Just last month in New York, South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Hyun met Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister.

The meeting, held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, came at a delicate moment. The UN Security Council had just rejected a resolution to maintain the easing of sanctions under the 2015 nuclear deal, setting the stage for those sanctions to snap back into place. When the votes were counted, China, Russia, Pakistan and Algeria stood with Iran. The US, UK and France led the opposition. South Korea — alongside Guyana — abstained.

That abstention was not the product of indecision or lack of interest. It was a deliberate choice. It’s one of the hundreds of minor choices that add to the transaction cost of the US alliance relationship. The situation raises a question: At what point do alliance transaction costs become impossible to sustain?

There is a significant build-up of US forces in the Middle East, including vessels, aircraft, munitions, and refuelling assets. Speculation is that  Israel will soon attack Iran, which will in turn, require  US participation.

Nobody in the White House can see it, but another war in the Middle East could be the point where alliance transaction costs become impossible to sustain. Another war in the Middle East may actually end up affecting America’s position in East Asia.

If it weren’t so serious, you’d think it was a joke. Attacks on peace negotiators, a one-sided 20-point peace plan, and the return of Tony Blair! During the last week, US forces were noisily repositioned off the coast of Venezuela. A thousand top-level Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps personnel were called in for an urgent meeting with the “Minister for War”. The president gave a pointless, rambling speech, and US forces were quietly repositioned to the Middle East. The week has been like a cheap-arse B-movie script caught on late night TV after a night on the piss. We just need Chuck Norris infomercials.

Yet, the scary thing is, it also fits an all too convenient pattern: Washington presenting Iran as a proliferating threat, while linking it to a Western Hemisphere adversary to justify action on two fronts at once. Add the revolving frame of human rights, democratic suppression, nuclear proliferation and maybe even throw in chemical weapons and a regional minority to create shades of Iraq 2003 (not to mention Tony Blair) and we have the perfect script for the next forever war.

There are three ways this can turn out: success, failure, and somewhere in between. Each way, the end result is era defining.

• Success? This has been brilliantly planned for decades. American interests secure control of Venezuela and Iran, creating leverage over global oil markets. The US emerges as the indispensable guarantor of energy stability, destabilises the Russian economy and forces Moscow to negotiate with Ukraine and reminds China and Europe of their dependence on US naval power.
• Failure? “Grand plans” rarely deliver the stability they promise. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan began with confident assertions of strategy and ended with disorder, fatigue, and failure. Venezuela rallies support from Latin and South America, Iran secures support from Russia and China. The US expends its credibility, resources, and reputation until internal division ends support. Israel collapses and the US turns inwards and retreats from across the globe.
• Somewhere in between? For the next seven or so years, as US administrations come and go, war continues – an ongoing ghoulish quagmire of death marked by wealth transfers from the periphery to the centre, and from the bottom to the top. The US retreats from some places, but establishes a permanent presence in others.

Each scenario has that end of empire feel to it. We are living in what can fairly be called the end of the American century. US power remains formidable, but it is no longer unchallengeable. Its ability to dictate outcomes in distant regions has eroded. Each new attempt to reassert control — whether by invading, sanctioning or threatening — exposes the limits of US leverage. This risk is that at the end of empire, discerning the difference between hope and fear, sacrifice and profiteering, and egoism and narcissism gets harder and harder.

For South Korea, this is not a game of grand strategy, but a matter of calculation. Oil shocks are not theoretical. They hit immediately, raising input costs for industry, squeezing households and undermining growth. The Trump administration has, to date, been responsible for threatening to cut off, and preventing, easy access to two major oil suppliers. A broader conflict in the Middle East will require China, Japan and South Korea’s refiners to scramble to secure alternative supplies at higher prices. Conflict in the Middle East will be devastating.

For South Korea, the alliance transaction costs of another Middle Eastern war are measured not only in oil prices and supply shocks, but also in credibility, autonomy, and strategic risk.

Seoul’s diplomacy in the wider Middle East region has been successful, marked by pragmatic caution, careful balancing between great-power rivalries, and an ability to sustain constructive ties even amid volatile regional shifts.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the  deployment of the Akh Unit to the United Arab Emirates, where South Korean troops have quietly trained Emirati forces and deepened security co-operation since 2011. That presence, linked to Seoul’s multibillion-dollar nuclear reactor deal, illustrates how diplomacy and defence can reinforce each other. Yet this very success underscores the challenge ahead: maintaining space for independent initiative while avoiding entanglement in Washington’s grand strategies.

For Seoul, the lesson is clear – measured diplomacy in the Middle East is not just about oil or trade; it is about preserving the strategic autonomy necessary to navigate the uncertainties of a fragmenting global order.

Every time Washington embarks on a distant conflict, Seoul is forced to calculate how much to follow, how much to resist and how much it can afford to be seen as complicit. Each calculation consumes scarce political capital at home and abroad. Another US war in the Middle East would not just stretch American forces thin, it would force South Korea into an impossible balancing act between its security guarantor and its own survival.

In that sense, Seoul’s abstention at the UN was not just caution. Another forever war in the Middle East will not just sap US power. It will make America’s alliances in East Asia, starting with South Korea, harder to sustain.

Republished from Junotane, 3 October 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.