The Korean peninsula has been at the center of competition for power and influence among major nations for more than a century. While Korea was the site of war and conflict for millennia beforehand, modern geopolitics arrived on the Korean peninsula from the West, via Japan, in 1875. That year, Japanese “gunboat diplomacy” forced the Kingdom of Joseon to sign the Korea-Japan “Treaty of Amity and Commerce” (Treaty of Gangwha Island), which was finalized in February 1876 as the first Western-style legal treaty in Korean history. The late nineteenth century was the height of Western imperialism, with European countries – joined by the US and Japan – competing for control over vast territories in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Joseon was thrust into this world of violent competition and power politics after centuries of peace in the shadow of China, and Joseon struggled to adjust to this new world. The four outside powers that would dominate Korea’s fate were China, Russia, Japan and the US; after three decades of maneuvering among these four, Joseon came under the control of Japan from 1905 to 1945, followed by national division during the Cold War, which found the Korean peninsula caught between the competing interests of the US on the one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War the Korean peninsula remains divided and the object of competition for power and influence by more powerful neighbors. China, the US, Russia and Japan are today, as they were 150 years ago, the main external actors whose interest converge on the Korean peninsula. But with the end of the bipolar competition of the Cold War period and the decline of America’s unipolar dominance in the post-Cold War period, relations among great powers is becoming, at least potentially, more multipolar and dynamic than it has been for many decades. In other words, the global environment seems to be moving toward a situation not unlike that of the late nineteenth century. Of course, Korea, China, the US, Russia and Japan – as well as the relations among them – are very different now than they were in the 1870s or 1880s. Still, as a new multipolar world emerges today, it is worth revisiting this earlier period, and Korea’s place in it, for possible lessons on Korea’s strategy going forward.

On September 6, 1880, the Joseon government’s special envoy (sushinsa수신사) Kim Hong-jip (김 홍집) met with Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪), counselor of the Chinese legation in Tokyo. Kim had been in Tokyo for nearly a month and had met with the Chinese legation a half-dozen times to discuss diplomatic matters. On this final visit, Huang gave Kim a 6,000-character policy brief he had written called “Korea Strategy” (Chaoxian celue 朝鮮策略). Probably the first introduction to Korea of balance-of-power politics, a concept apparently learned from the recent Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s 1836 book Elements of International Law,[1] “Korea Strategy” began as a warning against Russian territorial aggression: “On the earth there is a gigantic country called Russia.”[2] This country, Huang explained, had been expanding for 300 years and had reached the Pacific, taking Sakhalin Island, the east bank of the Heilongjiang River and the mouth of the Tumen. Russia had established a naval base at Vladivostok and now had designs on obtaining a warm-water port in Korea. In order to defend themselves against Russia, Huang argued, Koreans must find common cause with China and Japan. For Korea stood at the crossroads of Asia, and it would likely be Russia’s first target in the region; and should Korea fall, China and Japan would suffer as well. Furthermore, Korea should seek to balance with another outside power. Therefore, Korea’s best defense against Russia is “intimacy with China, connection to Japan, alliance with America, and self-strengthening” (親中国・結日本・聯美国、以圖自強而己). In fact, Huang’s formula was not quite a modern foreign relations strategy: as far as Korea-Chinese relations were concerned, the two countries would rely on their traditional “family-like” relationship in which China was the protective older brother, Korea the dependent younger one. “Intimacy with China” was a hybrid of Sino-Korean tributary relations and a modern protectorate status. Nevertheless, the suggestion to connect with Korea’s old adversary Japan and ally with faraway America was a radical one, and the rationale for doing so was based on contemporary balance-of-power strategy.

Kim took Huang’s document back to Korea and presented it to King Kojong. The court discussed it in detail on October 11, and although the government chose not to substantially change Joseon’s relations with either China or Japan, it decided to establish a foreign affairs office, the Tongnigimu Amun (統理機務衙門) modeled after the Chinese Zongli Yamen (總理衙門), through which to pursue a more modern diplomacy as a sovereign state. Significantly, the first Western nation Joseon established relations with was the United States, which Joseon saw as relatively benign even if the two countries were not yet “allies.” However, opening up Korea to Japan and the West externally, and self-strengthening through modernization domestically, created a fierce backlash from more tradition-minded elites. Despite its efforts Joseon was unable to maneuver successfully among the neighboring powers, including China, which was reinventing itself as a modern empire and intervening directly into Korean affairs for the first time in centuries.[3] The failed reformist coup of 1884 led to a decade of domination by China under the auspices of Resident-General Yuan Shikai, followed by another decade of Korea buffeted between Japan and Russia after China was defeated in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 – 5. After Russia was in turn defeated by Japan in 1905, Korea became a Japanese protectorate and then a Japanese colony for four decades. Within a few years after liberation in 1945, Korea had become a divided nation caught in the Cold War struggle between the Western bloc led by the US and the Communist bloc led by the USSR. Despite the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Korea remains divided and the object of great power competition, now primarily between the US and China. The “Korea Strategy” that Huang Zunxian suggested to Kim Hong-jip in 1880, based on a multi-actor balance-of-power environment, became moot in the face of Japanese hegemony in the first half of the twentieth century and Soviet/Chinese – American duopoly in the second half. But 140 years later, the world seems to be moving once again toward multipolarity, and the principles if not the prescriptions of Chaoxian Celue may have new relevance.  

Contemporary Geopolitics

Although Korea’s division was a product of the Cold War, the end of the Cold War in 1990 did not lead to national unification in Korea as it did in Germany. This is largely due to two interrelated factors: the resilience and survivability of the North Korean political system, and the commitment of China to lend North Korea economic and political support – in contrast to East Germany, which quickly collapsed after the Soviet Union withdrew its support in 1989. But beyond that, the two Koreas have long co-existed in a “division system” that has become internalized and self-perpetuating despite changes in the external environment.[4] South Korea remained a staunch ally of the US, and although there were some attempts at inter-Korean rapprochement (notably in 1991 – 92 and 2005 – 7), the North-South confrontation continued throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, especially over the issue of North Korea’s nuclear program. The post-Cold War emergence of the US as the world’s only superpower did not eliminate Korean division or draw the entire Korean peninsula under American hegemony, in part because at the regional level China remained a great power with a vested interest in the stability of the Korean peninsula. Korea’s room for independent maneuver is thus constrained both in a hegemonic environment (Japanese domination in the first half of the twentieth century) and a duopolistic one (the Cold War from 1945 – 1990, US-Chinese rivalry in the post-Cold War).  But in the second decade of the twenty-first century the situation of either hegemony or duopoly has been eroding, both at the global and local level, leading to a more fluid and dynamic environment for the Korean peninsula. These changing circumstances include the rapid growth of China, the revival of Russian power, the failed American military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, economic changes from the financial crisis of 2008, and the emergence of new leadership in both North and South Korea, especially a South Korean government that has been consistently focused on engaging with the North since 2016. The latest crisis, the global pandemic of COVID-19, will almost certainly have important effects on global politics generally and the Korean peninsula specifically, although as of the summer of 2020 the crisis is far from over and it is not clear what impact it will ultimately have. At the moment it is clear that both China and the US have been damaged by their initially poor response to the outbreak, and relations between the two have also suffered, with potentially grave implications for the world order.[5]  Overall however the US has come out much worse, swiftly achieving the largest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world, whereas China managed to get the virus largely contained, suggesting that America’s relative decline in global status and power continues but that Chinese ascendance may also be slowed by the pandemic. South Korea, on the other hand, has been one of the world’s success stories in fighting the pandemic, a topic to which we will return below.

             If the Cold War was characterized by US-Soviet bipolar conflict and the post-Cold War period by American unipolar dominance, the current geopolitical environment is shifting toward something more unstable and complex, perhaps more like the competitive world of the late nineteenth century than anything seen since World War II.  At the moment, there are several contending schools of thought regarding where the post-post-Cold War world may be headed. Most hinge on the role of China, whose economic rise since the 1980s has often amazed and sometimes terrified the rest of the world.

             First, there is a view that the rise of China is irresistible, its economic power having grown enormously over the last three or four decades, inexorably leading to political and military dominance not only of East Asia, but possibly even the world, making China the new global hegemon in the twenty-first century as America was in the twentieth century and Britain was in the nineteenth.  Few observers have gone so far as to say China will definitely be the next global hegemon, but many see China as a serious rival to the US for economic and political influence, resulting in a more level geopolitical playing field than had been the case in the post-Cold War period.[6] Yan Xuetong, the influential international relations scholar at Tsinghua University, has argued that China’s rise will bring it close to parity with the US, but has implied that “moral leadership” will make China in fact superior.[7] There is little likelihood that China will surpass the US in per capita GDP any time soon, however, even if China were to become the world’s largest economy in absolute terms and is currently the world’s largest economy according to purchasing power parity.[8] The chances are even more remote that China could reach military parity with the United States in the foreseeable future. No does China have anything close to the range of alliances, leadership in international organizations, or global financial and economic reach of the US. While American power may objectively be in decline and China’s on the ascent, it is highly unlikely that China will become the global hegemon in the near- or medium-term.

A second school of thought holds that the US and China are moving toward confrontation, perhaps inevitably falling into what Graham Allison calls the “Thucydides trap” of an ambitious rising power confronting a declining hegemon, leading ultimately to war.[9] Especially in the United States, many scholars and policy-makers foresee a global bipolar struggle emerging between the US and China, a “New Cold War” analogous to the Soviet-American Cold War of the twentieth century. But this is also unlikely, as China does not have the capacity nor as yet the interest in confronting the US for global dominance, and world power has become too diffuse and complex for division into two “camps.” Nor is the ideological struggle between communism and capitalist democracy central to the US-China relationship as it was in the US-Soviet Cold War, and despite talk in the US of “decoupling” from China economically, there is much more interdependence between China and the US then there ever was between the US and the Soviet Union. The world may in some sense be moving toward bipolarization, but it will be more of a Sino-American strategic competition rather than the existential confrontation of the Cold War.[10]

A third possibility is the world becoming multipolar, with no single power having global dominance but a few countries exercising global influence, competing and cooperating with one another and with other countries in a shifting set of relations. These few great powers would include the US, China, a revived Russia and perhaps the European Union considered as a single unit. In addition, there might be several regional power centers such as Brazil in Latin America, Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey in the Middle East, and so on, having preponderant influence in their respective regions.  The American political scientist John Mearsheimer has recently observed that “the structure of the international system is moving toward multipolarity, because of China’s striking rise and the resurrection of Russian power.”[11]  Such a multipolar system might be more dynamic and unpredictable than a bipolar or unipolar one, with alignments changing based on perceived national interest, especially as relative power among the major countries changes, which seems to be the current case with the US, China, Russia and the EU. Multipolarity is probably more likely in the near term than either unipolarity under American or Chinese dominance, or Sino-American bipolarity.

Finally, some scholars, including Richard Haass of the US Council on Foreign Relations, have argued for a “nonpolar” world where no great powers dominate. Haass sees this as an unstable and potentially dangerous situation, with many centers of state power, as well as international organizations and non-state actors, all in dynamic competition and tending toward global disorder.[12] Like many members of the US foreign policy establishment, Haass bemoans the loss of American global leadership, which he sees as having been a stabilizing force in the world and whose absence will lead to “disarray.”  Yet it appears inevitable that American global dominance is declining relative to a rising China and resurgent Russia, and as other more regionally focused powers also emerge. Given these apparent trends, multipolarity seems the most likely outcome. The US will remain the world’s most powerful state overall, especially in terms of military power, but will be unable to exert unipolar dominance in the face of global and regional competitors. China will compete with the US across several sectors in the fields of economics, technology, and diplomacy, especially in Asia, but the world will not be dominated by a full-spectrum confrontation between two superpowers as it was in the Cold War. A multipolar world is very different from a bipolar or unipolar one, and it may offer a smaller power such as Korea greater maneuverability and opportunities for autonomous action. 

The Shifting Balance of Power and Korea’s Strategy

              As the world moves toward a more multipolar order, several trends are evident:

• The relative decline of the American power and rise of “the Rest.” The US remains globally predominant in most respects, but other countries and regions are rising economically and at least one country, China, is able to challenge the US globally in certain fields.  After two hundred years of Western dominance and a half-century of American ascendency, a “post-American” or “post-Western” world is taking shape.[13]

• A shift in the global center of power from the West (Europe and North America) to the East (Asia, and East Asia in particular), especially in terms of economic power but also in terms of political, diplomatic and cultural “soft power.” It is a process appropriately dubbed “Easternization” by a British journalist, in contrast to the “Westernization” that has been the goal of many non-Western countries since the nineteenth century.[14]

• The “Pacific Century,” in which the economies of North America and East Asia became increasingly prominent and interconnected, is giving way to the “Eurasian Century.” For many decades Eurasian integration was blocked by political division, war and under-development, but as programs such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union come into play and connect with each other, the Eurasian “supercontinent” – containing the vast majority of the world’s population and natural resources – is becoming the economic center of the world.[15]

• Greater complexity, flux and instability in the international system, with new threats such as climate change, cyberwar and pandemics

Such a condition of global flux and complexity offers obvious challenges as well as potential opportunities for smaller powers like Korea. For example, it so happens that small and relatively affluent countries have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic best: South Korea, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore among others. The “great powers” including the US, China, Russia and Japan, as well emerging major countries like India and Brazil, have all fared relatively poorly. The important criteria for success in addressing the pandemic crisis appear to be not so much the forms of government, whether authoritarian or liberal, but such factors as functional administration, information transparency, a strong public health system and public trust in government. South Korea has even become a model of pandemic response for the rest of the world, including the United States and other Western countries. In a world of complex threats and great power competition, smaller countries have certain advantages and freedom of maneuver that they may not have had in a less competitive and flexible unipolar or bipolar world order.

             Northeast Asia, the Korean peninsula, and the international system have changed enormously since 1880, and Huang Zunxiang’s advice to Kim Hong-jip no longer applies in its specifics. But Huang’s reference to balance of power theory may be more relevant now than it has been for a century. In “Korea Strategy,” Huang remarks:

                And why do Britain, France, Germany and Italy, looking to each other, come to Korea one after another and ask for

               alliance?     Because that is what the West calls the “balance of power” [均勢]. Nowadays all countries in the world compete

               and struggle in all possible combinations, to a greater degree than in the Warring States era. And, if the great powers want to

               form a constellation in order to keep a state of peace, it is possible only under conditions in which neither very weak nor very

               strong states exist so that they can balance each other. If there is even one state that annexes other states, it increases its 

                power, and if it increases its power, it increases its military strength, which in turn threatens the security of all the other

                states.[16]

Huang Zunxiang’s recommendation for Korea was “intimacy with China, connection to Japan, alliance with America, and self-strengthening.” At the time, Korea was just coming out of isolation, China was the dominant power in the East Asian region, Russia the rising threat, Japan the vulnerable neighbor, and the US the distant and disinterested great power. Now the US is the declining power, China the rising one, Japan semi-autonomous under the American security umbrella, and Russia distant and relatively uninvolved. Most importantly, Korea is no longer weak and isolated but a strong and integral member of the international community. Of course, Korea is also a divided nation, and neither North nor South Korea can act independently without consideration of its competition and interaction with the other, and the relationship of each side with the more powerful countries to which they in turn are connected. Nevertheless, the more fluid and dynamic relations among Korea’s more powerful neighbors – especially China, the US, and Russia – offer both Koreas more room for maneuver and make it less necessary that Korea become entrapped in a conflict among any two of them. As North and South Korea become more involved with one another, building on the momentum of past agreements and especially the summit meetings of 2018, they will be able to recognize their common interests and work together to form a more coordinated approach to the region and the world. Eventually this could lead to a common foreign and security policy as a step toward unification. Much could happen to prevent this, not least another conflict on the Korean peninsula, and a crucial prerequisite for a successful pan-Korean foreign policy is a formal end to the Korean War and the normalization of relations between North Korea and the US and Japan. At this point, even without peninsula unification, the two Koreas could deal together with China, the US, Japan and Russia in pursuit of their own national interest. Under such circumstances, however Korea chooses to relate to the surrounding great powers – whether it be intimacy, connection, or alliance – Korea in a multipolar world will be capable of a more flexible and independent strategy than it has been able to achieve for much of its modern history.