U.S. foreign policy and its lack of predictability now looks dangerous for South Korea—and that’s without considering the second and third-order effects.
Significance. Strategic flexibility — the concept that U.S. (and potentially South Korean) forces stationed on the Korean Peninsula will deploy regionally without explicit prior approval — remains one of the most contentious defense issues between Washington and Seoul. It has been conspicuously absent from electoral discourse for the presidential election.
U.S. soft power is disappearing faster than a bouffant comb-over on a windy day - and in Seoul the winds are blowing hard.
Strategic flexibility—the U.S. doctrine that deems forward-deployed forces, including those in South Korea, ready to respond to crises anywhere in the region—is knitting the Korean and Taiwan theaters together once again.
Geography is more than a backdrop—it often shapes the grand arcs of national strategy. While political will, technology, ideology, and the vagaries of fortune do override geography, it is always momentary. Like the rocks and earth on which it rests, geography tells tales over millenia, not centuries or decades.
At the moment, it’s impossible to escape. The parade of think tank briefs, university reports, blog posts, and earnest social media threads is already in full swing. After all, the moment seems irresistible — a relatively new U.S. president and a freshly minted South Korean one.
It was inevitable. Like watching porn in tracksuit pants, America’s left-leaning commentators can’t hide their fondness for Lee Jae-myung. A plucky human rights lawyer who survived child labor in a factory; a human rights lawyer; and someone who stared down authoritarianism at the barricades. It’s classic Western leftist fetishism—a script-ready narrative for a Michael Moore documentary. Unfortunately, this sentimental packaging misunderstands both Lee and Korea.
It didn’t take long. Just minutes after it became clear that Lee Jae-myung won South Korea’s presidential election, American conservative social media lit up with a verdict: “RIP South Korea.” According to Laura Loomer: “the communists have taken over.”
Attention has turned to the re-emergence of a Cold War-like division in East Asia, with China, North Korea, and Russia on one side and the United States, South Korea, and Japan on the other.
Every discussion about South Korea’s foreign policy options begins with the same unspoken constraint: what will Washington tolerate? Proposals for strategic realignment, closer ties with China, or regional multilateralism are not dismissed because they’re impossible—they’re dismissed because they’re implausible within the context of U.S. political expectations.
