
South Korea is in a dangerous political mess. President Yoon Suk-yeol has been arrested, but his dismissal and imprisonment are far from certain. His toxic ambition to eliminate ‘despicable pro-North Korean and anti-state forces’ has numerous supporters. As have his hostility towards China and his plans to develop nuclear weapons.
However, TV footage since 3 December suggests that demonstrators in Seoul’s Town Hall plaza wanting Yoon’s arrest and impeachment outnumber those supporting him, the latter waving the Stars and Stripes making them easily identifiable.
It is therefore likely that a majority of the voting population still opt for less extreme policies than Yoon’s, including support for the ‘sunshine’ strategy of reconciliation with North Korea introduced by President Kim Dae-joong (1998-2003), and productive relations with China.
But the gap is closing. Not so much, I suspect, because senior US military officers are embedded in the Korean military establishment (as they are at Russell Hill in Canberra), but because of the pervasive influence of US strategic think-tanks in Korean class rooms and universities.
I’m not sure whether this extends as far as it does in Australia, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The situation here was brought into focus in Peter Varghese’s independent Review of Commonwealth Funding for Strategic Policy Work. In defence of his findings, and in sharp response to heavy-handed criticism from Peter Jennings, former head of the Australian Security Policy Initiative (ASPI), and Australian editorialists, Varghese defends independent think tanks which at their best ‘generate policy contestability’:
Being unencumbered by the government’s bureaucracy and direction allows them to think innovatively, challenge existing ideas, produce new policy concepts and identify emerging issues. The sector injects alternative perspectives into policy discussions, helping mitigate groupthink.
But do the National Security College at the Australian National University, ASPI, the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, RAND Australia or the Australia/America Leadership Dialogue follow dispassionate ideals? In their assessments of the security situation in the Indo-Pacific or South East Asia, do they provide the kind of factual, sceptical and dispassionate advice that is the standard of academia and independent inquiry?
Or do they reinforce the conventional perspectives to which conservative political leaders in Australia, Korea and Japan seem so attached? At their Camp David meeting in October 2023, President Biden, President Yoon and Prime Minister Kishida described the desirable situation in the region as being ‘free and open’, ‘peaceful and stable’, and subject to the international ‘rules-based order’ – all code words for the exclusion of China and the continuation of US military and (less feasibly, economic) hegemony.
A relevant and influential US think-tank operating in Seoul is the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). It was founded in Washington DC by Michèle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, both of whom have held positions in Democratic administrations, but whose policies were indistinguishable from those of national security establishment Republicans. CNAS was set up to do approximately what the Republican Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) does – that is to preserve US regional hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and contain China. Same funding sources including heavy contributions from the US military industrial complex.
CNAS came to my attention last April during an all-day conference in Sydney designed to explore Australia’s role in Korea’s Indo-Pacific strategy. I thought that one of the speakers, a Korean academic and senior adjunct fellow of CNAS, might give an objective and dispassionate Korean perspective about Korea’s place and purpose in the region. But she gave no such opinion. Instead, she said she frankly preferred Yoon Suk-yeol as ROK president over those she characterised as dangerous left-wing radicals, such as Kim Dae-jung and Moon Jae-in. Was she speaking on behalf of American hard-liners as well as Yoon and his cohort? She was certainly not speaking for Korean progressives. Just remember this was said six months before Yoon’s bid to impose martial law.
To what extent, I wondered, was this academic, her sponsor CNAS , and other like-minded US think-tanks operating in Korea, able to infuse their ideas about security issues among Korean students?
I was Australian Ambassador to the ROK in the late 1980s when the country began its first experiment in democratic government under President Roo Tae-woo. It was a very hasty and compressed transition from the military dictatorships of Rhee Syngman, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan.
As Dr Youngshik Bong of Yonsei University in Seoul observed in the Sydney Morning Herald of 9 January, 2025, many corners were cut in the rush towards democracy in the ROK in 1988. And the current crisis over Yoon underlines how weak and subject to emotion that the judicial system actually is. Assemblymen and women can be swayed by vociferous public opinion, and actually indulge in physical combat in the Assembly.
Apart from the fragility of its evolving democratic system, the nation’s foreign policy options continue to be contentious. But whether to resume the search for accommodation with an aggressive North Korea and building productive relations with China, or keep the US and Japan as allies and friends, need not be either/ors. What I would hope for is that the Republic of Korea can develop a rugged and balanced policy able to reconcile the two positions. The influence of CNAS and other conservative ‘think-tanks’ on Korean campuses can only hinder the process towards maturity and even-handedness, and make Korea captive to American strategy in the western Pacific.