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President Park Geun-hye looks at the fountain pens that she and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet will use to sign an agreement

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Asian-African Summit in Jakarta on Apr. 22, which marked the 60th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. It was the second meeting between the two leaders after brief talks on the sidelines of the APEC in Beijing last November.

Abe is also set to hold a summit with US President Barack Obama and become the first Japanese Prime Minister to address both houses of Congresses during a visit to the US from Apr. 26.

It’s a whirlwind moment in summit diplomacy for South Korea, the US, China, and Japan - but President Park Geun-hye is nowhere to be found. Instead, Park is spending these weeks on a 12-day tour of South America. Her schedule had her departing on Apr. 16, which coincided with the anniversary of the Sewol ferry sinking that claimed over 300 lives last year, and returning on Apr. 27. While the leaders of China and Japan were shaking hands on Apr. 22, Park was meeting with overseas Koreans in Chile.

“The administration is building on the amazing results of past eras and channeling its energies into increasing national competitiveness,” Park said of the South America push.

But there are worries that she has absented herself from a turbulent diplomatic scene with direct repercussions from the Northeast Asian political environment - and that Seoul could find itself shut out by an increasingly tight-knit Beijing and Tokyo.

Abe is proving the most agile of the leaders at the moment: weighing the possibilities for mending fences and normalizing relations with China one hand, and racing to integrate militarily with the US on the other, as seen with the recent decision on the US-Japan defense cooperation guidelines. His visit to the international Bandung Conference as a setting for meeting Xi before heading on to the US is part of a carefully crafted program of strategic diplomacy.

Xi’s decision to meet Abe appeared motivated by strategic necessity. Xi’s intention could be to explore Japan’s possible participation in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and communicate China’s wishes ahead of Abe’s US visit and address before Congress.

The problem now is that South Korea is sitting on the sidelines at a pivotal moment when the US and Japan are growing closer and China-Japan relations are undergoing a change.

“The five-year summit diplomacy schedule is set up in advance,” explained a government official on Park’s reasons for choosing South America over the Bandung Conference.

“It was already decided she would be going to South America some time this year, and after all the scheduling with the different countries it ended up being April,” the official explained, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Park apparently failed to predict that Xi and Abe would meet in Jakarta, and ended up being caught off guard after scheduling her South America trip.

The administration suggested it was a mistake to equate the China-Japan meeting with diplomatic isolation for South Korea.

“Some people seem to view Japan-China and South Korea-Japan relations as a kind of zero-sum game,” said Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Noh Kwang-il on Apr. 23. “We don’t take that view.”

The Blue House also groused about the criticisms.

“It’s going overboard a bit to ask ‘why didn’t you go to the Bandung Conference 60th anniversary?’ when the [South America] tour schedule was decided based on government priorities like the need to boost the economy,” said one Blue House official.

Another stressed that the level of diplomacy with Beijing and Tokyo was “our decision to make.”

“People who tie attendance at the Bandung Conference to South Korea-China-Japan relations don’t understand the basics of diplomacy,” the official argued.

Underlying the administration and Blue House’s attitude is the notion that the meeting between the Japanese and Chinese leaders and Abe’s US visit have no immediate bearing on the international situation in Northeast Asia. Critics are accusing them of not taking the situation seriously enough and failing to recognize subtle diplomatic developments that could end up like the proverbial butterfly’s wings ushering in a major storm in the future.

“They seem to have overlooked the nature of this situation, which is that different countries’ diplomatic strategies could change at any time,” said Catholic University of Korea professor Kim Jae-cheol.

“They should have at least predicted what might come next from China and Japan and behaved strategically, with President Park attending [the conference] to talk to Abe or showing herself to be coordinating with Xi,” Kim said.

By Son Won-je, staff reporter in Santiago and Seok Jin-hwan, Blue House correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]