US missiles, jittery neighbours and South Korea’s big security dilemma

Caught between Beijing and Washington over US mid-range missile deployment, Seoul is under tremendous pressure to find a breakthrough out of a political dead end amid its deteriorating relations with Tokyo, Moscow and Pyongyang.

South Korea – which hosts the largest US military base in the world at Pyeongtaek – along with the two other major US allies in the Asia-Pacific region, Japan and Australia, is in danger of being caught in the so-called alliance security dilemma, in which forming a security bloc may hold greater risk than all-round abstention.

The middle power has always been under Beijing’s jittery radar, due to the potential for the United States to target China militarily from its South Korean base – just as Washington feared the deployment of Russian missiles in Cuba during the cold war.

But those concerns have come to the forefront with US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty – a move widely seen as directed at checking Beijing and Moscow’s military expansion in the Asia-Pacific.

Beijing on Tuesday warned it would take unspecified “countermeasures” if the US deployed ground-based missiles in South Korea and Japan. “I urge our neighbours to exercise prudence and not to allow the US deployment of intermediate-range missiles on their territory,” Fu Cong, director general of the arms control department at China's foreign ministry, said.