South Korea’s presidential election on June 3 installed Lee Jae-myung as the new president. His victory renewed the substantial debate regarding Lee’s foreign policy orientation. In particular, Lee is a politician who has clearly been on the left or liberal side, as the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea. He has advocated against hardline policies toward North Korea and suggested a recalibration of ties with China and Russia. Lately, though, his campaign promises were more pragmatically centered.
Alliance supporters in both the United States and South Korea are concerned that the Lee Jae-myung government may shift closer to China, at the expense of the decades-old South Korea-U.S. alliance. To assuage such concerns, Lee has been emphasizing the importance of the alliance for South Korea’s security.
Our ongoing research on global alignment and realignment can help shed light on what to expect from South Korea under President Lee Jae-myung. The bottom-line result is this: South Korea has shown some fluctuations in its relationship with China, but alignment with the U.S. has also been growing closer over time.
We define “alignment” as the proximity or closeness of one country to the other in terms of political, economic, and social relations. “Realignment” is defined as one country distancing itself from one great power while getting closer to the other rival great power. This concept of alignment and realignment is a substantial departure from the previous understanding of global alignment, chiefly concerned with alliances or United Nations voting. In contemporary international relations, many activities that define interstate relations are conducted not only by public political actors but also private individuals and firms. Based on this observation, we measured alignment as the broad phenomenon encompassing not only joint defense agreements or voting records in the U.N., but also trade, investment, and aid relations. By employing the latent variable approach of exploratory factor analysis, we uncovered a measure of alignment, which we call the “A-score.”
Defined as such, alignment is primarily the result of intentional public politics, but it is also shaped by the decisions of decentralized actors such as private firms and individuals. Alignment could be made or broken by tariff policies or industrial policies that could affect firms’ decision to invest and trade. But small and big businesses seeking cheaper suppliers or input materials, as well as public opinion, particularly in democracies, have influenced the patterns of friends and foe in international relations. All these public and private ingredients are part of the alignment scores we constructed.
Conservatives in South Korea are not happy about any political developments that could bring South Korea closer to China. In their support for ousted former president Yoon Suk-yeol, conservative protesters turned out waving the flag of South Korea as well as that of the United States. The assumption here is that the proximity to China could pull South Korea away from the U.S. This zero-sum sentiment is reflected in many political discussions and public opinion surveys in today’s South Korea, which is increasingly polarized.
Whether the Korean government intended it or not, alignment with China has intensified over the years. The red line in Figure 1 below shows South Korea’s A-score between 2000 and 2020 with respect to alignment with China. The zero line on the y-axis represents the global average A-score with two great powers – the United States and China. South Korea’s A-score with respect to China has consistently stayed above zero. This means that throughout the five administrations we studied – under presidents Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003), Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013), Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), and Moon Jae-in (2017–2022) – South Korea continued to move closer to China. The dip after 2015 can be potentially explained by the post-THAAD sanctions where China decided to limit trade and travel in retaliation for the U.S. deployment of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile systems in South Korea.
Figure 1: South Korea’s Alignment Score (A-score) with China and the United States.
How did South Korea align with the U.S. over time? Belying claims that South Korea is gradually distancing itself away from the United States, the alignment score with the U.S. has been steady. Over the five governments of Kim (centrist/conservative), Roh (liberal), Lee (conservative), Park (conservative), and Moon (liberal), South Korea fluctuated between the election of party leaders from both left and right. Yet the importance of the security ties with the U.S. has never been fully discredited.
For example, the liberal Roh government sent troops for the reconstruction of Iraq in 2003, despite strong opposition from Roh’s political support base. The liberal Moon government aligned certain elements of its New Southern Policy with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy. These liberal governments, which engaged more with North Korea, recognized that they needed to accommodate U.S. strategic interests elsewhere in order to gain the United States’ support for South Korea’s policies toward North Korea and China on the Korean Peninsula.
Similarly, the behavioral patterns of individuals and firms exhibit stability rather than change. For example, South Korea has the third-largest number of Starbucks stores in the world, following the United States and China. Starbucks outperforms any of the Chinese tea franchises operating in South Korea. South Koreans have now become deeply assimilated into Western lifestyles, while still retaining key Confucian values. Opinion polls (2019 Carnegie Poll, 2020 Pew Poll, 2023 Pew Poll) consistently show that the public exhibits more favorable views toward the U.S. compared to China.
The semiconductor industry is one example of how the private sector contributed to these alignment trends. In 2018, 67 percent of semiconductor exports from South Korea were going to China. By 2022, the percentage dropped to 55 percent. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix Inc. are both beneficiaries of the United States’ $53 billion CHIPS and Science Act, while they are at the same time participating in Chinese economic forums.
In the context of the June 2025 election, our analysis of alignment scores over the past two decades indicates that we should expect greater continuity in the newly elected government rather than a sharp departure – at least in terms of foreign policy toward the United States and China. The details will continue to be heavily debated, of course, including the issue of the South Korea-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), the command structure of South Korea-U.S. military cooperation, as well as tariff and investment issues. But the bedrock of alignments does not appear to particularly portend dramatic changes.
Disclaimer: This article was made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (G-PS-24-62004, Small State Statecraft and Realignment). The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.