South Korea's Grand Strategy

Since the 2010s, South Korea has established itself as a 'middle power', but it has rarely been factored into conversations of grand strategy and global order. This is beginning to change as South Korea and its neighbors increasingly think about its strategic mark. But how does a small country surrounded by major powers navigate geopolitical competition in an increasingly fractured world?Andrew Yeo examines how South Korea is evolving in response to its strategic environment and, in doing so, is becoming an 'adaptive middle power'. Yeo focuses on the role that narratives - the stories told and retold by a nation - play in shaping how South Korea defines and pursues its national objectives. At the strategic level, policymakers draw on narratives to justify and legitimize grand strategy to domestic and foreign audiences. At a deeper level, narratives are constitutive of national identity, reflecting historical and cultural legacies, ideology, and belief systems that weigh heavily on a country's strategic outlook. Moving beyond narrow debates over 'alliance versus autonomy', Yeo demonstrates how South Korea has built upon foundational and strategic narratives to leverage both hard and soft power to craft a more expansive global role. The Oxford Studies in Grand Strategy is a major new series of cutting-edge monographs that examine the grand strategies of states, and those intergovernmental organizations and nonstate actors who credibly aspire to sovereignty. Books concentrate on the contemporary aspects of grand strategy, while paying due respect to the historical antecedents of a nation's grand strategy and their relevance for a leadership's current choices. The series is pluralistic in terms of theory and method, and maintains a broad view of the ways, means, and ends that undergird a grand strategy. Analytical and explanatory in contribution, books in the series feature a rigorous analysis of the interaction between domestic factors and global forces and provide a clear understanding of how that interaction shapes a grand strategy's formulation, codification, and implementation.Series Editors: Thierry Balzacq (Sciences Po, Paris), Peter Dombrowski (US Naval War College), and Simon Reich (Rutgers University, Newark)

Andrew Yeo is Senior Fellow and SK-Korea Foundation Chair at Brookings Institution and Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America. He has authored or edited seven books, including Great Power Competition and Overseas Bases (Brookings Institution Press, 2024), State, Society, and Markets in North Korea (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Asia's Regional Architecture (Stanford University Press, 2019). His commentary on Korean affairs has appeared in outlets including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Foreign Affairs, and in major South Korean media outlets. He received his PhD from Cornell University.