South Korea deal with US and possible military aid to Ukraine will further fuel tensions

Seoul military support to Kiev would contribute both to the continuation of the conflict in Eastern Europe and to increasing tensions in the Korean peninsula and the entire Indo-Pacific region.

Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

On April 26 at the White House, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol and his American counterpart Joe Biden announced a major deal aimed at deterring North Korea: it includes Washington’s commitment to deploy a nuclear-armed submarine in the peninsula for the first time since the 1980s. Yeol’s visit to the United States coincided with the 70th anniversary of the US-South Korean alliance and the Korean War armistice. Facing increasing demands for arms in Ukraine, Washington has been pressuring Seoul for artillery weapons and so far South Korea had been postponing any such a decision over concerns about the diplomatic repercussions – but now things could change.

In an interview with Reuters, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol claimed, quite hypocritically, that “if there is a situation the international community cannot condone, such as any large-scale attack on civilians”, then his country could extend its support to Kiev beyond humanitarian aid implying that Seoul was considering delivering military aid.

South Korea is a major producer of artillery ammunition and also a key US ally in the region. The country produces self-propelled K9 howitzer artillery systems and sophisticated K2 battle tanks. It had been successfully avoiding tension with Moscow (and also with Beijing), despite intense Western pressures. It remains to be seen how much, in terms of pros and cons, Seoul could benefit from such a policy shift in case it materializes. For one thing, this would be a diplomatic challenge with high risks of blowback – and even domestically it could ignite opposition: the leader of South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, has already called a press conference to criticize Yoon’s remarks. He, and many other political voices in the peninsula worry about antagonizing Moscow and thereby pushing it closer to Pyongyang in terms of enhanced cooperation.

I’ve written on how Biden’s own approach to Pyongyang has been a major setback. Moreover, tensions in the peninsula – and beyond – have escalated over concerns about a new “Asian NATO” there. Since the 2021 Biden Sunga summit, Tokyo-Beijing relations have been at their lowest point in decades. Washington’s new stance on Taiwan in turn has of course thrown fuel into the fire. Increasingly aligned with the US Indo-Pacific views, South Korea saw, in October 2022, the American updating of the THAAD system employed there, merging it and the US Patriot System into a single integrated defense system. This development certainly raised eyebrows in Beijing, not to mention the fact that Washington even seems to have given Seoul a green light regarding the nuclear option: in January 11, Yoon unprecedentedly stated that, if what he sees as a North Korean nuclear threat grows, South Korea may either build its own nuclear arsenal or (more likely) ask its American ally to redeploy it there. The ongoing talks about Seoul military aid to Kiev must thus be understood as part of this larger context.

From an American perspective, such development, as well as the South Korean abundant artillery stockpiles, would of course be mostly welcome: NATO’s and the United States’ own arsenals have been tremendously impacted by all the deliveries to Ukraine – to the point of potentially hampering US capacities in a hypothetical conflict with China. Post-Nord Stream Europe in turn has become more dependent on the US for security than ever, with depleted stockpiles and de-industrialized countries. Moreover, the American-led coalition to support Kiev has been facing fissures since at least late 2022, and the specter of “non-alignmentism” (formerly restricted to the Global South) now, rephrased as “strategic autonomy”, also haunts Europe – possibly led by France and Germany.

In recent weeks, inter-Korean tensions have been on the rise, and Seoul has major concerns regarding the fact that neighboring North Korea has recently tested and launched its first solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile.

Seoul in turn has been seeking to enhance its ties with the political West, among other things, by positioning the Asian country as a major weapons exporter globally, with a special focus on European markets, thus boosting the nation’s economy while also boosting its military power. Yoo became in fact the first South Korean head of state to attend a NATO summit, the June 2022 Madrid Summit.

The South Korean mention of hypothetical “large-scale attacks on civilians” (as a justification to start considering sending weapons to Ukraine) is not without hypocrisy: for over 8 years, Ukraine has been doing precisely that during the now largely forgotten Donbass war. Kiev’s offensives have taken a large toll on civilians in that region since 2014. On February 18 (before Moscow launched its military campaign), Ukraine started an intense bombing campaign in Donbass, affecting schools and hospitals. The humanitarian crisis was reported by El Pais and CNN.

That population has been under Ukrainian attack, militarily, economically and culturally: in February 2019, for example, Ukrainian legislators repealed a bill which would have made it possible for people living in both rebel republics (Lugansk and Donetsk) to get their pensions without needing to take difficult trips outside of the conflict zone and then back home. This is part of Ukraine’s chauvinistic ethno-linguistic policies against the Russian speaking population which have been advance since the 2014 Maidan revolution, while much of the Western media has been covering up Kiev’s record of human rights infringements, and its far-right problem – including the blatant neo-Nazism of the Azov regiment.

By militarily supporting Ukraine, South Korea would significantly contribute not only to the continuation of the conflict in Eastern Europe (and the ongoing humanitarian disaster), which increasingly risks spiraling out of control and spilling into the rest of the continent, but would also contribute to increasing tensions in the Korean peninsula and the entire Indo-Pacific region.