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CALL ME, BEEP ME, IF YOU WANT TO REACH ME — When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in South Korea late Wednesday after her visit to Taiwan, she found a changed geopolitical landscape. South Korean President Yoon Seok-youl decided not to meet Pelosi in person, opting instead for a phone call with Pelosi the next day. And today, China halted its relations with the U.S. on a range of issues, including talks on climate change and military ties, in retaliation for Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
To better understand why the South Korean president — who campaigned on building closer ties with the United States — avoided an in-person meeting with the Speaker of the House (the official explanation was that he was on vacation, and that evening attended a play and had dinner with the actors), POLITICO’s Minho Kim spoke with Patricia M. Kim, an expert on Chinese foreign policy and regional security dynamics in East Asia at the Brookings Institution. This interview has been edited.
Walk us through reasons why Yoon might not have met Pelosi in person. What’s the message that he was trying to send?
South Korea is currently juggling a number of competing interests. While the Yoon administration has vowed to enhance defense cooperation with the United States to deter the growing nuclear and missile threat from North Korea, it also needs Beijing’s cooperation to manage the North Korean nuclear challenge.
Beijing has made it clear that it opposes deepening U.S.-ROK security cooperation, especially in missile defense. In light of these competing objectives, Yoon opted instead to share a phone conversation with Pelosi, which was intended to be a “middle of the road” arrangement that would upset neither the U.S. or Beijing.
Of course, this seems to have satisfied no one and this episode will likely become a political vulnerability for the administration.
How have previous South Korean presidents dealt with tensions between the United States and China?
South Korea has always faced the dilemma of being proximate to China, and in more recent decades, deeply economically intertwined with the country. And Beijing has never been shy about using its economic and diplomatic leverage over Seoul to try to drive a wedge between the U.S.-ROK alliance and to demand South Korea respect its strategic interests. In 2017, Beijing dealt a heavy blow to South Korean businesses that depend on the Chinese market as retaliation for Seoul’s decision to accept the deployment of U.S. THAAD batteries. At the time, the United States was criticized for not coming to South Korea’s aid. This experience still reverberates inside the South Korean political arena and continues to shape South Korean decision-making, especially on sensitive issues that involve China.
The Biden administration has made strides to restore confidence in the U.S.-ROK alliance, ensuring that its agenda in the Indo-Pacific, including with South Korea, is not just focused on security issues but also economic cooperation. Nevertheless, Seoul and other U.S. partners are still heavily economically intertwined with China and therefore must live with the daunting prospect of economic retaliation from Beijing.
