Lee govt's first year: A transformed US alliance, expanded ties with China and Japan

Over the past year, the Lee Jae-myung administration has focused on what it calls the "normalization of summit diplomacy." The government inherited a daunting set of challenges: urgently restoring international credibility damaged by the Dec. 3 emergency martial law declaration, while simultaneously strengthening the alliance with Washington, repairing relations with Beijing and reviving shuttle diplomacy with Tokyo.

President Lee has pursued a "pragmatic diplomacy" agenda with an eye on tangible results. Within 147 days of taking office, he completed reciprocal summits with the United States, and after intensive tariff negotiations with the Donald Trump administration, the two sides released a Korea-US Joint Fact Sheet (JFS) last November. The United States publicly backed Seoul's pursuit of nuclear-powered submarine construction and the right to enrich and reprocess nuclear fuel. Earlier this month, a US government delegation visited Seoul for the first working-level consultations under the JFS framework.

Korea-China relations, severed under the previous government, have been fully restored. Chinese President Xi Jinping made a state visit to Seoul last November — his first in 11 years — and President Lee returned the visit with a state trip to Beijing in January, the first by a South Korean president in nine years. The two countries agreed to expand cooperation in economic and livelihood areas, with a focus on supply chain collaboration to prevent a recurrence of the urea solution shortage and on boosting exchanges in consumer goods, services and content.

With Japan, Lee held seven summits and meetings in the year since taking office, earning credit for quickly restoring the freewheeling "shuttle diplomacy" between the two neighbors and reinforcing a forward-looking bilateral relationship. Facing shared challenges — US trade pressure and resource shortages stemming from the Middle East war — the two sides agreed to deepen cooperation in advanced supply chains and technology.

Beyond the major powers, Seoul also opened channels with Global South nations including South Africa, India, Egypt and Brazil. Korea was particularly active with Middle Eastern countries, solidifying its standing among Gulf Cooperation Council members through close engagement with the UAE and others. Analysts say the relationship has been transformed from one centered on construction and civil engineering into an "AI and advanced technology alliance" that combines Korea's AI capabilities with the Middle East's capital and energy infrastructure to jointly develop global high-tech markets. As the Middle East war made resource security a pressing reality, the government dispatched two special envoys to the region, securing 270 million barrels of crude oil and up to 2.1 million tons of naphtha.

To drive this agenda, President Lee visited 14 countries over the past year, signing 126 memorandums of understanding. He also held 39 phone calls with foreign leaders and met with 26 foreign political and business figures in a relentless schedule of diplomatic activity.

The Lee administration is expected to continue its pragmatic foreign policy course this year through bilateral summits and active participation in multilateral forums. However, two challenges loom over the first half of the term: managing trade and security friction with Washington, and finding a way out of the deadlock on the Korean Peninsula.

The first challenge is the growing complexity of alliance management under the Trump administration's transactional approach to diplomacy. Korea-US tensions have spilled beyond security issues into economic disputes. One flashpoint was the US government's request for personal protection for Coupang Inc. Chairman Bom Kim amid Seoul's disciplinary proceedings over the company's massive personal data breach. The government says it is in close communication with Washington on the matter, but the disciplinary outcome could reignite disagreements.

The pace of Korean investment in the United States is another sticking point. Earlier this year, Washington warned of renewed tariff hikes after Korean companies were slow to follow through on investment pledges made after the JFS announcement. The government passed a special law on US investment in March and began consultations with Washington on the details, but further delays in actual investment could provoke fresh complaints from Washington.

The deeper problem is that these trade and legal frictions are bleeding into security negotiations. The government now faces the complex task of managing these disputes proactively while preserving its leverage in security talks.

Progress on Korean Peninsula peace is equally elusive. President Lee moved quickly after taking office to suspend loudspeaker broadcasts near the border as a goodwill gesture, but North Korea's response has grown increasingly cold. Pyongyang has formalized its "two hostile states" doctrine, reinforced the legitimacy of its nuclear arsenal and drawn a hard line against engagement. With prospects for both inter-Korean and US-North Korea dialogue rapidly narrowing, analysts widely believe that direct inter-Korean exchanges of the kind seen in the past have in effect lost their momentum.

In response, the government is expected to maintain its three-stage denuclearization framework — calling for a halt, reduction and eventual elimination of North Korea's nuclear program — while pursuing indirect diplomacy through neighboring countries. Attention is turning to the role China could play in breaking the inter-Korean impasse, particularly as Xi Jinping is set to visit Pyongyang on Monday and Tuesday. Whether Seoul can persuade Beijing to engage constructively even as North Korea, China and Russia draw closer together remains a key question.