South Korea’s political trajectory has always been uncertain and full of drama. Since the establishment of the country’s First Republic in 1948, when Syngman Rhee, the country’s first conservative president, used ballot-stuffing, intimidation, armed repression and financial corruption to marginalise his progressive opponents, to the 1961 coup when Park Chung-hee, a young army officer, seized power in a largely bloodless coup, and later during the brutal suppression of civil society and student protest of May 1980 in Gwangju (South Korea’s Tiananmen moment), the forces of democratic change have battled against the repressive forces of the authoritarian right. However, until a year ago, such moments seemed a distant historical memory. 

All of this changed abruptly on 3 December 2024, when then President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law and sought to shut down the National Assembly, aiming to arrest (and potentially execute) his political opponents in the majority Democratic Party (DP), while closing down public media and occupying the national electoral commission. Incompetence on the part of Yoon and his fellow plotters, as well as the resolve of Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the DP, and his fellow progressive politicians, and the determination of public opinion to rally at the National Assembly in defence of democracy succeeded in blocking Yoon’s attempted coup. If the martial law declaration had been launched later in the evening, rather than at 10.30 pm, or if the troops and some of their commanders dispatched to implement the martial law instructions had not questioned or intentionally delayed acting on the President’s orders, the outcome might have been very different. 

Just over a year on from the martial law crisis, it appears as if South Korean democracy has successfully weathered and moved on from its existential moment. Former President Yoon, along with senior members of his cabinet, including his former Prime Minister and Defence Minister and high-ranking officials, both civilian and military, have been arrested and are facing trial on a raft of charges, including in Yoon’s case, insurrection – an indictment which carries with it the potential of lifetime imprisonment or the death penalty. The country’s new President, Lee Jae-myung has, since his election in June of this year, used his party’s commanding position in the National Assembly and an active series of diplomatic initiatives, including the high-profile APEC summit in Gyeongju in late October and early November, to maintain his popularity with approval ratings in the high 50s, low 60s. Moreover, Yoon’s political base – the conservative, opposition People Power Party (PPP) remains sharply divided. A significant minority of the party’s National Assembly members (43 out of 107 National Assembly members according to one assessment), including Han Dong-hoon, the party’s former leader, have issued or expressed backing for a public apology, distancing themselves from Yoon and expressing their contrition for not having done more to resist martial law.

Yet it would be premature to assume that the political dust from last year’s crisis has fully settled and that the country is back on a secure and stable democratic track. Jang Dong-hyeok, the chairman of the PPP, has taken an uncompromisingly aggressive approach towards the Democratic Party and pointedly refused to apologise for the imposition of martial law or to distance himself from former President Yoon. While he has moderated his language in recent days, adopting a more self-critical position, Jang’s more contrite posture appears opportunist and primarily motivated to avoid a fracturing of the PPP which still retains 20 per cent support from the South Korean public. 

Strikingly, public opinion polls suggest that the country still remains sharply polarised, with 77 per cent of respondents in one poll indicating their belief that the country is more divided than ever on age, regional and occupational lines. The depth of this unreconciled public sentiment is apparent anecdotally. On my recent ten day visit to Seoul to attend a couple of high profile conferences, I was struck by the resilience of the country’s conservative true-believers. On a wintry Saturday night in the heart of the capital’s popular and fashionable Hongdae district, I was surprised to see a sizeable contingent of vocal Yoon supporters, parading en masse along the street amid the snowfall with loudspeakers and large banner versions of the familiar Taegeuki Korean national flag, vocally and unambiguously expressing their support for the imprisoned former president and denouncing the government for engaging in a rigged witch-hunt of Yoon and his fellow defendants.

The significance of this national division and an unresolved national legitimacy crisis becomes apparent when one considers the outcome of the presidential election last June. Lee Jae-myung secured an impressive 49 per cent of the national vote, in a contest with very high turnout of some 79 per cent, the highest since the watershed election of 1997 when Kim Dae-jung – an iconic figure in the country’s democratic movement – was elected president. However, Lee’s two rivals, Kim Moon-soo of the PPP and Lee Jun-seok of the Reform Party, the leaders of two broadly conservative parties, secured respectively 41.15 per cent and 8.34 per cent of the vote, demonstrating the near even split between progressive and conservative voters. 

This near symmetrical divide mirrors an ideological binary that has long been at the heart of South Korean politics – the presence of two competing narratives of South Korea’s modern experience. On the one hand, conservatives have embraced the story of South Korea’s exceptional rapid economic development – the familiar ‘Miracle on the Han River’ in which economic dirigisme coupled with generous US economic and military support (the product of the strategic imperative arising from the Korean War) helped propel the country from undeveloped country status to economic juggernaut in a matter of decades. By contrast, progressives celebrate the country’s long struggle to achieve full democratisation in the face of repressive authoritarian governments – an achievement that many date from as late as 1993 or 1997 and the successful elections of the most prominent representatives of democratic struggle, Kim Young-Sam and Kim Dae-Jung. 

These two narratives are not mutually exclusive. They both capture the essential dynamics that have driven the country’s modernisation. But they remain the polarising themes around which the country’s two rival political camps centre themselves, and they animate the often visceral opposition of the two groups to one another. 

This continuing tension matters at a time when South Korea is under acute pressure from a United States that has torn up the norms and principles that previously shaped alliance relations between the two countries. Trump’s transactional approach — reflected in punitive tariffs, extortionate demands for some $350 billion-worth of direct investment in the US market, and the astonishing language of the administration’s recently published National Security Strategy (NSS), with its focus on a ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine — has impressed on Korean policy makers and analysts the risk, if not the current reality, of US abandonment or, at the very minimum, qualification of its support for South Korea. Trump’s focus on the Western hemisphere, the NSS’s highly conditional support for a continuing presence in the Indo-Pacific and the protection of Taiwan, and the complete absence of any mention of the strategic threat from North Korea has reinforced the impression in Seoul that the country needs an urgent rethink of its strategic priorities. While the NSS has extolled the importance of ‘sovereignty’ as an animating principle of international relations, it is clear that for the Trump administration the only sovereignty that counts is that of the United States. All other state interests are secondary and subordinate to those of the US.

In the face of this new, sobering reality, and especially given the added challenge of an emboldened ad hoc coalition of authoritarian actors — including the newfound unity of purpose of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un — South Korean decision-makers are focused on enhancing their country’s strategic options. At a high profile Forum on Korea’s Regional Strategies, organised by the ROK’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 9 December in Seoul, senior representatives of the government laid out in detail the country’s extensive plans for sustaining and expanding its engagement with partners in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe. Listening to the speakers, I was struck by the urgency with which the government highlighted the diversity of initiatives between South Korea and a variety of bilateral and minilateral partners. At the heart of this push to demonstrate foreign policy activism and innovation is a focus on pragmatism rather than ideology, and it was striking how much substantive continuity there was between the past conservative Yoon administration’s foreign policy initiatives and those of the new progressive Lee government.

President Lee has, to date, demonstrated considerable diplomatic agility in both wooing Trump personally to offset the risks of US transactionalism, while also bolstering South Korea’s strategic autonomy, whether in increasing the country’s defence expenditure and defence-industrial capacity, or pushing for a transfer of operational control over South Korea’s military forces on the peninsula when acting in coordination with US forces to offset the threat from North Korea. There is little doubt that the ROK has a distinctive set of national strengths reinforcing its ability to play a vital and leading role in addressing regional and global challenges. These include its technological leadership in semiconductors, batteries, AI, and advanced manufacturing; its defence industrial capacity, particularly in shipbuilding, artillery systems, armoured vehicles, and drone technology (both airborne and maritime); and its innovative role in economic governance, as was so clearly demonstrated at the APEC summit in Gyeongju.

President Lee has also shown an admirable capacity to break out of old-established political patterns and narratives. For example, as a candidate, Lee was quick to criticise the past Yoon administration’s cooperative relationship with Japan, calling it ‘humiliating diplomacy’. Yet, as President, Lee has pragmatically embraced policies intended to strengthen cooperation with Tokyo and particularly with the new administration of Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae who Lee is now committed to meeting in January for a summit in Nara, Takaichi’s constituency and hometown.

This diplomatic innovativeness and adaptability was also on display in the convening of the UK-ROK High Level Forum on 15-16 December. Prompted by the efforts of the British Embassy in Seoul and those of former Foreign Minister, Park Jin, the forum marks the re-establishment of a previous bilateral track 2 initiative and builds on the Global Strategic Partnership announced between the UK and South Korea in 2023. Participating in the forum’s deliberations, it was clear to me that across a wide range of areas, including defence, AI and soft power, the ROK has considerable capacity and appetite to contribute globally with like-minded partners to offset a variety of strategic challenges.

A key requirement of this ambitious and activist foreign policy is convincing the South Korean public to support the government’s approach. At the onset of the MOFA Forum, Kim Ki-Sik, President of the National Assembly’s Futures Institute (a prominent parliamentary think-tank) underlined the importance of a bipartisan approach to foreign policy. This might seem self-evident, but in South Korea, where administrations are constitutionally limited to one-term, and where the pendulum of political change frequently swings from left to right with an associated pressure to reinvent foreign policy with every change of government, politics has rarely, if ever, ‘stopped at the water’s edge’. Partisanship can all too easily infect and disrupt the process of effective foreign policy making. 

This is not only true between parties. It can also complicate problems within government. In recent weeks, a new and potentially damaging fault line has emerged within the Lee administration, with the country’s unification minister Chung Dong-young seemingly at odds with the country’s National Security Adviser, Wi Sunglac. Chung has stressed the importance of developing a new initiative towards North Korea, a reflection of the left’s longstanding appetite for constructive engagement with Pyongyang, while Wi has been more focused on managing the complexity of the relationship with the United States as well as the ROK’s other critical bilateral and minilateral relationships. While the government has been keen to downplay the reports of intragovernmental tensions, the evidence of old, ideological positions complicating policy coordination is hard to ignore. 

At the same time, the commitment to thinking innovatively about the challenges that South Korea faces is also very much apparent among informed South Korean strategists and retired officials. For example, former Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, a key figure in the Six Party Talks with North Korea during the Roh Moo-hyun administration in the early 2000s, has recently published an influential new book in Korean, entitled Good Fences, Good Neighbours, arguing for a radical rethink of policy towards North Korea based on a realistic acceptance of the North’s de facto nuclear status and arguing that the South should acquire its own nuclear latency as a means of bolstering its strategic options while adapting to the less reliable posture of the United States. Similarly, when it comes to the relationship between public opinion and the government in South Korea, there is a clear-sighted awareness of the need to break out of old-established patterns of thinking. As one former, but still very influential, diplomat said to me during my visit, ‘We’ve had our system of government for eighty years. Perhaps it’s time for democracy 2.0.’ 

The challenge for the current administration is finding a way to adapt rapidly to multiple challenges simultaneously: the threat from emboldened authoritarians, the de-anchoring of the partnership with the United States, and the persistence of populist politics both abroad and at home. Managing this three-fold challenge will require considerable leadership skill and ingenuity, as well as effective cooperation with like-minded national partners facing similar challenges both in Asia and Europe.