Pulling Chestnuts Out of the Fire: Yoon Suk-yeol and South Korean Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Abstract

In recent decades, the presidency in South Korea has increasingly become critical to the East Asian country’s vested interests in the Middle East. Despite such an imperative, Yoon Suk-yeol turned out to be less effective than some of his predecessors in advancing larger Korean interests in the region. By and large, Yoon’s ideational perspectives played an important role in the way his government handled the Republic of Korea (ROK)’s relations with other nations, including major Middle Eastern countries. Politico-diplomatically, his highly ambitious global agenda essentially had little to do with South Korea’s conventional pragmatism and trade-oriented approach toward the region. In terms of commercial objectives, moreover, the Yoon government pursued a relatively contradictory and potentially problematic policy of curbing energy trade with the region, while aiming to enhance South Korea’s economic as well as technological involvement in newly grand industrial and information-driven projects across the Middle East.