korean leaders actually make strategic choices and it misses one very large problem: South Korea’s foreign policy decision-makers operate on two distinct levels.

The outer, more visible layer of South Korean strategy is built on imported structural realism. It’s a legacy of U.S. influence since 1945; the fact that most academics and commentators are trained in the U.S; and the fact that to be an academic or even government official, the benefits (funding and advancement) largely depends on supporting the U.S. It’s the epitome of epistemic capture.

From the American perspective, Korea is a textbook case for alliance with a distant hegemon. U.S. strategists assume that proximity equals threat. The logic runs like this: China and Japan are too close, too strong, and historically too willing to intervene in Korean affairs. The United States, on the other hand, is far away—powerful enough to deter aggressors, but too distant to impose direct territorial control.

This mirrors Britain’s role in Europe as an offshore balancer. In European history, smaller continental states often sought Britain’s help to counter nearby threats like France or Prussia. Mearsheimer’s thinking grows directly out of this tradition. In the American telling, Korea’s alliance with the U.S. is the rational outcome of structural geography.

And at the surface level, it seems to work. Korean officials often frame their policies in these terms—emphasizing deterrence, interoperability, and shared security objectives with Washington. They speak the language of U.S. strategic doctrine because doing so keeps the alliance functional; keeps Washington reassured; and ensures the individuals involved funding and advancement.

But this is not the whole story. In fact, it’s not even the most important layer.

Beneath the imported realist language lies a much older and more resilient operating system: the Korean tradition of managing hierarchy and asymmetry.

For centuries, Korea has existed between greater powers—China to the west, Japan to the east, and the steppe empires to the north. Its survival strategy was not based on offshore balancing; there was no “Britain” in East Asia. Instead, the goal was to navigate hierarchical relationships without losing autonomy.

During the Joseon Dynasty, this meant a carefully managed tributary relationship with Ming (and later Qing) China—ritualized deference in return for non-interference in domestic governance. This was not submission; it was strategic insulation. The practice, known as sadae (“serving the great”) diplomacy, allowed Korea to avoid direct military conflict with China while preserving internal sovereignty. In parallel, kyorin (“neighborly relations”) diplomacy managed ties with Japan and other neighbors.

This tradition instilled instincts very different from those embedded in European balance-of-power theory. Where the European realist sees proximity as a permanent threat to be countered, the Korean realist often sees proximity as an enduring reality to be accommodated, managed, and carefully shaped.

That deep layer still influences decision-making today. Korean leaders know that China is not just a potential adversary—it is a neighbor, an economic partner, and a cultural presence that cannot be wished away. The goal is not permanent alignment against China, but managed coexistence.

These two levels—deep cultural-historical realism and shallow imported structural realism—do not always align.

From the U.S. perspective, China’s rise demands containment, and the Korean Peninsula is a strategic platform for that effort. From Korea’s deeper perspective, China’s rise demands caution, hedging, and channels for dialogue.

This tension was on display during the 2017 THAAD missile defense dispute. To the United States, deploying THAAD was a straightforward deterrent against North Korea. To China, it was a move in a larger containment strategy. For Korea, it was a trap—alienating Beijing without decisively improving national security. The Moon Jae-in administration’s “Three No’s” policy toward China (no additional THAAD, no missile defense integration, no trilateral alliance with the U.S. and Japan) was not a rejection of the U.S. alliance—it was a deep-layer response to the risks of antagonizing a proximate power.

Washington saw hesitation; Seoul saw prudence.

The shallow layer—structural realism as taught in America’s school of international relations—frames Korea’s public alliance language. But it is the deep layer that ultimately shapes Korea’s strategic limits and red lines.

American policymakers often misread this. They assume that because Korean officials use familiar realist vocabulary, they share identical threat perceptions and strategic priorities. Particularly when they’re flying in for three days of meetings with a cosmopiltan epistemic elite that knows what needs to be said.

I was once adminished by one such fly-in fly-out senior academic who in justifying his stance on Korea’s foreign policy noted “I have great friends in Korea”. Such people may have “great friends” in Korea, but most assuredly don’t have a clue about what the concept of “friend” even means in Korean society.

For those who really know Korea, it’s easy to understand that Korean leaders are operating in two modes at once:

• Outward-facing mode: speaking in U.S.-derived strategic terms to maintain alliance cohesion and American security guarantees.
• Inward-facing mode: navigating the long-term imperative of surviving between giants without being absorbed into their orbit.

This duality is not a sign of duplicity. It’s a survival mechanism—one that predates the U.S. alliance by centuries.

Structural realism assumes universality: given certain geographic facts, all rational states will make the same choices. This works well when explaining the behavior of European states in the 18th or 19th centuries. But it can become culturally myopic when applied wholesale to East Asia.

It’s even possible to argue that the very fundamentals of structural realism, that the interaction between states occurs in an anarchic system, is not necessarily true for states further down the international ranking of power. There is order, there are rules, there are regulations and norms—it’s just that they are always set by the most powerful state. For a non-great power, anarchy doesn’t exist, but hierarchy always exists.

Rationality is not free-floating—it is shaped by historical experience and strategic culture. Korea’s rationality is not identical to Britain’s or Poland’s. A country whose historical security was built on managing the most powerful nearby state will not automatically embrace a distant power’s containment strategy as its own.

The question is not whether Korea is rational. It is: whose rationality is it using?

If South Korea’s foreign policy operates on these two levels, then American policymakers must stop assuming the shallow layer tells the whole story.

When Washington pressures Seoul to take harder positions against China, it is asking Korea to override its deep layer in favor of the shallow one. Sometimes Korea will comply—especially when North Korea’s provocations sharpen the case for U.S. protection. But in the long run, Korea will revert to its historical habit: hedging, balancing, and avoiding full commitment to either giant.

U.S. officials may see this as wavering. In reality, it is consistency—consistency with a centuries-old strategic tradition that has kept Korea intact despite its precarious location.

South Korea’s alliance with the United States fits neatly into the surface logic of structural realism, and Mearsheimer’s distant-ally preference explains only part of the picture. But the deeper, older layer of Korean strategic thought operates on a different wavelength—one that values managed proximity over outright opposition, and which sees survival not in permanent alignment but in perpetual calibration.

Ignoring that deep layer is not just an analytical error—it is a strategic blind spot. To truly understand Korea’s choices, Washington must see beyond the language it taught Seoul, and start listening to the instincts Seoul has inherited from a much longer history.