Will South Korea’s Indo-Pacific strategy ‘imitate’ US to counter China’s regional influence?
- Experts say Seoul needs to come up with its own, unique plan as multi-nation race into Indo-Pacific region heats up, rather than simply fall in line with what America wants
- ‘We need to always contemplate the bigger picture’, professor warns as he sees South Korean policy moving ‘further away from China’
South Korea needs to devise a “strategy that fits into the gap” between the United States and China’s hegemonic race into the Indo-Pacific region, according to analysts.
“It’s really essential that we put a lot of thought into how we are going to find our place in the context of the intensifying hegemonic race between the US and China and the reorganising of orders in the Indo-Pacific region,” said Kim Sang-bae, a professor of international politics at Seoul National University.
The previous Moon Jae-in administration’s regional policies, referred to as the New Southern Policy, encompassed only Southeast Asian countries.
“In the past few months, it seems like we are getting closer to the US and getting further away from China,” Kim added, speaking on Thursday during an event held by the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, a government-funded economic research institute. “But we need to always contemplate the bigger picture of how we can structure things three-dimensionally.
“Only with those kinds of contemplations will we be able to come up with our own Indo-Pacific strategy, and not just an imitation of that of the US.”