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President Yoon Suk-yeol chairs a security meeting with aides on Sept. 23 upon boarding his flight back to Korea from Canada. (Yonhap)

President Yoon Suk-yeol returned home to South Korea on Saturday evening after completing a seven-day tour of the UK, the US and Canada.

Ordinarily, the president meets with the press corps on the flight home after such tours to expound on outcomes. But in contrast with his previous trip in late June to attend a NATO summit, Yoon did not speak with the press on the flight back.

It’s an omission that speaks volumes about the mood in the presidential office over the latest diplomatic travels.

At his first stop in the UK, Yoon drew much criticism for his decision to send condolences for the death of Queen Elizabeth II without paying his respects in person. An expected South Korea-US summit failed to pan out in New York, where Yoon was visiting to attend a UN General Assembly session, and the trip produced nothing in the way of visible results on protectionist terms in the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) after the presidential office itself raised the South Korean public’s hopes for them.

In the case of Japan, the Yoon administration invited accusations of “submissiveness” with a cursory summit of ambiguous nature.

Meanwhile, the furor over coarse remarks made by Yoon at the same event where he had his 48-second meeting with US President Joe Biden — and the subsequent explanation of them — provided a symbolic illustration of the president’s poor understanding of foreign affairs and national security and his advisors’ incompetence.

The situation is leading many observers to insist that the administration needs to establish a new control tower for foreign affairs and national security.

At a surface level, the fiasco of Yoon’s latest series of visits stemmed from a lack of prior coordination on the forms and content of diplomacy, combined with unexpected developments on the ground.

At a deeper level, however, analysts are attributing the situation to the Yoon administration’s emphasis on establishing alliances with the US in the areas of the economy and technology in addition to security amid intensifying frictions between Washington and Beijing. The tour produced more or less nothing to show for the efforts the administration has made to beef up the South Korea-US alliance and trilateral cooperation with Japan.

Yoon’s election as president came amid an unprecedented coalescence of foreign affairs and national security factors, with the deepening power battle between the US and China, the supply chain impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking after a summit held with the US around two weeks after his election, Yoon said he “felt that President Biden’s ideas and mine align in more or less every respect.” This read as a strategic declaration that he would be pursuing a direction of far greater closeness to the US than before.

The problem is that the US itself has changed.

The “Make America Great Again” approach of the Donald Trump administration has been carried on in part under the Biden administration with its “foreign policy for the middle class.” The only position in US politics today that transcends party lines is “America First.”

An excellent illustration of this is the IRA, which the US Congress passed overwhelmingly, and which translates into subsidies that discriminate against South Korean electric vehicles (EVs).

After spending the past four months focusing attention on the US — including the announcement of plans for large-scale investment there by major South Korean corporations — he ended up blindsided by the IRA.

“Given its intensifying competition with China, the US has lost some of its strength, and it no longer has room to share benefits with allies the way it did in the past,” said Lee Hea-jeong, a professor of political science and international relations at Chung-Ang University.

“This is a time when we need a fundamental shift in perceptions when it comes to the basic calculations of the South Korea-US alliance and our diplomatic strategy with the US, yet we just keep looking to the US,” he observed.

Accompanying Yoon on his trip was Minister of Foreign Affairs Park Jin, who attended a meeting of Minerals Security Partnership ministers in New York on Thursday. Spearheaded by the US, the partnership was launched in June to reinforce supply chains for key mineral resources such as rare earth elements that are needed for semiconductor and high-capacity battery production. The same day, Park attended as an observer at a meeting of the Partners in the Blue Pacific, a group formed by the US, Japan, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Those frameworks are two of the most representative examples of bodies created by the US to target China, alongside two others — the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and the Chip 4 semiconductor dialogue — that the Yoon administration decided to join after taking office.

China has been up in arms over the frameworks, which it views as an attempt to hem it in. Experts are predicting it will adopt an even more aggressive approach to its foreign policy after President Xi Jinping’s third term is finalized at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which commences on Oct. 16. This means that the Yoon administration is poised to face even stiffer diplomatic challenges.

“If you just look at semiconductors, the US can’t shut China out without Korea, and China can’t bring back its semiconductor industry without Korea,” explained Kim Joon-hyung, a professor at Handong Global University and former director of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy.

“The most serious issue is that [the Yoon administration] doesn’t seem to realize that we have leverage,” he observed.

Cheong Wook-sik, director of the Peace Network, said it was “not clear that President Yoon’s advisors are reporting to him properly on foreign affairs and national security policies.”

Cheong urged that the president “waste no time replacing his advisors and listening to what the experts have to say.”

By Jung In-hwan, staff reporter

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