Category: Publications

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…

Link to Read the Full Article: (Click Here)

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’…

Link to Read the Full Report: (Click Here)

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…

To Read the Full Report: (Click Here)

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…

To Read the Full Report: (Click Here)

Structured Abstract

Purpose – This research analyzes the validity of the Biden administration period’s cooperation as a deviant case within the quasi-alliance model’s expectations for the period while exploring the compounding impact of building trilateralism in the U.S.-Japan-ROK relationship and U.S. involvement in Japan-Korea conflict issues.

Design – This research conducts an embedded multiple-case study design, exploring two cases with two embedded units of analysis each. The first case operates within the past quasi-alliance application by researchers in the Obama and Trump periods, applying a constructed structured framework of analysis on the building trilateralism and the United States’ involvement in defining conflict issues of the 2015 Obama-era ‘comfort women’ agreement and the 2019 Trump-era GSOMIA conflict. The second case analyzes the U.S. commitment to security made by the Biden administration through an aspect of the quasi-alliance model and applies the structured framework of analysis on the building trilateralism and U.S. involvement in the 2023 Biden-era forced labor compensation plan.

Findings – The research findings contribute to the understanding that articulating the United States’ involvement in Japan-Korea conflict issues as pressure is well-founded and that the impact of that pressure within the alliance system is multidirectional. Additionally, this research argues the importance of the compounding factor of the building trilateralism, as it impacts susceptibility to pressure over time and the accessibility for further progression through using past agreement foundations. Moreover, these research findings support the interpretation of the Biden administration period’s cooperation as a deviant case within the quasi-alliance model’s expectations for the period and discuss the future applicability of the model for the U.S.-Japan-ROK case. Specifically, the analysis’s findings elaborate on the past concerns for the model in the post-Cold War era and propose the additional difficulties it will face as the effort to build trilateralism continues to move the relationship between a quasi-alliance and alliance theory interpretation.

Value – This research expands on gaps in security studies’ theoretical frameworks, deepens understanding of a unique aspect of alliance management, produces observations on the United States’ involvement in a critical relationship, and supports the benefit that aspects of building trilateralism and pressure in the alliance system hold in supplementary analysis.

To Read the Full Thesis: (Click Here)

The Covid-19 Pandemic has only exacerbated the long-standing issues afflicting the insufficiencies in human rights protections around the world while furthering the degradation of human rights across areas of autonomy and accessibility. In the case of the long history of human rights violations and reluctance to meet the international standards upheld by the United Nations, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK/North Korea) must be viewed as an exceedingly critical case of concern, especially in recent times. From June 16 to 18, 2020, Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), in partnership with the Koret Foundation, organized its annual Koret Conference with a specific focus centered on North Korean human rights. In a volume of conference proceedings organized into parts based on three interrelated issues of the role of the United Nations, the role of information, and that of denuclearization, The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security (2021) adds to the conversation on the role human rights in policy towards North Korea, while emphasizing the interconnectedness of human rights with political issues such as the addressment of issues of security and denuclearization. Espousing a desire to not “delegitimize” the regime but rather “help North Korea move towards becoming a positive and contributing participant in the international community” (p. 22), editors Robert R. King and Gi-Wook Shin strive to “reignite” the importance of a broad engagement with the DPRK on human rights issues, as they deem the stereotypical notions of such efforts as negatively impactful to denuclearization efforts and security issues as false (p. 42).

To Read the Full Review: (Click Here)

The Journal of Territorial and Maritime Studies (JTMS) recently spoke with Edcel John A. Ibarra about his article “Issue-Based Cooperation on Conflict Resolution in the South China Sea: Exploring Roles for ASEAN Beyond the Code of Conduct,” published in the Winter/Spring 2022 issue of JTMS (Volume 9 No. 1).

Presenting an original framework to explore the roles of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in cooperation on conflict resolution in the South China Sea, Ibarra’s employment of an issue-based approach to international relations breaks down the South China Sea disputes into their component issues. Through this research, Ibarra identifies the types of conflict resolution and modes of cooperation implied in each, while supporting the need for additional complementary efforts (e.g., conflict settlement), in other modes (e.g., “minilateralism”), and on other issues (e.g., maritime rights, maritime power projection, and marine economic development), in addition to concluding on a code of conduct.

In this interview, Ibarra was willing to help answer questions on why this new framework and issue-based approach were needed, what component issue of the dispute he finds to be the most critical or primed for future complimentary engagement, and his current opinion on how likely this form of cooperation among ASEAN member states could be produced…

To Read the Full Interview: (Click Here)

The North Korean Review recently spoke with Dr. Van Jackson about his article Deviant Cases and Near-Miss Crises: Locating North Korea in the Asian Peace, published in the Fall 2021 issue of NR. Acting as a bridge between Asian-peace and security studies research, Dr. Jackson’s deviant-case approach to North Korea’s experience holds illustrative cases and was of comparing competing claims about the sources of the “Asian peace.” In this interview, Dr. Jackson was willing to help answer questions on what a deviant case analysis is, the importance of understanding The United States paradoxical role in “Asian Peace”, and his personal outlook on “Asian Peace” in near future…

To Read the Full Interview: (Click Here)