South Korea’s new president is Lee Jae-myung, from the liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK). He succeeds Yoon Suk-yeol, the disgraced former president from the conservative People Power Party (PPP), whose martial law declaration last December led to his impeachment and subsequent removal from office.
Some analysts have rushed to argue that Lee will reverse Yoon’s conservative foreign-policy principles. Whereas Yoon emphasized the centrality of the U.S.-South Korea alliance, promoted trilateral cooperation with the United States and Japan, and took a tough stance on China and North Korea, they believe Lee will follow his liberal predecessors and seek a balanced relationship between the United States and China, weaken cooperation with Japan, and retreat from the global stage to pursue engagement and accommodation with North Korea.
Though Lee has vowed not to “unnecessarily antagonize” China and said that he will seek dialogue with Pyongyang, these early predictions miss a crucial point: South Korean foreign and security policy has remained fairly constant in recent decades, regardless of whichever party is in office. South Korea has a long-standing grand strategy, and though the rhetoric and some priorities will certainly change between administrations, the substance of South Korean foreign policy is unlikely to change dramatically under Lee.
Throughout his campaign, Lee presented himself as a pragmatic, rather than value-driven, leader. In his inaugural address, he cast his foreign policy as “practical diplomacy centered on national interest.” But what will this mean in practice?
Though South Korean liberals, including Lee, have sometimes been critical of the U.S.-South Korea alliance, Lee has repeatedly made clear that the alliance will be the cornerstone of his foreign and security policy—like every other South Korean president of the past seven decades. In fact, reinforcing the alliance was the top foreign-policy pledge that Lee made during his inaugural address. Even as U.S. President Donald Trump makes it less reliable, the alliance will remain central to Seoul’s international posture for the foreseeable future.
On the economic front, Lee has stressed that reaching an agreement with the United States to reduce or remove the Trump administration’s tariffs is “the most pressing matter” for Seoul to address. After all, South Korea’s exports to the United States are now roughly equal in size to the share of its exports going to China, with each of them accounting for around 20 percent of South Korean exports last year. Simply put, Lee cannot pursue his pro-growth agenda without removing U.S. trade and investment barriers.
In regard to security, South Korea is bracing for a discussion about the number, purpose, and cost of maintaining U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula.
The Trump administration has asked Seoul to pay more to host U.S. troops and is reportedly considering reducing their number. Multiple U.S. officials have indicated that U.S. troops stationed in South Korea could be deployed to fight a war against China in the Taiwan Strait if necessary. This so-called strategic flexibility, meaning that U.S. troops stationed in South Korea can be deployed outside of the Korean Peninsula, is not new. But Lee will effectively be the first South Korean leader to grapple with the possibility of strategic flexibility being used in a Taiwan contingency.
Lee has been quiet on this matter so far, yet his pragmatic approach to foreign policy will probably mean quietly acquiescing to U.S. demands while limiting discussion in public so as not to antagonize China—which is not a significant difference from how the Yoon government would have handled it.
South Korean liberals tend to argue that the U.S. alliance saps South Korean autonomy and was a key reason why it took so long to become a democracy. Various opinion and news articles have thus portrayed liberal presidents such as Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in as anti-American. Accordingly, some commentators have already cast doubt on Lee’s willingness to work with the United States.
However, both former liberal presidents actually forged stronger ties with the United States. Roh did not hesitate to deploy South Korean troops to Iraq in support of the United States and also signed the KORUS free trade agreement. For his part, Moon agreed to continue the deployment of the United States’ THAAD anti-missile system—a move opposed by China—and explicitly linked his New Southern Policy to Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Historically, even if liberals previously criticized the U.S.-South Korea alliance, they have supported stronger relations with Washington during election campaigns and once in office. So far, there is no indication that Lee will be any different.
Lee’s critics argue that the new South Korean president is going to seek accommodation with China, even pursuing a middle ground between Washington and Beijing, similar to the portrayal of Moon’s strategic ambiguity approach. But if anything, Lee’s path may resemble that of his conservative predecessor, Yoon.
Moon may have talked about taking a middle position between the United States and China, but in practice he aligned himself with many U.S. policy priorities opposing China. Then, under Yoon, tensions with China increased because of his vocal support for U.S. positions on the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, along with his emphasis on trilateral cooperation with Washington and Tokyo. But Yoon also sought to improve ties with Beijing. His last noteworthy foreign-policy action before his martial law declaration was meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November 2024. Notably, the Yoon government also invited Xi to visit South Korea last year, which would have been Xi’s first visit to the country since 2014.
Similarly, Lee has indicated that he wants to improve relations between South Korea and China. The Lee government will likely also want to receive Xi at the APEC summit that South Korea is hosting later this year.
But overall, the relationship between South Korea and China is unlikely to reach the heights of the conservative Park Geun-hye years anytime soon, largely because times have changed. Today, more than 70 percent of South Koreans have a negative perception of China. Chinese actions, such as infrastructure-building in the Yellow Sea—where Seoul’s and Beijing’s exclusive economic zones overlap—have been denounced by the DPK, among others. Ten years ago, Chinese economic coercion would have hit South Korea hard, but while China remains an important trade partner for South Korea, it’s not the only relevant one. In short, even if Lee wanted to balance between the United States and China—which, to be clear, he didn’t indicate during his presidential campaign—there are significant barriers to him doing so.
Some analysts have argued that South Korea-Japan relations will deteriorate under Lee since he has indicated a willingness to raise the unresolved issue of Japan’s colonization of Korea in a way that Yoon did not. Lee, however, has pledged to maintain security and economic cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo. In fact, trilateral cooperation with the United States and Japan was the only other foreign-policy priority name-checked during Lee’s inaugural address.
Although unresolved historical issues may indeed affect the relationship with Tokyo, Lee seems ready to cooperate on other issues. Ultimately, then, the future of the trilateral relationship will depend on Trump. If he and his administration value trilateral cooperation, as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated in his statement congratulating Lee on his victory, South Korea will have a strong incentive to follow suit. In this respect, the assumption that Moon’s troublesome relationship with Japan during former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s tenure will pick up under Lee ignores the broader positive transformation of these relationships in recent years.
Similarly, the Lee camp has signaled that the new president wants to continue cooperation with the G-7 and NATO. Though this follows the path that Yoon pursued, it should be remembered that it was Moon who attended the G-7 summit in 2021 and first sent his foreign minister to participate in the NATO-IP4 framework in 2022.
One area in which Lee may divert from Yoon is North Korea. Lee is likely to emphasize cooperation over deterrence, whereas Yoon showed limited interest in inter-Korean policy and focused on Pyongyang’s poor human rights record. For example, Lee has already vowed to restore the inter-Korean military agreement that was signed in 2018. But dialogue and deterrence are not mutually exclusive with North Korea. Lee’s comments about the need for South Korea to boost its defenses suggest that he will not abandon deterrence, even as he seeks ways to revive inter-Korean relations.
The international community should brace for a change in the rhetoric coming out of Seoul, emphasizing pragmatism over values and engagement with both foes and partners over uncritical alignment with the West. But while policies can shift between administrations, Seoul tends to stay the course on key foreign-policy matters: the U.S.-South Korea alliance, a cautious approach toward China, a degree of cooperation with Japan, and even the need to deter North Korea. In this respect, Lee will borrow elements of both liberal and conservative predecessors in pursuit of a relatively stable overall strategy.