Yoon has left the building - but what happens to his foreign policy ideas? What happens to closer South Korea - U.S. relations, closer South Korea - Japan relations, and closer trilateral relations?
I’ve written often about the hollowness of Yoon’s foreign policy and the risks of accepting it at face value. As is often the case in the modern world, any analysis that doesn’t match our own attitudes and opinions is lost in the algorithmic ether as we sit in our own echo chambers.
The leaders of South Korea, the United States, and Japan announced the establishment of a trilateral secretariat during the APEC summit in November 2024. This institutionalization aims to strengthen security cooperation.
Yoon’s performance has been marked by a glaring gap between rhetoric and implementation: a president that nominally supports pro-US policies, but in practice is caught cursing US lawmakers on a hot mic; a president that nominally supports freedom, but in practice stumbles in support of Ukraine; a president that nominally stands for international norms and the rule of law, but in practice sparks a debate on securing nuclear weapons.
Seoul’s Indo-Pacific Strategy has been broadly welcomed by a number of states, but making it future proof won’t be an easy task.
