Moon Jae-in of the Democratic Party of Korea has just been elected South Korea’s new president. This is the second conservative-to-liberal transition of power in the country’s democratic history. It began unexpectedly last October, with the eruption of a corruption scandal involving then-President Park Geun-hye, culminating in her impeachment and removal from office earlier this year. Although Park’s ouster was painful, it also demonstrated the resilience of South Korea’s democracy.

Moon will take office at a time of heightened tensions with North Korea. To understand what kind of policy he will pursue requires familiarity with liberal foreign-policy thinking in South Korea since the 1998–2003 presidency of Kim Dae-jung.

Kim had watched the Cold War come to a peaceful end in Europe, and he wanted to bring his own country’s ongoing confrontation with the communist North to a similarly nonviolent conclusion. So he pursued direct engagement with North Korea, and his ‘Sunshine Policy’ was taken up by his successor, Roh Moo-hyun. Before he died in 2009, Roh (under whom I served as Foreign Minister) was a political mentor and close friend to Moon.

German reunification, preceded by West Germany’s policy of direct engagement, or Ostpolitik, with East Germany in the last decades of the Cold War, was a source of profound inspiration for Kim. Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt began pursuing Ostpolitik in earnest in the 1970s, and Helmut Kohl maintained the policy after he came to power in 1982. Although Ostpolitik could not change the East German regime’s nature, it did make East Germany heavily dependent on West Germany, and gave Kohl significant political leverage during the reunification process.

Of course, most Korean liberals recognize that North Korea is not East Germany, which never threatened West Germany or the United States with nuclear weapons. But Moon and his supporters nonetheless find it regrettable that conservative South Korean presidents since Lee Myung-bak did not maintain the Sunshine Policy, as Kohl had done with Ostpolitik. If they had, North Korea might have become more dependent on South Korea than on China, in which case US and South Korean leaders would not have to plead constantly with China to rein in the North Korean regime.

South Korea’s liberals also recognize that the strategic situation has changed significantly since the Kim and early Roh eras, when North Korea had not yet become a de facto nuclear state. To realize his liberal dream of national unification, Moon will have to confront a much larger challenge than anything his predecessors faced.

Moon will still pursue his dream, but he will do so prudently, and with an eye toward geopolitical realities. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, he made it clear that he sees South Korea’s alliance with the US as the bedrock of its diplomacy, and promised not to begin talks with North Korea without first consulting the US. But, beyond formal talks, he could also try to engage with the North by reviving inter-Korean cooperation on health or environmental issues, which fall outside the scope of international sanctions.

Over the last nine years, conservative presidents—especially Park—cut all contacts with North Korea to try to push it toward denuclearization. South Korean liberals argue that this policy compromised the national goal of peaceful reunification, by turning it into an empty slogan. They believe that maintaining inter-Korean relations will lay the groundwork for reunifying the Peninsula, just as Ostpolitik did in Germany. Thus, Moon will most likely pursue a two-pronged strategy that pairs denuclearization with engagement and preparations for eventual reunification.

Moon has acknowledged that strong sanctions will be necessary to bring North Korea to the negotiating table. So his government will have no fundamental disagreement with the US, especially now that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said that the US is not seeking regime change in North Korea.

Moon will also have more flexibility than his conservative predecessors to accommodate a US-led Iran-style deal aimed at freezing North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities. But if US President Donald Trump tries to make South Korea pay for America’s recently deployed Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system, Moon will have to refuse. Otherwise, he would face a serious domestic backlash from both the left and the right.

A final but crucial issue is China, with which Korea has had a bitter history. China has intervened whenever it has viewed the Korean Peninsula as a potential beachhead for an invading maritime power. China intervened in 1592, when Japan prepared to attack the Ming Dynasty by first subduing Chosŏn Dynasty Korea. It happened again during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, and then during the Korean War in the early 1950’s.

Despite this history, Korean liberals recognize that Chinese cooperation will be necessary for achieving reunification. Accordingly, Moon’s government will have to maintain a rock-solid alliance with the US while trying to improve relations with China, which have cooled since South Korea decided to host the THAAD system. Moon might try to soothe Chinese concerns by suggesting that the system is temporary, and could be removed, pending North Korean denuclearization.

Those who predict that a Moon presidency will disrupt South Korean relations with the US and Japan are surely mistaken. After all, it was during the liberal Roh presidency that South Korea concluded the South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, allowed for US troops to be redeployed within its borders, and dispatched its own troops to fight alongside the US in Iraq. Moon will affirm that legacy and attempt to revive another, an updated and renewed version of the Sunshine Policy, which embodies South Korea’s most fundamental long-term aspiration.

These are difficult times for China. After decades of double-digit GDP growth, today’s slowdown points to an economic system in trouble. Once hailed as a model of development, the Chinese economy now appears sclerotic and cumbersome. The Chinese public is growing restive and increasingly questioning the system’s ability to deliver on official promises that the country’s economic ‘miracle’ will continue. Many Chinese fear that the ‘Chinese Dream’ may be just that: a dream.

China cannot fix its economic problems merely by pulling the right combination of existing policy levers. Rather, it must embark on a broader and deeper process of reform and renewal; and it must be willing to swallow the bitter pill of slower short-term growth in the interest of long-term goals.

At the same time, an expansive reform effort cannot be advanced by economic decisions alone. China must also come to terms with the gap between how it wants to be perceived and how the world actually perceives it. China should take a lesson from business and recognize that many of its actions and affiliations on the world stage pose serious risks to its reputation—and to its bottom line.

For example, consider an international observer’s view of developments in the South China Sea. China is plainly bullying its southern neighbors by using the menacing term ‘core interests’ (in pursuit of which a country would resort to the use of force) to have its way in various disputes. But, to hear it from Chinese officials, China is an aggrieved partner in the region. They argue that they have reined in their fishing fleet to avoid incidents with the Vietnamese, only to see Vietnamese fishermen aggressively claim the relinquished waters.

China obviously has the strength to drive out the Vietnamese, the Filipinos, the Malaysians, the Indonesians, and almost anyone else it chooses to confront. Southeast Asia represents but a fraction of China’s size and wealth. But does this behavior make China stronger in the region? Does a nineteenth-century approach to pursuing economic gain justify ongoing enmity with one’s neighbors? The peoples of Southeast Asia, after all, will be China’s neighbors for the rest of its history; while their knives may be short, their memories surely aren’t.

Many Chinese genuinely believe that they are unfairly criticized for China’s new assertiveness in the South China Sea. But certitude has little to recommend itself when the price paid is distrust and condemnation from everyone else. This is a basic social truth that most people know from their personal lives: Happiness and harmony are far more important than the empty comfort of being convinced you’re right.

Beyond Southeast Asia, nowhere in the world is China’s reputation more at stake than on the Korean Peninsula. In the South, the Republic of Korea (ROK) has become a modern, vibrant, and culturally sophisticated country that is admired around the world and addresses its problems forthrightly and transparently. In the North is a state that can best be described as a prison camp, run by a hereditary despotic leader whose regime—most politely described as a cult—is pursuing an unrelenting drive to develop weapons of mass destruction. Its main exports are the black humor produced by its political system, refugees, and claims of exceptionalism that put America’s to shame. And China is its only real—albeit increasingly wary—ally.

To be fair, China’s interests on the Korean Peninsula are more complex than how they are often portrayed in the West. For China, North Korea is not so much a foreign-policy problem as a multifaceted set of issues that impinge on China’s own internal debates as it charts its future course.

What would the demise of North Korea and its potential unification with the ROK mean for Chinese security interests, and for the perception of those interests? What would be the repercussions of losing a historic ‘partner’ (many Chinese today would bristle at such a description), and potentially strengthening a rival, for China’s own political system or foreign policy? One thing seems certain: the future of the legacy relationship with North Korea will be determined by the Chinese themselves, not by the international community.

Still, weighing the disposition of the Korean Peninsula offers China an ideal opportunity to begin reconsidering its long-term interests. It is here, more than anywhere else, that China can align itself within mainstream international thinking and start to close the gap between how it is viewed by the world and how it views itself.

Ahead of ASPI’s Australia’s Future Surface Fleet Conference (30 March to 1 April, here in Canberra) we’ll be bringing you a new feature: a weekly update on maritime strategy and security issues, from here in Australia and internationally.

First, it’s worth noting the recent visit by Australia’s new Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, to Australia’s Government-owned ship builder the Australian Submarine Corporation. He agreed to meet with South Australian State Defence Industries Minister Martin Hamilton-Smith, after initially declining the meeting. The South Australia government and Hamilton-Smith have been vocal supporters of local shipbuilding. Here’s the press release and the transcript of the Minister’s remarks from the visit, during which he said:

The Australian Government has not yet decided on a particular submarine design and more work is required before such a decision is made. Decisions about this next generation of submarines need to be made on the basis of what is best for our Armed Forces and our national security.

Read more

There’s growing concern amongst analysts, and government officials alike that North Korea has begun to rapidly accelerate its development of advanced offensive cyber capabilities. I explored this in a recent journal article, which drew together open source material to provide an assessment of some of the motivations for North Korean developments in this area, and examine how they’ve used this capability. During 2013 evidence and sources emerged detailing North Korea’s prolonged targeting of its southern neighbours. You can read more about this in the article, but here I look at some of the potential impacts for South Korea and the region as a whole.

South Korea is in a strong economic situation, boasting one of the world’s most technologically advanced economies, with a well-developed broadband infrastructure and a strong digital economy across the public and private sectors. This highly networked economy brings increased vulnerabilities that are being exploited in cyberattacks. There are various consequences for South Korea, the most important of which is the reputational damage economically, politically and internationally that accompanies appearing vulnerable to cyberattacks. Read more