Author: Matthew Fleming

Seoul has a chance to take a leading role in shaping the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.

South Korea must not relinquish its agency and allow others to define the Indo-Pacific without it. As President Lee Jae-myung has stated, South Korea “cannot repeat the mistakes of 120 years ago,” because “in the past, we failed to keep up with the changing international trends and were caught between the great powers and pushed around, ultimately losing our sovereignty.” 

South Korea today possesses capabilities to navigate a volatile regional and international environment that its 19th-century self could only have dreamed of. South Korea has emerged as a G-20 economy, a leading actor in critical and emerging technologies of AI and semiconductors, and a global cultural exporter with soft power reaching far beyond Asia. It is also a resilient democracy that recently weathered the turbulence of a short-lived declaration of martial law by former President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was impeached for his constitutional violations. 

However, Seoul has not consistently translated its strengths into regional agenda-setting or leadership that reflects its substantial economic, cultural, and security advancements. Yoon began to change this oversight with the Camp David Summit, South Korea’s first Indo-Pacific Strategy, and founding membership in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. It will be under Lee that South Korea’s larger regional role can truly start to take shape…

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In the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), the terms “deter,” “deterrence,” and “deterrent” are used forty-two times across its forty-eight pages, applying to broad ideas of aggression, conflict, and coercion, as well as more specific attacks and issues related to biological warfare capabilities, cyberattacks, and domestic terrorism. Introducing the concept of “integrated deterrence,” the 2022 NSS lays out a National Defense Strategy (NDS) intended to go beyond reliance “solely on conventional forces and nuclear deterrence,” aiming to “effectively coordinate, network, and innovate” by integrating capabilities across domains, regions, the spectrum of conflict, the U.S. government, and its allies and partners.

On December 10-11, 2024, the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) convened its workshop, Deterrence in the 2025 National Defense Strategy Review. This two-day workshop featured in-depth discussions on lessons from integrated deterrence, challenges in adapting deterrence strategies, and priorities for enhancing both conventional and nuclear deterrence in response to evolving threats. While key takeaways from this workshop can be found in the center’s Workshop Summary, this blog aims to emphasize further the crucial role that building minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific region plays in the ongoing implementation of a U.S. strategy for integrated deterrence, which seeks to better integrate its allies and partners in a ‘networked way’…

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Donald Trump will retake office at the start of 2025 as the 47^th U.S. President. At the end of his previous presidency in 2020, pessimism about the future of the global order was high. The past four years of the United States’ deteriorating relations with China, threats to withdraw from multilateral organizations, and the emphasis on equal, reciprocal, and proportional burden-sharing with allies fueled these concerns. These concerns only intensified as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted vulnerabilities to constructive international cooperation in an era of great power rivalry. Leading up to the 2024 U.S. election, this ever-increasing perception of current affairs as one of instability remained a prominent characterization. A sentiment that once focused on the threat to international cooperation posed by the Trump presidency and exacerbated by the later pandemic continued on a larger scale due to the emergence of multiple global crises: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, deteriorating inter-Korean relations amid North Korean threats, the militarization of the South China Sea, and increasing tensions between the United States and China. With Trump’s return to the White House, the growing concern about further instability and disruption to U.S. foreign policy that his election will bring is rightly being considered and debated.

However, despite the dominance of focusing on instability and justified concern over the disruption his administration might bring, a contrary, more optimistic perspective still deserves reiteration. Over the last four years, an undercurrent of optimism has emerged, focusing on rapid development and resilience building with our partners and allies. The world has witnessed remarkable international collaboration in developing and distributing COVID-19 vaccines, widespread condemnation of Russia’s actions, support for the Ukrainian defense, and coordinated humanitarian efforts in conflict zones. However, what is more interesting is the critical driver of resilience beyond traditional, pre-existing international multilateral structures, evident in the growing prevalence of more targeted, regionally focused, smaller formulas of partnership based on shared interests, termed minilateralism. Notably, initiatives such as AUKUS, the QUAD, and the U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral partnership have propelled a vision of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) and highlighted the importance of countries adopting Indo-Pacific Strategies (IPS). This networked approach, characterized by an overlapping and ‘latticework’ of minilateral cooperation centered in the vital region of the Indo-Pacific, exemplifies a proactive, inclusive, and resilient response taking place amid great power competition and instability concerns…

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From July 11 to 13, 2024, the East-West Center in Washington, in coordination with the U.S. Embassies in Seoul and Tokyo, the Korean Ministry of Education, the National Institute for International Education, and Busan Metropolitan City brought together fifty delegates representing the United States, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands to hold the inaugural U.S.-ROK-Japan Trilateral Global Leadership Youth Summit in Busan, South Korea. This Summit was announced as one of the cooperative initiatives focused on “Expanding Global Health and People-to-People Cooperation” at the 2023 Trilateral Leaders’ Summit at Camp David that inaugurated a new era of trilateral partnership. 

This Roadmap for the Trilateral Partnership summarized the policy recommendations that the delegates proposed, negotiated, and agreed upon at the conclusion of the Camp David Plus Simulation Exercise and articulates how the intended outcomes contribute to further promoting the shared interests of the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan…

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