Mr. President, your first administration played “small ball” with North Korea. The policy of “strategic patience” succeeded in weathering North Korean provocations and limited exposure to the political risks that would have accompanied a high profile effort to address North Korea’s nuclear development.  However, the crime and punishment approach to North Korea’s 2009 satellite launch and nuclear test through UN Security Council sanctions, statements, and resolutions has failed to stop North Korea’s growing nuclear and long-range delivery capabilities. Read more »

Following an early ambassadorial visit and a courtesy call on President-elect Park Geun-hye from China’s special envoy Vice Minister Zhang Zhijun, Park has decided to reciprocate by sending her first special envoys to Beijing during the transition. The exchange illustrates a mutual recognition that Sino-South Korean relations had deteriorated under Lee Myung-Bak and Hu Jintao and that Park and Xi have a chance to start out on the right foot this time. (See-Won Byun and I review the respective South Korean and Chinese leadership transitions over the last four months in detail here alongside parallel assessments of inter-Korean relations and U.S.-ROK relations by Aidan Foster-Carter and Victor Cha and Ellen Kim.) Read more »

North Korea’s announcement of plans to pursue another satellite launch between December 10 and 22 may have been unwelcome, but it should not have been entirely unanticipated. North Korea defiantly stated that it would continue to test long-range multi-stage rockets on its April 17 response to a UN Security Council Presidential statement condemning North Korea’s failed April 12 launch. Another launch will likely have a disproportionate political impact since it comes prior to national elections scheduled in Japan on December 16 and in South Korea on December 19. Here’s a rundown of the challenges a North Korean satellite launch poses during this political transition period: Read more »

Terence Roehrig is professor of National Security Affairs and director of the Asia-Pacific Studies Group at the U.S. Naval War College.  

The Republic of Korea (ROK) Navy welcomes visitors to its website with the headline, “To the Sea, To the World.” Over the past two decades, South Korea has been building an ocean-going, blue water navy that is capable of extended operations in waters beyond the peninsula. After the sinking of the Cheonan, the Navy scaled back plans to build a blue water navy to focus attention on more immediate defense needs around the peninsula. Last week, the ROK Navy announced a plan to resume the expansion of its blue water fleet with a new line of submarines, more Aegis-class destroyers, and twenty frigates.

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U.S. secretary of defense Panetta and ROK minister of defense Kim Kwan-jin released a joint communique following the 44^th annual Security Consultative Meetings (SCM) on Wednesday.  Since this meeting is an annual event that rotates between Washington and Seoul, I decided to compare this week’s communique with the one issued four years ago (at the end of the Bush administration) under Lee Myung-bak’s first defense minister Lee Sang-hee and his counterpart Robert Gates to provide a sense of how the relationship has developed during the stewardship of Presidents Lee and Obama.  Here are my takeaways: Read more »

The agenda for the annual U.S.-ROK Security Consultative Meeting to be held this week in Washington between South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin and his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, will inevitably focus on how to keep the Korean peninsula stable against potential North Korean provocations. However, with South Korea’s decision to contribute resources to a variety of international peacekeeping and stabilization missions, U.S.-ROK security cooperation has gone global. Read more »

South Korea tries for the third time to successfully launch its own satellite into earth orbit using Russian technology this Friday, October 26, 2012. A new essay by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Clay Moltz analyzes South Korea’s space strategy in a new U.S.-Korea program essay. The essay analyzes South Korea’s program achievements and strategic challenges in the context of rapidly advancing Chinese, Indian, and Japanese programs. Moltz also analyzes opportunities and challenges to enhanced U.S.-ROK cooperation in space as part of my edited volume released earlier this year entitled The US-South Korea Alliance: Meeting New Security Challenges. Read more »

The Korea Economic Institute of America co-hosted an event with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Asan Institute for Policy Studies yesterday at which I presented my analysis of Chicago Council results of its biennial poll of American public attitudes toward South Korea. The Asan Institute’s Dr. Kim Ji-yoon gave a parallel presentation of South Korean attitudes toward the alliance based on results from a survey of Korean respondents completed last week. Both presentations are available here, but I also want to share my takeaways from Dr. Kim’s data and its implications for the U.S.-ROK alliance going forward. Read more »

The DPRK (North Korea) National Defense Commission responded with predictable bravado (“DPRK NDC Reiterates Its Stand to Fight It Out against U.S. and S. Korean Regime”) to Sunday’s announcement by the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK) that it had secured U.S. agreement to amend a 2001 accord that would allow the ROK to develop ballistic missiles with ranges of up to 800 kilometers and payloads of up to 500 kilograms. This amendment extends the current ROK missile range limit of 300 kilometers as a deterrence measure against the North’s own steady development of nuclear and missile capabilities. South Korea will pursue development of these capabilities over the next five years with a target date for deployment of 2017. Read more »

Ahn Chul-soo, professor and founder of AhnLab, a computer security software company, formally announced his bid for the South Korean presidency. With Ahn’s entry, the Korean public is beginning to think in earnest about the December election. A recent realmeter public opinion poll had the independent Ahn in second place with 27.2 percent of public support, trailing the conservative Saenuri candidate Park Geun-hye with 37.5 percent, but leading the progressive Democratic United Party (DUP) candidate Moon Jae-in with 22.6 percent. Asan Institute poll results for two-way races between Park and either Ahn or Moon are within the margin of error. Read more »