Seoul's strategic choices

Seoul’s strategic future holds two paths. At the moment, these two paths are close enough that the centre of each overlaps with the other. In this overlapping section there are ten years of steady policy progress: increased missile payloads and range; communications and intelligence gathering satellites; a sturdy, prolific, export-oriented arms industry; steady progress towards a bluewater navy; and a competitive nuclear energy export industry.

Over the past week, subject to finalization of agreements, three more data points were added: OpCon transfer; nuclear submarines; and nuclear reprocessing.

Assuming ongoing U.S. efforts to sustain hegemony in East Asia (and this is in no way assured), there’s only one data point left before these paths begin to diverge: nuclear weapons. Where do these two paths go when they diverge?

One heads towards a niche, frontline role in the U.S. effort to contain China - a volatile and perilous path that seats Seoul’s sovereignty more than six thousand miles away in the war rooms of the Pentagon. The other heads towards armed neutrality - a fractious and politically precarious path of hypervigilance, apprehension and uncertainty.

Pursuing a niche, frontline role in Washington’s effort to contain China would lock South Korea more tightly into the U.S. alliance system, but narrows Seoul’s strategic autonomy. In this trajectory, Korea becomes a specialist contributor to a broader American-led deterrence architecture, supplying high-tech platforms, surveillance capabilities, and forward-deployed assets tailored to Indo-Pacific contingencies.

The path is volatile, because the U.S.–China competition is increasingly zero-sum, and perilous, because it transforms the Korean Peninsula from an already tense flashpoint into a critical node in a much larger rivalry. Korea secures influence within the alliance, but only by accepting deeper dependence on decisions it cannot ultimately control.

The alternative—armed neutrality—offers Seoul greater formal autonomy, but at the price of profound insecurity. To step outside the U.S.–China strategic frame, Korea would need to build and maintain a self-reliant defence posture capable of deterring both a nuclear North Korea and a suspicious China, all while convincing Washington that neutrality is not a pivot away from the alliance but a recalibration of national interest.

This is a fractious and politically precarious pathway that demands hypervigilance, sustained defence spending, and constant reassurance diplomacy. It is also a path of apprehension: neutrality offers no great-power umbrella, no automatic political ballast, and no guarantee that neighbours will accept Korea’s self-declared distance. The reward is autonomy; the risk is strategic isolation. Armed neutrality promises independence, but only if Seoul can endure the uncertainty that comes with carrying the full weight of its own security.

For two decades, Seoul has been hedging between these two paths. Most analysts interpreted it as the struggle to maintain ties with the region’s hegemon and the actor seeking to supplant it: South Korea hedging between the United States and China. It’s an easy interpretation to make. It fits snugly into the international relations frameworks that we’re told explains the world. But in my opinion, it’s surface level. It misses the very real, deeply historical and cultural driving force that sits underneath this decision-making.

At the heart of Korea’s decision-making lies something far older and more elemental than great-power balancing: a culturally embedded drive for self-determination forged through centuries of external influence. The Korean state’s modern quest for independence is not merely a diplomatic preference but a civilisational impulse shaped by repeated experiences of subjugation—Mongol oversight, Ming and Qing intervention, Japanese colonisation, and Cold War partition. Each episode reinforced the conviction that security outsourced is security imperilled, and that true sovereignty must be guarded with vigilance, capability, and unity.

Going further, you could argue it’s a village mentality — one built on concentric circles of trust and distrust that remain deeply embedded in Korean language and culture. For centuries, Korean communities relied on finely calibrated social boundaries: absolute trust within the family, cautious cooperation within the village, wary engagement with outsiders, and deep suspicion of distant powers. These gradations are still encoded in honorifics, interpersonal hierarchies, and the instinctive distinction between uri (our, belonging to the in-group) and nam (others). This cultural architecture shapes how Koreans intuitively assess risk and sovereignty.

This long arc of historical memory and culture infuses contemporary policymaking with a deep sensitivity to autonomy, even when outwardly masked by pragmatic alliance management or economic interdependence. When Korean leaders weigh alignment against neutrality, they are not only calculating material costs; they are responding to a cultural narrative that insists survival depends on maintaining the capacity to stand alone.

Humans are pretty weird. Ask them why they made a specific decision and they’ll give you a tidy, logical explanation — even when the real drivers are instinct, fear, habit, or the cultural narratives they’ve absorbed without ever noticing.

These overlapping paths explain the seemingly paradoxical decision-making of progressive administrations. The Lee Administration seeks to engage North Korea, seek reconciliation, and hold summits with Kim Jong-un, but it also seeks nuclear submarines that will make Kim Jong-un “lose sleep” (I guess if there is ever a summit, Kim will be really crabby, but I digress).

Some on the conservative side of politics think that those on the left are cunning and manipulative - armed neutrality would be a forerunner to unification, subjugation, and Chinese domination. Some on the progressive side of politics think that those on the right are foolhardy and naive - aligning with the U.S. will lead to South Korea seeing the opening salvos of a coming war. And there’s the rub. Internal division driven by competing outside forces is pretty much Korea’s greatest weakness.

Of course, analysts often see what they want to see - and our feeble human cognitive capacity forces us into situations where when we see a pattern, unseeing it requires sustained and focused effort. Maybe, I’m wrong. Maybe the musings of a sandal-wearing, pasta-eating political adviser from a peninsula on the other side of the Eurasian continent do have relevance to the Korea Peninsula? Maybe realism’s birth in the crowded city states of Italy and its development in the equally crowded but more pugnacious past of Europe does apply to Korea?

Regardless, the one certainty is that with time, South Korea’s hedging will get more and more difficult. One day, it will prove impossible. The past decade of hedging has been productive, even impressive, but it cannot last indefinitely. Eventually the final data point will be reached, the overlap will vanish, and those two strategic paths will diverge for good. Korea will have to choose.