Korea is running through its security inheritance

Why it matters: Korea’s security posture still relies on alliance, diplomatic, and military institutions accumulated under more favorable conditions. Conservative governments failed to renew them; the Lee administration is politicizing them just as Washington becomes less reliable and Beijing and Pyongyang gain room to maneuver.

One theme I keep returning to when I consider where Korea is headed is the dissolution of its old institutions. Many have tainted histories: they originated under Japanese colonial rule or military dictatorship. But they worked. They helped make Korea what it is today.

Now they are disintegrating. Some are being dismantled quickly and deliberately, as with the judiciary and criminal justice system. Others are slowly breaking apart as both the country and the world around it change.

Korea’s national security institutions are a prime example. Several pillars are crumbling, each for different reasons and at a different pace.

ROK-US Alliance: Trump’s easiest mark

There is little point searching for sophisticated strategy beneath President Trump’s abrupt termination of a joint military exercise or his offbeat charm offensive toward Pyongyang.

Whether his true target is a dog-and-pony show with Kim Jong Un or concessions from Seoul over Iran or US investment negotiations is hard to tell. Mr Trump, hungry for anything that makes him look strong, will poke at everything and take whatever gives way first.

After his frustrations with Tehran and Ottawa, Seoul may look like an easier target. It is wealthy yet emotionally insecure. Because Korea’s left-wing governments are perpetually vulnerable to accusations of being anti-US, the last thing President Lee wants is a sign that Washington is abandoning Seoul.

With Pyongyang ignoring his overtures, Mr Trump may further destabilize the ROK-US alliance simply for the sake of pwned.

Diplomacy without diplomats

Just when Korea’s diplomatic situation could hardly be more dire, its diplomatic bullpen is thinner than ever. Part of the reason is a trait Messrs Trump and Lee share beyond their social media habits: a disdain for career diplomats.

Half of the mission chiefs appointed by the Lee administration so far are special appointees rather than career diplomats, and a quarter of all those appointed have no diplomatic experience at all. Mr Lee has never personally presented letters of credence to his appointees, nor has he convened a conference of mission chiefs since taking office.

For Mr Lee, diplomatic posts look more like the spoils of the presidency, to be shared with those he owes. His appointment as ambassador to the UN of a lawyer who represented him in his election-law violation case is a glaring example. Vacancies have been slow to fill, feeding suspicions that some posts were being reserved as consolation prizes for fellow party members who lost elections.

Mr Lee is hardly the first president to do this, nor will he be the last. At least he has not sent a family member as a special envoy. Not yet, anyway. But a superpower can survive this habit more easily than a state whose security depends on reading and influencing that superpower.

The thin bullpen does not appear to be helping Korea’s relations with the US. In July, the foreign minister took the unusual step of ordering Kang Kyung-hwa, ambassador to the US, to return to Seoul temporarily. The order reportedly concerned various bilateral disputes, including the Coupang dispute.

Interestingly, at a press briefing last month, the minister described her return as “summoning,” as though Ms Kang were being reprimanded. Nor did he correct himself when reporters questioned his wording.

Ms Kang, who served as foreign minister under the Moon administration, is a case in point for what Minjoo wants from a diplomat: a handsome face that speaks good English, and nothing else. Gen-86 Minjoo politicians see the country’s foreign service as the old guard of the ancien régime — the pro-US status quo. When they took power with President Moon’s inauguration, they demonstrated what they expected from the foreign service by appointing Ms Kang as the administration’s first foreign minister. The administration’s distrust of career diplomats ran so deep that, I was told, it once ordered them to submit raw transcripts of talks with their foreign counterparts rather than diplomatic cables, which it feared would be distorted by the diplomats’ biases.

The diplomatic scenes in Washington and Seoul share an undercurrent of skepticism toward the role of the foreign service: don’t think; just smile and say what we tell you to say.

It may be true that there is no need for an ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary in a modern world where leaders correspond via WhatsApp, but diplomatic expertise cannot be easily replaced. Just look at the Iran peace deal approaching its 64th season finale — or at Ms Kang, who I was told is being criticized internally for spending time meeting lower-ranking US officials and Korean community groups.

Accumulated access, adversarial advice, and institutional memory are the buffers Korea needs right now against a personalized Trump administration. To be fair, much of what Seoul is going through would not be happening if someone other than Mr Trump were in the White House. But Minjoo’s skepticism toward professional diplomats, compounded by Mr Lee’s spoils system, is weakening those buffers when their value is highest.

Sovereignty without capacity

The Lee administration’s blitzkrieg to integrate the military academies made many eyes roll. A reform this radical is being pushed through on a remarkably compressed schedule: the basic plan was produced in just three months and initially called for admitting the first cadets in 2028.

The more you listen to the administration’s reasons, the deeper the confusion becomes. The Defense Ministry’s stated reasons each have merit: jointness, demographic decline, and the need to break down service silos. But none justify such a blitzkrieg.

As with other policies whose aims are otherwise unintelligible, Mr Lee himself offers a clearer explanation. In a Putinesque goverance-as-spectacle work meeting livestreamed last month, Mr Lee made clear that the reform is also political retribution for Korea Military Academy (KMA) generals’ participation in the 2024 martial law crisis.

Preventing a future coup is a passable aim for reform, but an integrated military academy could make a successful coup easier than before. One reason the martial law attempt failed was friction between the armed services — exactly what the integrated academy aims to remove. If the Air Force had greenlit the Army special forces helicopter’s flight to the National Assembly more quickly, the crisis might have lasted much longer.

Pursued this haphazardly, the military academy reform is best understood as another Minjoo symbolic struggle, or culture war. For Minjoo, the prosecutor’s office and the KMA are pillars of the ancien régime. But the reality is more nuanced. Just as prosecutors’ history of politically biased prosecutions does not justify the wholesale dissolution of the criminal justice system, the KMA’s dark past does not justify dismantling national security institutions with more than 80 years of history.

Furthermore, Mr Lee chose the wrong person to lead the reform. Although Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back spent about two decades on the National Assembly’s defense committee, he lacked the expertise to persuade the reform’s critics. The controversy over his military service record did not help. On Sunday, the government announced that the first-ever civilian defense minister with no military background would be replaced by a retired four-star general.

Mr Lee would want the new minister to push ahead with the reform, but the situation does not look good with the vanguard vanquished.

The signals of imminent crises are drowning in the noise of this symbolic struggle. The impending population cliff means the military will no longer be able to rely on active-duty soldiers for national defense. The ever-controversial wartime operational control, or OPCON, should eventually return to Seoul. But a premature transfer under the Lee administration’s push could accelerate Korea’s marginalization amid mounting concerns that Washington may be moving the axis of its regional military presence toward Japan.

The strategy Korea never had

Critics on the far right often cry that a pro-North Korea, pro-China leftist conspiracy is dismantling Korea’s national security institutions. Follow the government’s actions long enough, however, and it becomes clear that there is no coherent plan.

The institutions are instead being depleted through a succession of politically convenient decisions whose true costs remain invisible in ordinary times: filling diplomatic posts with cronies, treating OPCON as a symbol of sovereignty before building the capacity it requires, and waging a culture war against the military education system.

And the damage is bipartisan. Conservative governments preserved the US-centered machinery without renewing the strategy behind it. They largely treated the alliance as an environment Korea inhabited rather than an instrument it had to manage, and failed to prepare for an America that might remain powerful while becoming unreliable, coercive, or distracted. Progressive governments correctly identified permanent dependence as a problem, but too often confused distance from Washington with strategic autonomy, and institutional demolition with reform. One side failed to replenish the capital; the other is now spending it.

This brings me back to my argument about Korea’s strange foreign policy NIMBYism. Seoul wants the profits of arms exports without taking sides, the prestige of global power without its obligations, and strategic autonomy without paying for the leverage that makes autonomy possible.

This foreign policy NIMBYism was sustainable when Washington was willing and able to absorb much of its cost. The most critical failure of Korean conservatives is their assumption that Washington will be willing to do so again once Mr Trump leaves the White House. Minjoo progressives believe the South Korean military is strong enough to fend off threats from the North without the US. Some even believe parity in military power must be reached to facilitate “dialogue.” But close coordination with the world’s mightiest armed forces has been the only thing preventing a military that has not fought a battle in decades from falling to the level of Taiwan’s.

China policy is another example of this bipartisan failure. The left often interprets Beijing through its relationship with Washington, while conservative elites have often approached it through trade, access, and personal networks. Unlike their peers elsewhere, Korean conservative elites are surprisingly naive about China. (A quick question: why are there so few reports on Chinese influence operations in Korean politics?)

The only anchor here is the public’s suspicion of China. Yes, some of it is xenophobia. But it also shows that Korean voters perceive a strategic threat the political class has struggled to incorporate into policy. Progressive media outlets that treat it purely as hatred in need of moral correction miss what people feel in their daily lives.

Peace without architecture: one downside scenario

Where will Mr Trump’s search for an easy win around the world lead us? Probably nowhere.

After losing face in Hanoi seven years ago, Kim Jong Un will be cautious. He may prefer a period of “hide strength, bide time_韜光養晦.” His gambit in Russia’s war in Ukraine brought a bonanza to both North Korea’s economy and its military. Time is on his side; he has no reason to be impetuous.

Formally accepting North Korea as a nuclear power — probably the only condition Pyongyang would accept at this point in exchange for any spectacle — is the last thing Mr Trump would want, because the world would recognize it as a complete failure.

But there might be a middle ground on which the two leaders can meet. I am thinking of formally ending the Korean War. Mr Trump can present himself as a bringer of peace. Mr Kim can gain time and tacit acceptance of the nuclear status quo. Mr Lee can at last have the moment he has dreamed of since getting a former gangster to send $8 million to Pyongyang. Beijing can argue against the continuing legitimacy of the UN Command.

Everyone wins — except the people of the peninsula.