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Abstract

This article elucidates the reasons behind South Korea’s diminished security cooperation with Japan during the Moon Jae-in administration (2017–2022). The author discovered that President Moon halted ongoing security cooperation activities initiated by his predecessor, even though the North Korean nuclear threat became exponential. In particular, this article argues that not the national-level factors, such as South Koreans’ negative perception of Japan on the basis of their collective memory, but the leader factor was the main reason for the worsening of South Korea–Japan’s security cooperation during the Moon administration, contrary to most people’s expectations. The Moon administration’s progressive political leaders, who had acquired anti-United States/anti-Japan and pro-North Korea/pro-China perspectives during their anti-government protests in the 1970s and 1980s, decided to be confrontational towards Japan to their political benefit. The reality that the security cooperation between South Korea and Japan jumpstarted once the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol administration leaders replaced them supports this finding.

Keywords

South Korea South Korea–Japan relation South Korea–Japan security cooperation Japan–South Korea North Korea

Introduction

Since the inauguration of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol in May 2022, relations between South Korea and Japan have improved rapidly. President Yoon flew to Tokyo to meet his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, on 16 February 2023, without any demands or conditions. Prime Minister Kishida paid his return visit to Seoul on 8–9 May 2023 with a voluntary apology for the South Koreans’ suffering and pain during Japanese colonial rule. Then, the two leaders and US President Joe Biden held their trilateral summit at Camp David on 18 August 2023 and agreed to ‘consult trilaterally’, ‘in an expeditious manner’, ‘to coordinate our responses to regional challenges, provocations, and threats’. This development level was unimaginable during the previous Moon Jae-in’s administration of South Korea.

The Moon administration retreated South Korea–Japan relations by adopting a confrontational approach to Japan. It de facto nullified the Comfort Women Agreement and the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Japan, which were signed during its predecessor, the Park Geun-hye Administration. In retaliation, Japan imposed a few trade restrictions on South Korea. The two neighbours stopped most military and security contacts, even though North Korea, the common enemy of the two neighbours, developed hydrogen bombs and various types of missiles to deliver the bombs to them. The negative collective memory of Japan’s colonial rule over the Korean people and the historical hostility between the two neighbours were reminded, even though the countries share democratic values and systems, an alliance with the United States and, most of all, security threats from North Korea and China.

It has been one of the most challenging puzzles for international relations (IR) scholars to understand why the relationship between South Korea and Japan can hardly improve. V. Cha (1999) and V. Jackson (2018) attributed the sour South Korea–Japan relations to international-level factors, such as the two neighbours’ excessive reliance on the United States’ and Northeast Asia’s complex and contentious security environment. Other scholars focused on national-level aspects, such as national identity clash (Glosserman & Snyder, 2015; Tamaki, 2010, p. 177), nationalism (Katz, 2015), reproduction of historical memories (Deacon, 2021) and symbolic politics (Kim, 2014, pp. 31–60) of the two countries. However, the former underevaluated the dynamic interactions and complex domestic politics between the two neighbours, and the latter searched for too fundamental roots to be addressed. These answers could be helpful for long-term analysis but can have limitations in explaining the short-term abrupt policy changes, as Presidents Moon and Yoon demonstrated. These international- and national-level analyses will have more substantial persuasive power when short-term and human-level analyses complement them.

In particular, South Korean political leaders have played a more significant role than international and national factors during their respective terms because South Korea has a powerful presidential governance system. The presidents may tend to realise their foreign policy directions during their five-year, one-term presidency. In addition, South Korea has had a clear ideological divide between conservatives and progressives, who have had totally different foreign policy outlooks. The dramatic improvement of South Korea–Japan relations in the conservative Park Geun-hye Administration, the sudden hiatus of relations during the following progressive Moon administration, and the rapid restrengthening of security consultation and cooperation with Japan during the current conservative Yoon Administration cannot be easily explained by international or national-level analyses. In this sense, this article will analyse the changes in South Korea’s Japanese policy from the Park Geun-hye administration to the Moon Jae-in administration, focusing on the human level, specifically, the leader factor.

For this purpose, this article reviews the theories of the three-level— international, national and human—approach, which was introduced in the late 1950s (Singer, 1961, pp. 84–85; Waltz, 1959), and examines South Korea’s recent three-level status regarding Japan before the inauguration of the Park administration. Then, as the central analysis, it compares the three-level factors of South Korea–Japan relations during the Park and Moon administrations. Finally, it concludes the analysis by providing policy and theoretical implications.

The Three Levels and Leader Factor in International Relations

International-Level Factors

International-level factors have been discussed more actively than others because the interactions among nations have exponentially increased through the Cold War—a fierce confrontation between the democratic and communist blocs. Moreover, international society remains anarchic despite the considerable contributions of the United Nations (UN) and international laws to reduce anarchical elements in the world (Eckstein, 2023).

Most nations in this anarchical international society should pay constant attention to identifying threats and taking measures to defend themselves from their threats. If the threat level exceeds their defence capabilities, they should seek an alliance or security cooperation with other nations for external balance. In this sense, the balance of power among nations has been an essential subject of modern IR research, and insightful alliance theories were developed in the 1980s and 1990s (Altfeld, 1984; Morrow, 1991; Palmer, 1990; Snyder, 1984; Walt, 1997).

The international-level IR could be condensed into regional levels. B. Buzan and O. Wæver developed the regional security complex (RSC) theory in the 1980s to avoid the overestimation of world powers and focus on regional politics (Kelly, 2007, pp. 206–208; Sadurski, 2022, p. 142). In the same context, bilateral interactions among neighbouring countries could be more critical than regional or global politics, while the interactions cannot be detached from multi-dimensional IR.

National-Level Factors

Due to the growth of liberal democracies worldwide, national-level factors have been increasing their influence on nations’ international decision-making. R. Putnam (1988, p. 434) introduced the logic of the ‘two-level game’ and the concept of ‘win-set’ and argued that political leaders make foreign policy decisions to satisfy domestic pressures. A few scholars in eighteenth-century Europe called the people’s influence ‘a public-opinion tribunal’ or ‘repository of wisdom’ (Holsti, 2004, pp. 3–5). Modern people appear to have more ‘substantively meaningful orientations towards foreign affairs’ than their ancestors, thanks to the development of modern communication devices (Kertzer & Zeitzoff, 2017).

Recently, people’s emotional aspects have been emphasised, and many case studies were conducted as the key national-lever factor (Lebow, 2016; Wallace, 1991). In particular, the countries that have shared controversial histories have been experiencing a strong influence of their collective memory, which is ‘public discourses about the past as wholes or narratives and images of the past that speak in the name of collectivities’ (Olick, 2007, p. 34). J. Olick (2007, p. 54) conducted a thorough analysis of the Germans’ collective memory of the Holocaust and concluded that ‘social pasts interact with social presents to shape political action’. While introducing ressentiment and trauma as important factors in modern international society, Olick (2007, p. 127) even emphasised the ‘politics of regret’ to reconcile the present justice with the past misdeeds as a ‘transitional justice’. He argued that the politics of regret have become ‘the major characteristic of our age’ or ‘modernity’ since World War I (Olick, 2007, pp. 136–137). However, people’s emotions or collective memories cannot be easily measured and do not have a straightforward way to be reflected in foreign policy decision-making.

Human-Level Factors

As an institution, nations choose leaders to represent their people and give the leaders the authority to make decisions on foreign policies. Usually, leaders respect and follow people’s opinions and emotions, but they sometimes make decisions on their own in the name of the long-term security and prosperity of their respective countries. Their roles stand out in specific decisions that lead to a change in history. R. Snyder and his colleagues (1962) introduced foreign policy analysis (FPA) to focus on leaders’ role in policy decision-making. They considered the leader’s role as a liaison between the international and national levels (Putnam, 1988, pp. 456–457), and seriously discussed leaders, their decision-making processes, how they influence foreign policies, and their actions’ effects on international affairs.

Sometimes leaders can decide not to sufficiently respond to international-level factors such as security threats for various reasons, as R. Schweller (2004, pp. 167–168) called it ‘underbalancing’ that occurs when national leaders misperceive the threat or consider domestic politics more seriously than the external threat. According to him, the leaders can pursue ‘a trade-off between internal and external stability’ and decide to put a higher priority on domestic political considerations (Schweller, 2004, p. 201). As a leader tries to incorporate the people’s demands into his foreign policy decisions, the appropriateness of balancing against the perceived threat will be reduced.

Just as underbalancing against the international threat, leaders can decide whether and to what degree they incorporate national-level factors when making foreign policy decisions. Some leaders are very responsive to people’s emotions or opinions for their political benefit, but some disregard the people’s demands and make independent decisions, even risking their political careers. Some leaders remind the people of the collective memory to strengthen their political positions, but some lead or change the people’s demands and attitudes to support their international-level oriented decisions, called ‘elite cue-taking’ (Kertzer & Zeitzoff, 2017, pp. 544–545). Especially when the leaders’ terms are short or have an unwavering stance on specific issues, the elite’s cue-taking effect on the people could be more assertive.

If leaders dominate foreign decision-making, a few inherent human defects cannot help but intervene and distort the decisions; as the old saying goes, ‘no humans are perfect’. G. Allison (1971, p. 267), who analysed the decision-making process of the John F. Kennedy Administration regarding the US’ response to the Soviet Union’s move to deploy its missiles to Cuba in 1962, introduced the ‘bureaucratic politics model’ and the ‘organisational process model’ in addition to the ‘rational actor model’, claiming that only about 10% of most governments’ decisions seemed to be made by the rational actor model. ‘States do not always act rationally’ (Schmidt & Wight, 2023, p. 179). R. Jervis (1976, p. 5) also raised the problematic influence of decision-makers’ misperceptions of international affairs.

Various psychological elements started to be included in the IR discussion as the leaders’ role increased and made the discussions more complex. For example, the prospect theory argues that each leader has a different ‘reference point’, which leads to varying evaluations of loss and gain and justifies unique or irrelevant decisions (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). The ‘confirmation bias’, which is ‘people’s tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information consistent with their existing beliefs’ (Casad & Luebering, 2023), could block leaders from adapting their judgements to the changing situation. In particular, I. Janis (1982, p. 9) introduced the concept of ‘groupthink’, which is ‘a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgement that results from in-group pressures’, to emphasise the collective miscalculations or wrong decision- making of national leaders.

Ideology, understood as the set of ideas and beliefs of an individual or a group of individuals, also influences the decisions of national leaders. As we witnessed fierce confrontation among nations based on liberalism, Marxism, or nationalism during the Cold War (Howard, 1989), national leaders decided their policies in accordance with their own and/or their supporters’ ideologies (Cassels, 1996, p. 246). The influence of ideology on national leaders’ decision-making is so powerful that ideology have influences on all three levels of IR: ideology determines the ‘international attitude and foreign policy preferences’ of the national leaders (human level), influences the decision-making of the foreign policies of a particular country (national level) and affects international relations (international level) (Gries et al., 2020, p. 136). Usually, conservative leaders emphasise strong preparedness against the threat, but liberalist leaders emphasise diverse efforts to address the threat without using military forces (Gries, 2022, p. 308). Even in economic fields, ‘ideologically motivated group members can have an outsized influence on group decisions’ (Engl, 2022, p. 30). The country’s foreign policies will change if political leaders with different ideologies take over the government.

Discussion

As explained above, the best approach for a specific nation’s foreign policy analysis is to approach it at all levels—international, national and human. Because each level can have numerous factors, however, we need to select a few key factors that relevantly represent each level: this author selected ‘threat and security cooperation necessity’ to represent the international level, ‘public perception’ for the national level and ‘the leader factor’ for the human level of IR. In particular, this article intends to put heavier weight on the leader factor, which the author thinks more appropriate in analysing the foreign policy changes of four- or five-year short-term individual administrations.

The leader factor-based analysis could entail a few unexpected difficulties due to the leaders’ human defects and psychological aspects such as misperception, prospect theory, confirmation bias, groupthink, ideology and so on. In addition, it is challenging to collect accurate personal information about leaders. Therefore, we need to settle for leader-factor analysis using a few key human aspects of leaders, which should complement its weakness with international and national- level analyses.

Leader-factor-focused analysis is rare, whereas international-level analyses are popular. The former can hardly be considered objective due to the inevitable subjectivity of human-level analysis, whereas the latter looks logical, comprehensive, attractive and, most of all, supported by lots of information and data. That may be why D. Singer integrated the human level into the national level, and the FPA still remains as one subfield of the IR. However, disregarding human-level factors could deprive IR analyses of reality, detail and implementable prescriptions. Researchers who can access and acquire relatively sufficient information on leaders may need to focus on the leader-factor analysis and provide practical prescriptions to complement the international-level analyses.

South Korea’s Three-Level Factors Towards Japan

Historical Context

Historically, Japan frequently tried to occupy the Korean Peninsula as a bridgehead toward the Asian continent, as demonstrated by its invasion in 1592. It eventually managed to annex the peninsula as its colony from 1910 to 1945. Korea was liberated as the United States defeated Japan in the Pacific War, in which some Koreans were mobilised to fight as Japanese soldiers and workers. Because of these accumulated collective memories, the Koreans developed strong negative perceptions of Japan.

After the Korean War (1950–1953), in which North Korea invaded South Korea and the United States rescued South Korea again, South Korea had to recover its economy. President Park Chung-hee (1961–1979) thought cooperation with Japan was essential for his country’s economic development and national security (Park, 2016, p. 116) and normalised diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965 in exchange for financial assistance from Tokyo, including $500 million as compensation for Korea’s colonial experience (Kim, 1998, p. 34). Throughout the Cold War, South Korea and Japan cooperated closely to balance the communist threats while controlling their people’s negative perceptions. South Korea needed Japan as the base to support US military operations on the Korean Peninsula, and Japan needed South Korea as a forward defence line, as described by the so-called Korea Clause, which stated that ‘the security of South Korea is essential to Japan’s security’ (Lee, 2012, p. 124). The United States, a common ally of South Korea and Japan since the 1950s, promoted close cooperation between its two allies (Magbadelo, 2006, p. 75).

The following three conservative administrations in South Korea generally inherited the active balancing policy of the Park Administration. President Chun Doo-hwan (1980–1988) even demanded a 10-billion-dollar loan and received 4 billion dollars from Japan by claiming that South Korea had protected Japan in the front (Dahl & Lee, 1983). In particular, he changed the South Korean constitution to elect a one-term president every five years. Although President Roh Tae-woo (1988–1993) tried to reduce the communist threats by improving relations with China, Russia and North Korea in the name of ‘Nordpolitik’, he continued close cooperation with Japan (Park, 2016, p. 117). As North Korea’s secret nuclear weapons development programme was exposed in 1993, President Kim Young-sam (1993–1998) had to intensify security cooperation with Japan, even though he did have a very unfavourable perception of Japan. In domestic politics, President Kim decided to select most of the key officials and parliamentary members of municipalities through elections, increasing the influence of domestic factors on state affairs.

During this period, a few diplomats from South Korea and Japan in Washington, DC, met and discussed their common threat, North Korea’s potential nuclear armament, with US State Department officials. The meeting was reported to the South Korean and Japanese governments, which supported the meeting. The two governments named the meeting the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG) and dispatched other officials from their countries. William Perry, then the US policy coordinator for North Korea, praised the TCOG and recommended strengthening it (Perry, 1999). However, the TCOG became inactive as the progressive Kim Dae-Jung administration took office in 1998 and eventually stopped the meeting in 2004.

The two progressive presidents, Kim Dae-Jung (1998–2003) and Roh Mu-Hyun (2003–2008), concentrated on rapprochement with North Korea. President Kim pursued the so-called ‘Sunshine Policy’ towards North Korea to reduce the threat instead of balancing it, while his Japan policy stopped at the rhetorical level without pursuing any ‘tangible progress in bilateral security cooperation’ with Tokyo (Park, 1998, p. 100). President Roh inherited his predecessor’s rhetorical-level policies towards Japan, sharing no practically cooperative actions in the ‘Six-party Talks’ to stop North Korea’s nuclear armament. As the two presidents visited North Korea and agreed on the principles for the peaceful reunification of the two Koreas, respectively, they downplayed the seriousness of North Korea’s nuclear armament efforts and selected underbalancing against them.

With the inauguration of the conservative President Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013), South Korea decided to balance against North Korea by re-strengthening its security cooperation with the United States and Japan. Moreover, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test in 2009, destroyed the South Korean warship Cheonan and bombarded South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island in 2010. Japan and the United States strongly supported South Korea’s resolute stance against North Korea, and trilateral security cooperation appeared to resume. However, in August 2012, just six months before the end of his term, President Lee visited ‘Dokdo’, which both South Korea and Japan claim as their territory, and made disrespectful remarks about the Japanese emperor. Although the president boosted his low approval rate by about 10% by stimulating South Korea’s negative collective memory of Japan (Hwang et al., 2018, p. 698), the South Korea–Japan relationship abruptly worsened.

Three-Level Evaluation of South Korea Around 2012

International Level: Threat and Security Cooperation Necessity

South Korea and Japan have shared communist threats since the Cold War. Although the degree of threat decreased by the end of the Cold War, the aggressive and hostile foreign policies of the three northern countries in Northeast Asia (China, Russia and North Korea) continued. North Korea, in particular, had pursued its nuclear weapons development programme since the 1950s and acquired its planned 2–4 kt of TNT explosion power at its second nuclear test in 2009 (Martin, 2009). It launched its long-range missile, or the so-called satellites ‘Unha-3’ on 13 April 2012 and ‘Kwangmyungsong-3’ on 12 December 2012. China also demonstrated its aggressive foreign policy with a robust military buildup, as ‘China’s rise and US decline’ was a hotly debated topic at the time (Shifrinson & Beckley, 2012).

South Korea and Japan had to cooperate to protect themselves from a potential nuclear-armed North Korea and a potential world-level challenger. South Korea had functioned as an outpost against threats from the north, as demonstrated by the ‘Korea Clause’. Japan provided the US and UN forces with a stationing area, logistic support, and sea and air security in the case of North Korea’s attack on South Korea. At that time, the United States, the common ally of the two neighbours, began to recognise the increasing potential threat from China.

In Hanoi in July 2010, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, expressed her country’s concern about China’s expansionism, especially regarding the South China Sea area. In November 2011, President Barack Obama announced his ‘Pivot to Asia’ or ‘rebalancing strategy towards Asia’. This policy was evaluated primarily as the change from the US’ hedging policy to a ‘strategic containment’ policy towards China (De Castro, 2013). To realise its new strategy, the United States reinforced its efforts to encourage security cooperation between its two allies, South Korea and Japan.

National Level: Public Perception

South Koreans’ collective memory of Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 has fundamentally influenced South Korea–Japan relations. South Koreans have always perceived Japan negatively and demanded Japan’s apology for past wrong deeds and compensation for Japan’s atrocities, such as forced labour and comfort women cases. They had strong resentiment and trauma against Japan. As shown in Figure 1, over 60% of South Koreans maintained an unfavourable perception of Japan throughout recent history. The considerable decline in unfavorability in 2010 and 2011 seems related to Japan’s sincere support of South Korea’s resolute stance against North Korea’s military provocation. Unfortunately, the lowered unfavourable perception was short-lived because President Lee’s abrupt visit to Dokdo Island in August 2012. In this sense, most scholars mention South Koreans’ collective memory, such as ‘history problems’ or ‘identity clashes’, as a root cause for uncooperative relations between South Korea and Japan (Deacon, 2021, p. 991).

Figure 1.

Source: Kimura (2016, p. 162).

However, the degree of influence of the South Koreans’ unfavourable perception on South Korea’s Japan policy varied depending on the ideology of the government. South Korean conservative politicians seemed to think that South Korea and Japan should have good relations as democratic countries and mutually profitable economic partners. As a result, they managed the people’s collective memory on a certain level and decided policies towards Japan based on international demands. In contrast, progressive South Korean politicians tried to remind their people of the unpleasant collective memory of the past and reproduced the negative national identity (Deacon, 2021, pp. 700–802). For example, progressive South Korean Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Mu-hyun strongly protested the Japanese political leaders’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine, including the cancellation of their planned meetings, whereas South Korean conservative leaders remained generally silent. Although Japanese politicians tried hard to provide their sincere apology to South Koreans for their ancestors’ wrong deeds, South Korean progressive politicians always demanded more (Fukuoka & Takita-Ishii, 2022, p. 806). As W. Hwang et al. (2018, p. 705) analysed, the heightening dispute with Japan increased the South Korean people’s political support for the politicians who had expressed a confrontational attitude towards Japan.

Human Level: Leader Factor

Most conservative South Korean political leaders have pursued security cooperation with Japan when international-level factors demanded it while trying not to be influenced by the collective memory of the past or negative public perceptions of Japan. However, since the beginning of the five-year one-term presidency in 1987, with the expansion of elections to all municipal governments and parliaments in early 1990, political leaders have become more submissive to public perceptions. Due to the different timing of presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections, they had to ask for people’s votes all the time. As the confrontation between South Korean conservatives and progressives became severe, the politicians had to appeal more to the collective memory of Japanese colonial rule or the South Korean people’s negative perception of Japan.

In addition, the collegial student leaders who had led anti-government protests in the 1970s and 1980s became political leaders in South Korea in the early 2000s. They came to have ideological level anti-United States and anti-Japan perspectives because they thought the two countries had supported non-democratic South Korean administrations. Some even believed that the United States initiated the Korean War after reading a few revisionist explanations of the origins of the war (Park, 2005, pp. 7–8). As called ‘Jusapa’, who admired North Korea’s Juche ideology, a few collegial student leaders came to have a pro-North Korea perspective. In the parliamentary election in April 2012, the Unified Progressive Party of extreme progressives acquired 13 seats among 300 (National Atlas of Korea, 2012). As the South Korean court ordered the party’s disbandment for its extreme pro-North Korea positions two and a half years later, the party and its members had ideological level pro-North Korea/China and anti-United States/Japan perspectives. At that time, the ruling conservative party earned a majority of only two seats, weakening its influence on national affairs.

South Korean progressive leaders used people’s negative collective memory of Japan for their political benefit. As A. Dudden (2008, pp. 33–34) pointed out, they and their side of the media continuously reminded South Korean people of the negative collective memories of Japanese colonial rule. Regardless of historians’ efforts to have a more balanced and evidence-based history, political actors in South Korea and Japan preferred to gain their political benefit from ‘appropriating the past for their political agenda’ and ‘using history as a weapon against an imaginary enemy’. (Sîntionean, 2020, p. 57). As called ‘memory politics’, South Korea’s recent responses to Japan were ‘intensely political’, and ‘anti-Japanism became an increasingly expedient tool for partisan politics’ (Jo, 2022, p. 791). As a result, diplomatic hiatus between South Korea and Japan often occurred even at the summit level, ‘particularly under South Korea’s ‘progressive’ political parties’ rule (Koga, 2023, p. 65).

Analysis

In 2012, South Korea had to address North Korea’s imminent nuclear armament because North Korea succeeded in making its nuclear device through its second test in 2009 and improved its missile capabilities. However, two elections—a parliamentary election in April and a presidential election in December 2012—made political leaders pay less attention to their country’s balancing against the North Korean threat than people’s negative collective memory or perception of Japan. In particular, President Lee’s visit to Dokdo in August provoked Japanese anger, which worsened South Korea’s perception of Japan in a chain reaction. The political leaders started to compete for more votes by being more confrontational towards Japan, and progressives were in a more advantageous position than conservatives in this competition.

South Korea’s need for economic cooperation with Japan played a significant role in strengthening its security cooperation with Tokyo from the 1960s to the 1990s. South Korea learned technologies and imported equipment from Japan to make products and export them to the world. However, thanks to the development of the South Korean economy and the emergence of another trade partner, China, South Korea’s economic reliance on Japan dramatically decreased in the 2000s. As shown in Table 1, South Korea’s exports to and imports from Japan accounted for only 6.1% and 15.1% respectively of its total volume in 2010, whereas China covered 25.2% and 16.9% respectively. Consequently, the influence of economic factors on South Korea’s Japan policy weakened.

Table 1.

South Korea’s Economic Dependency on Japan and China (%).

Trade Partner/Year		1990	1995	2000	2005	2010	2014
Japan	Export (%)	19.4	13.7	12.0	8.5	6.1	5.6
Japan	Import (%)	26.7	24.6	20.1	18.6	15.1	10.2
China	Export (%)	12.4	7.5	10.8	21.8	25.2	25.4
China	Import (%)	2.1	5.8	8.1	14.8	16.9	17.2

Source: Kim (2017, p. 27).

Interestingly, South Koreans’ remembrance of their collective memory of Japan’s colonial rule or subsequent negative perception of Japan was related to South Korea’s yearning for peaceful reunification with North Korea. According to the surveys, 50%–70% of South Koreans consistently supported reunification (Einhorn & Rich, 2021, p. 20; Kim et al., 2022, p. 31), and the support rate showed an equal distribution between conservatives and progressives (Kim et al., 2022, p. 31). These two issues commonly appealed to South Koreans’ emotions rather than rationality and gave an advantage to South Korean progressives. For example, the South Korean progressives’ anti-Japan slogans could be readily accepted by South Koreans, most of whom strongly yearned for the reunification of Korea because 82.2% of South Koreans thought that Japan would not support South Korea’s reunification in the 2019 survey (Lee, 2020, p. 36). In this sense, all three progressive presidents, Kim Dae-Jung, Roh Mu-hyun and Moon Jae-in, visited North Korea during their terms while deciding on confrontational or rhetoric-oriented policies towards Japan.

South Korea’s Security Cooperation with Japan During the Park Geun-hye Administration

Degree of Security Cooperation

President Park Geun-hye, inaugurated in February 2013, had to be very cautious in pursuing her policies towards Japan because of the worsened South Koreans’ perception of Japan in the wake of her predecessor’s Dokdo visit six months ago (Lee, 2017, p. 3). She had to wait almost two years before moving to resolve the ‘comfort women’ issue, the South Koreans’ demand for an apology and compensation from Japan for the women who had sexually served Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War. She managed to draw an agreement on the issue from Japan on 1 November 2015. In the agreement, Japanese Prime Minister Shintaro Abe promised to provide 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) to the Asian Women’s Fund, which was set up to assist South Korean comfort women survivors (Lee, 2017, pp. 3–4). The two leaders confirmed that this agreement resolved the issue ‘finally and irreversibly’ (Welle, 2017).

Based on the Comfort Women Agreement, President Park signed the GSOMIA with Japan on 22 November 2016, despite vehement opposition from South Korean progressives. The agreement was necessary to ensure intelligence sharing between the two neighbours on the nuclear activities of North Korea. Her predecessor, President Lee, had pursued this agreement in 2012 but failed to complete it because of the same opposition. Although President Park had had her military sign a pact to share military intelligence with the Japanese military through the US military as an interim measure in December 2014, it was not comprehensive enough (Fackler, 2014). After the signing of the GSOMIA, the security cooperation between the two neighbours started to improve.

Key Factors Regarding Security Cooperation

Threat and Security Cooperation Necessity

The nuclear threat from North Korea was continuously exacerbated during the Park Administration. After developing its nuclear weapons through its third nuclear explosion test on 12 February 2013, with an explosive power of 5–15 kilotons of TNT, North Korea conducted two more nuclear tests on 6 January and 3 September 2016, claiming they were hydrogen bomb tests. It also conducted 13 short- and medium-range missile tests and submarine-launched missile tests in 2016 (Manyin et al., 2020, pp. 7–9). Both South Korea and Japan, the non-nuclear states, had to worry about North Korea’s nuclear missile attacks in the future. It would be natural for the two countries to strengthen their security cooperation.

Technically, South Korea needed Japanese intelligence gathering and analysis capabilities because the test-fired North Korean missiles fell into the sea between the two neighbours. Japan had two sets of US TPY-2 radars (the so-called X-band radars) on the ground, several radars of SM-3 sea-based missile interceptors in the sea and other radars and satellites to gather and analyse North Korean missile activities (JMOD, 2017, pp. 329–331). In return, Japan could use South Korea’s human intelligence to corroborate its technical intelligence. South Korea also needed the Japanese navy’s capabilities to identify, monitor and block the infiltration of North Korean naval forces, as well as anti-mine operations for the smooth deployment of US forces to South Korea in case of war (Pajon & Hémez, 2018, pp. 271–272).

The United States, the common alliance leader of South Korea and Japan, encouraged its allies to strengthen their mutual security and military cooperation to level up the triangular security cooperation in Northeast Asia. Some US strategists even called on the US government to play a more active role in reconciliation between South Korea and Japan (Sneider et al., 2016, p. 2). The North Korean nuclear threat and the US demand strongly compelled security cooperation between South Korea and Japan.

Public Perception Factor

President Lee’s abrupt visit to Dokdo and his provocative remarks about the Emperor of Japan in August 2012 made the Japanese angry, and this anger exacerbated South Koreans’ negative perceptions towards Japan. Although these negative perceptions gradually improved, as shown in Figure 2, President Park had to deal with more than 70% of South Koreans’ unfavourable perceptions towards Japan.

Figure 2.

Source: The author’s making based on data from East Asia Institute (2022, p. 4).

President Park had to wait until South Koreans’ unfavourable perceptions of Japan lowered to a manageable level. Fortunately, the unfavourable perceptions decreased by 15% to 61.0% in 2016 and by 20% to 56.1% in 2017. The Japanese’ unfavourable perceptions of South Korea also gradually declined, from 31.1% in 2013 to 26.9% in 2017. President Park decided to negotiate with Japan and signed the Comfort Women Agreement in 2015 and the GSOMIA in 2016 based on these improvements.

Notably, as shown in Figure 3, the survey result conducted just a week before the signing of the GSOMIA shows that almost half (46%) of South Korean conservatives supported the GSOMIA with Japan, even though 73% of South Korean progressives opposed it. There was a clear ideological divide in South Korea’s Japan policy. On average, 59% of South Koreans opposed (only 31% supported) the agreement signing. President Park must have decided to take some risks of political backlash while signing the agreement.

Figure 3.

Source: The author’s own making based on Gallop Korea (2016, November 17) data.

Leader Factor

President Park was the daughter of President Park Chung-hee, who led a military coup d’état as a major general in 1961 and dedicated his life to economic development and self-reliant national defence until he died in 1979. Like her father, she emphasised a robust national defence against North Korea. She had her military develop the ‘3K’ concept, which was composed of a pre-emptive strike (Kill Chain), a missile defence (Korea Air and Missile Defence, KAMD), and a massive retaliation (Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation, KMPR) to complement the US nuclear umbrella (Ministry of National Defense, 2016, pp. 69–73). On 10 February 2016, she shut down the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a group of South Korean industrial companies operating in Kaesong City, North Korea, since 2004, as retaliation for North Korea’s continuous tests of nuclear weapons and missiles. She was very responsive to the international-level threat.

Once President Park signed the two agreements, the Comfort Women Agreement and the GSOMIA, with Japan, there was an ‘elite-cue taking effect’ in South Korea. A total 51.3% of South Koreans turned out to support the Comfort Women Agreement (Kim, 2018, p. 46), and 65% supported the GSOMIA (Kim, 2018, p. 50). These levels of support were much higher than South Koreans’ favourable perceptions towards Japan in 2015 (15.7%) and 2016 (21.3%) (East Asia Institute, 2022, p. 4). There must also have been a substantial swing in public perceptions of Japan.

President Park appointed several former military generals, mainly graduates of the Korea Military Academy (KMA), South Korea’s equivalent of West Point in the United States and four-star generals as her national security advisors and directors of security-related organisations. In particular, she newly created the Office of National Security in her presidential office to oversee national security affairs and appointed a KMA graduate and retired four-star general as its first director. She appointed other KMA graduates and retired generals as the heads of the National Intelligence Service and the Presidential Security Service, respectively. All three defence ministers during her term were from this group, which has led South Korean national security for decades. Although South Korean progressives and opposition parties criticised these appointments (Hankyorye, 2013), President Park did not want to make any compromises regarding her country’s national security.

Analysis

President Park regarded the North Korean nuclear threat as a life-and-death issue and concentrated on balancing against the threat. She created the ‘3K’ concept as her military’s self-defence measure and tried to strengthen the implementation mechanism of the US nuclear umbrella for South Korea. She pursued security cooperation with Japan to support the ‘3K’ measures and the US nuclear umbrella. In other words, President Park fully recognised the international-level demands and approached South Korea–Japan security cooperation to address the demands.

However, President Park could only partially disregard South Koreans’ negative collective memory or perception of Japan. She waited until the perception improved, then pushed for the signing of the Comfort Women Agreement and the GSOMIA. In other words, she also recognised the importance of the ‘win-set’ concept but decided to take calculated risks at a certain point. Indeed, she received more than half of South Koreans’ support for the agreements with Japan, as explained before.

President Park trusted several KMA graduates and generals and accepted their recommendations: she established the ‘3K’ measures, strengthened South Korea’s alliance with the United States and initiated security cooperation with Japan. The generals led the signing of the Comfort Women Agreement and the GSOMIA with Japan. President Park and her generals tried hard to meet the demands of the international-level factor, the North Korean nuclear threat, while recognising South Korea’s continued negative perception of Japan. President Park and her confidantes have a firm conviction in the appropriateness of their Japanese policies.

South Korea’s Security Cooperation with Japan During the Moon Jae-in Administration

Degree of Security Cooperation

President Moon Jae-in began his term on 10 May 2017. It was an 8.5-month earlier replacement because his predecessor, President Park Geun-hye, was impeached for her mishandling of a ferry accident that killed about 300 high school students. President Moon and his supporters acquired solid political power to override most of the policies of their predecessors, thanks to their success in the impeachment.

In this context, shortly after his inauguration, President Moon established a special committee to review his predecessor’s Comfort Women Agreement with Japan. In December 2017, the committee concluded that the agreement had ‘serious flaws, both in process and content’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2017). Based on this conclusion, the Moon administration almost nullified the agreement, even though its previous administration had announced it as ‘final and irreversible’.

In addition, the South Korean Supreme Court imposed another severe blow to South Korean-Japanese relations on 29 November 2018. The court ordered Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to compensate 10 South Koreans for their forced labour during the Pacific War (Denyer, 2018). The Japanese government protested that the issue had been resolved in 1965 when Japan compensated $500 million for all its colonial rule over South Korea. Then, it requested a consultation with the Moon administration, which did not even respond to the request. As retaliation for the disregard, Japan restricted exports of three critical chemicals to South Korea in July 2019, requesting that South Korea provide detailed information on the movements of these chemicals out of suspicion that these chemicals might have been delivered to North Korea via South Korea. The Moon administration did not respond to this request either.

In early August 2019, Japan excluded South Korea from its ‘white list’, which had granted favourable status to South Korean exporters to Japan since 2004, as another retaliation. In response, the Moon administration announced in late August 2019 that it would nullify the GSOMIA unless Japan lifted the trade restrictions. As a result, South Korea–Japan relations rapidly deteriorated, and the confrontation became emotional. The common threat—the North Korean nuclear threat—could not stop the worsening of mutual relations. Even though President Moon decided not to nullify the GSOMIA at the last minute, Japan did not lift any trade restrictions.

In addition, a South Korean navy destroyer locked its targeting radar onto a Japanese surveillance plane in December 2018, provoking a strong protest by the Japanese Defence Minister. The militaries of the two neighbours stopped their cooperative activities, including intelligence exchanges on North Korean missile launches. The relationship between the two neighbours was ‘widely considered to be at its lowest point since normalisation in 1965’ (Deacon, 2021, p. 790).

Key Factors Regarding Security Cooperation

Threat and Security Cooperation Necessity

The nuclear threat from North Korea rapidly aggravated during the Moon administration. North Korea succeeded in developing a hydrogen bomb at its sixth nuclear explosion test on 3 September 2017, just 4 months after President Moon’s inauguration. The explosion power was 108–250 kilotons of TNT, which was strong enough to destroy considerable parts of a big city with one bomb. North Korea was assessed to possess 25–30 nuclear weapons as of September 2017 (Zagurek, Jr., 2017, p. 1). After developing the hydrogen bomb, North Korea conducted a successful ICBM test on 29 November 2017. The US Department of Defence evaluated North Korea as ‘only months away’ from having actual ICBMs in its official document published in early 2018 (Department of Defense, 2018, p. 11). North Korea came to possess the capability to conduct a nuclear missile attack on a few US cities, blocking the US nuclear umbrella for South Korea.

However, President Moon decided to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons instead of balancing the threat. He invited a few North Korean leaders, including the sister of Kim Jong-un, to the Winter Olympic Games held in South Korea in February 2018. He held three summit meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and mediated the U.S.-North Korean summit meeting in Singapore in June 2018. Nevertheless, he only received the vague verbal promise ‘to work towards the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula’ from Kim.

North Korea never stopped the generation and improvement of its nuclear forces, even during its negotiations with South Korea and the United States. A joint report written by researchers at the RAND Institute in the United States and the Asan Policy Institute in South Korea assessed that North Korea had 67–116 nuclear weapons as of the year 2020, with the capacity to produce 12–18 nuclear weapons per year (Bennett et al., 2021, p. 37). Given North Korea’s culture of doing what is ordered and the massive number of centrifuges that North Korea imported, the estimate was not too far from the actual numbers (38 North, 2021).

North Korea also levelled up its missile capabilities to deliver these weapons to the United States. It developed and demonstrated ICBMs, such as Hwasong-15, 16 and 17, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), such as Pukguksong-3, 4 and 5, through several test fires and military parades (Kristensen & Korda, 2021, p. 228). It even announced its plan to construct nuclear-armed and powered submarines (SSBNs), solid-fuel ICBMs and multi-warhead ICBMs (Elleman, 2021). After making considerable progress with its ICBMs and SLBMs, North Korea shifted its focus to short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) such as KN-23, 24 and 25 to attack South Korea.

Based on its robust nuclear forces, North Korea started to express its intention to reunify Korea. At its Workers’ Party Congress in January 2021, it changed its party platform to expedite reunification through nuclear weapons (Cheong, 2021). In April 2022, Kim Jong-un said that his country’s military had to be prepared to ‘decisively complete its unexpected second mission’, in other words, the reunification war against South Korea. After the announcement, the Central Military Committee of the Workers’ Party revised its military war plan to include nuclear weapons (Ji, 2022).

In response to the rapid aggravation of the North Korean nuclear threat and as a way to pursue its Indo-Pacific strategy, the United States became more eager than ever to request security cooperation between South Korea and Japan. Improving South Korea–Japan relations was critical to trilateral security cooperation. The Trump Administration emphasised strong security cooperation among the three allies, describing South Korea as a ‘linchpin’ and Japan as a ‘cornerstone’ (Department of Defense, 2018, pp. 22–26). International-level factors, such as the nuclear threat from North Korea and the US’ necessity for trilateral security cooperation, strongly demanded President Moon improve his country’s relations with Japan.

Public Perception Factor

South Korea’s perception of Japan has improved continuously during the earlier period of President Moon’s term. However, it abruptly worsened when the disputes between the two neighbours regarding history, trade and the GSOMIA occurred. Fortunately, this worsened perception recovered rapidly during the following two years. The changes in perceptions of the South Koreans and Japanese towards each other are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 shows that South Koreans’ unfavourable perception of Japan decreased from 56.1% (2017) to 50.6% (2018) to 49.9% (2019) during the first three years of President Moon’s term. However, it abruptly worsened to 71.6% (a 22% worsening) in 2020 after the South Korea–Japan dispute in 2019. Japanese people’s unfavourable perception of South Korea also improved from 26.9% in 2017 to 22.9% in 2018 and 20.0% in 2019 but worsened to 25.9% (a 6% increase) in 2020 and 30.4% in 2022. Nevertheless, South Koreans’ negative perception of Japan improved in 2021, reaching 52.8%, similar to the level in 2017–2018. In other words, the Moon administration did not receive demanding public pressure to withdraw the Comfort Women Agreement and GSOMIA signed by its predecessor.

Most importantly, South Koreans’ perception of Japan was divided along the ideological divide between conservatives (who supported cooperation with Japan) and progressives (who opposed cooperation with Japan). As shown in Figure 5, only 28% of South Korean conservatives supported the nullification of the GSOMIA, while 79% of South Korean progressives supported it. The fact that President Moon decided not to nullify the agreement at the last minute, even though 79% of his power base demanded it, means that people’s opinions on the issue were not the critical factor in President Moon’s policy decisions towards Japan.

Figure 4.

Source: The author’s own making based on data from East Asia Institute (2022, p. 4).

Figure 5.

Source: The author’s own making based on Gallop Korea (2019, November 21) data.

Another notable feature was the large number of South Koreans who changed their positions and supported President Moon’s decision. According to a public poll sponsored by MBC TV in South Korea, 71% of respondents supported President Moon’s final decision not to nullify the GSOMIA (Oh, 2019). It was a 42% increase (from 29% to 71%) from the survey before the decision. In other words, the South Korean progressives showed a strong ‘elite cue-taking’ attitude and supported their leader’s decision no matter what.

Leader Factor

Quite the opposite of his predecessor, President Moon never appointed any KMA graduates or army generals for key security-related posts, even though they have been the leading players in South Korea’s national security affairs. He intentionally avoided the group and appointed a navy admiral and an air force general as his first and second ministers of national defence until he appointed a KMA graduate and army general as his last defence minister in September 2020.

In addition, most key staff members of Moon’s presidential office were people who had been involved in student protests or other progressive civil movements in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, the first Chief of Staff for President Moon, Lim Jong-Seok, was a national-level leader of the student protests in the 1980s and the leader of Jusapa as well. He appointed 57% (17 out of 30) of his staff members from his Jusapa family. In total, 35% (22 out of 63) of the initial key staff members of the presidential office were former student protesters or progressive civil activists (Chosun Ilbo, 2017).

President Moon had a weekly meeting with these staff members and discussed and decided most of the critical issues at the meeting. He was even criticised for his excessive dependence on these staff members instead of his ministers regarding his policy decisions (Kang, 2018). The decision to nullify the GSOMIA in August 2019 was announced not by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of National Defence but by the presidential office (Kwon, 2019). With the support and recommendations of these staff members, President Moon portrayed Japanese trade restrictions as an ‘attack’ on South Korea and connected the issue to Japan’s imperialism and colonial rule in the twentieth century and even to the Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century (Deacon, 2021, pp. 799–801).

As a result, President Moon decided his most foreign policies from the anti-United States and pro-North Korea perspectives of Jusapa. He insisted on the rapid restoration of the wartime operational control authority over South Korean forces from the US General, the US-South Korea Combined Forces Command (CFC) commander, even under a severe North Korean nuclear threat. He tried hard to reduce the anger of the Chinese leader over the deployment of the US THAAD missile interceptor system to South Korea. These decisions cannot be explained by other elements than the deep-seated anti-United States and pro-North Korea perspective of Jusapa because the CFC was the key institution to execute the US nuclear umbrella in the case of North Korea’s nuclear attack, and the THAAD was essential to intercept high-trajectory North Korea nuclear missiles in the air.

Analysis

The nuclear threat from North Korea was rapidly aggravated from the beginning of President Moon’s term: North Korea might possess 67–116 nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs, as of 2020 and possess ICBMs, SLBMs and SRBMs to deliver these nuclear weapons to the United States, Japan and South Korea. In other words, the international-level factors strongly demanded that President Moon take all necessary measures to balance the threat, such as strengthening his military’s nuclear preparedness, reinforcing his country’s alliance with the United States and ensuring security cooperation with Japan.

However, President Moon moved in the opposite direction. He neither focused on balancing the threat internally and/or externally nor improved the South Korea–Japan security cooperation. In particular, he de facto nullified the Comfort Women Agreement and the GSOMIA with Japan, which his predecessor signed. He stopped military intelligence exchanges with Japan even though North Korea frequently test-fired its missiles into the sea between the two neighbours. He did not listen to the US’ request to improve relations with Japan. International factors such as the nuclear threat or the US request did not influence President Moon’s Japan policy.

In response, the Japanese government started to lower its evaluation of South Korea’s value. In the 2016 Japanese annual defence white paper, South Korea was evaluated as the first group of active defence cooperation nations, mentioned just second to Australia, and was described as ‘the most important neighbouring country … extremely vital to Japan in geopolitical terms … close collaboration between the two countries on the security front has enormous significance for the peace and stability of the Asia-Pacific region’ (JMOD, 2016, p. 234). In 2019, however, Japan put South Korea in the second group of defence cooperation and mentioned it as fourth, following Australia, India and ASEAN. In 2021, South Korea was evaluated as one of the countries with no security cooperation with Japan, the same as China and Russia. In 2022, Japan only wrote that ‘the cooperation between Japan and ROK [South Korea] is increasingly important in the security environment surrounding the two countries’, with negative emphases on the South Korean navy’s radar lock-on to Japanese aircraft in 2018 and South Korea’s termination notification of the GSOMIA in 2019 (JMOD, 2022, p. 342).

President Moon’s confrontational policies towards Japan did not result from South Koreans’ unfavourable perception of Japan. The perception had been improving since the beginning of the Park Administration. The only abrupt worsening of South Koreans’ unfavourable perception towards Japan in 2020 (from 49.9% in 2019 to 71.6% in 2020) was the result of President Moon’s confrontational policies towards Japan in 2019. Most importantly, President Moon and his confidantes intentionally provoked South Koreans’ collective memory of Japanese colonial rule or national identity as an anti-Japan consensus through the connection of the current incidents to history (Deacon, 2021, p. 807). However, the South Koreans’ perception of Japan remained the same, contrary to their expectations. As shown in Figure 4, 71.6% in 2020 was quickly lowered to 63.2% in 2021 and 52.8% in 2022. If President Moon had not rejected the Comfort Women Agreement and had tried to find a compromise with the Japanese government regarding the forced labour issue, the South Koreans’ negative perception of Japan would have improved more.

The Moon administration’s negative policies on security cooperation with Japan turned out to be mainly caused by the leaders. President Moon and his confidantes decided to review and nullify the Comfort Women Agreement, the GSOMIA and military cooperation with Japan regardless of the North Korean nuclear threat and the South Koreans’ perception of Japan. Through their weekly meetings with President Moon and pre-coordination among themselves, the key staff members who had led the anti-government protests in the 1970s and 1980s initiated and realised their country’s centrifugal policies from Japan. Several foreign researchers also stressed the importance of the leaders’ role in South Korea–Japan security cooperation (Cooney & Scarbrough, 2008, pp. 173–192; Katz, 2015).

The leaders of the Moon administration might have had considerable misperceptions about Japan, such as their confusion between imperial Japan in the past and democratic Japan now. They even analogised the signing of the GSOMIA with Japan to the Joseon Dynasty’s accession to Japan in 1910. They also showed intense symptoms of confirmation bias as they stuck to their anti-Japan perspectives in the 1970s and 1980s without being adaptable to the changed world. According to the prospect theory, they may have their unique reference point, which the Jusapa members set in the presidential office. Most of all, they showed several groupthink symptoms, as even progressive intellectuals criticised them for the symptoms at that time (Hong, 2019).

The predominance of the leader factor in the Moon administration’s Japan policy decisions has been indirectly proven by the fundamental reversal of South Korea’s Japan policy by the following Yoon Suk-yeol administration. President Yoon and his ministers rapidly improved South Korea–Japan relations to accommodate the demands of international-level factors, such as the nuclear threat from North Korea and the US’ request to enhance South Korea–Japan relations. President Yoon visited Japan on 16 February 2023, and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida paid his return visit to Seoul on 7 May 2023. After the summit meetings, the two neighbours resumed security and military cooperative measures, including the normalisation of the GSOMIA, and Japan lifted its trade restrictions on South Korea. The two leaders even initiated their first trilateral meeting with US President Biden at Camp David on 18 August 2023 and promised to ‘consult trilaterally’ and ‘in an expeditious manner’ on regional threats. These developments were possible only because the South Korean president was replaced. In other words, President Moon and his confidantes should be blamed for the worsening of South Korea–Japan relations.

In addition, South Koreans showed a strong tendency to accept, follow and support the decisions of their leaders once certain decisions were made. As shown in Figure 5, the 29% of South Koreans supporting the GSOMIA increased to 71% after President Moon’s decision not to nullify the agreement. There was a strong ‘elite cue-taking’ phenomenon in South Korea, especially among South Korean progressives. The confrontational divide between conservatives and progressives may have significantly contributed to the elite cue-taking phenomenon.

Conclusions

The analysis of this article revealed that the Moon administration’s Japan policies were decided not by the North Korean nuclear threat or the South Koreans’ collective memory or negative perceptions of Japan but by its leaders’ policy preferences. President Moon and his confidantes happened to have anti-United States, anti-Japan, pro-China and pro-North Korea perspectives through their past experiences of collegial student protests or progressive civil movements in the 1970s and 1980s. They pursued centrifugal policies from Japan from their perspective and for their political benefit. They could not adjust policies even after recognising the severe side effects in the national security field because of their deep-seated misperceptions, confirmation biases, groupthink and, most of all, their ideology. The leader factor dominated the international- and national-level factors in the Moon administration’s policy decisions towards Japan.

South Korea’s national security had serious challenges during the Moon administration. North Korea managed to compel the United States not to provide the promised nuclear umbrella by threatening to attack a few US cities with its hydrogen bombs and ICBMs. President Trump frequently mentioned the necessity of withdrawing US forces from South Korea. The Moon administration should have tried to balance the North Korean nuclear threat by strengthening its defence capabilities and alliance with the United States. However, it decided to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and underbalanced the threat. It even nullified pre-established security cooperative mechanisms with Japan. This irresponsible underbalance may have encouraged North Korea to move its focus from its first mission, blocking the US nuclear umbrella, to its second mission, reuniting Korea using its nuclear weapons, in early 2022.

This analysis could provide a bright side: the security cooperation between South Korea and Japan will improve as long as South Korea has balance-oriented political leaders and the nuclear threat from North Korea and/or China’s expansionism exist. South Korean conservative leaders usually put priority on national security until now. In this sense, South Korean progressive leaders should reflect on their past wrong decisions and change their approaches to focus more on international-level requirements than their domestic political benefit. At the same time, the leaders of the United States and Japan may need to identify the ideology and policy preferences of their South Korean counterparts before they decide their policies towards South Korea. They should be more proactive in strengthening their relations with South Korea if the South Korean president has a conservative and balance-oriented policy preference for national security. Otherwise, they should take a wait-and-see approach to minimise negative effects on their relations with South Korea.

In this sense, the first Camp David trilateral summit in August 2023 and the agreement to hold at least one summit meeting annually are very promising regarding preventing fluctuations in security cooperation among South Korea, the United States and Japan. Because they institutionalised the annual trilateral summit and other ministerial meetings, one country cannot easily disrupt the mechanism and procedures. The United States could be more active in mediating between South Korea and Japan if the two neighbours become confrontational somehow. However, as the TCOG’s failure demonstrated, if a progressive South Korean president approaches the meeting with only rhetoric and mobilises a few excuses not to make most of the meeting, the trilateral summit cannot continue to be productive. The change of South Korean progressive leaders’ perspective from domestic political benefit to international-level cooperation is vital to positive relations between South Korea, Japan and the United States.

As a theoretical implication, this article does not argue that the leader factor is more important than international or national-level factors in IR analysis. Instead, it argues that the three levels of IR need to complement and examine each other. In particular, the international-level factor-focused analyses could end up with oversimplifications or disregard for the decision-maker’s role. They should be complemented by leader-factor analyses for more realistic and prescriptive analysis. The leader-factor analysis is limited not because they are unimportant but because sufficient and accurate information, such as personal information and confidential dialogues, for analysis is challenging to obtain. Some researchers become reluctant to analyse the leader factor for fear of political attack. In this sense, intentional efforts to increase the leader factor analysis may be necessary for more balanced IR analyses.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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What Made South Korea–Japan Security Cooperation Retreat During the Moon Jae-in Administration?

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The Three Levels and Leader Factor in International Relations

International-Level Factors

National-Level Factors

Human-Level Factors

Discussion

South Korea’s Three-Level Factors Towards Japan

Historical Context

Three-Level Evaluation of South Korea Around 2012

International Level: Threat and Security Cooperation Necessity

National Level: Public Perception

Human Level: Leader Factor

Analysis

South Korea’s Security Cooperation with Japan During the Park Geun-hye Administration

Degree of Security Cooperation

Key Factors Regarding Security Cooperation

Threat and Security Cooperation Necessity

Public Perception Factor

Leader Factor

Analysis

South Korea’s Security Cooperation with Japan During the Moon Jae-in Administration

Degree of Security Cooperation

Key Factors Regarding Security Cooperation

Threat and Security Cooperation Necessity

Public Perception Factor

Leader Factor

Analysis

Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

References