What explains South Korea's warming ties with the Middle East?

Months before becoming South Korea’s president, long-time prosecutor and conservative firebrand Yoon Suk Yeol called for a new era in his country’s foreign policy. In an oft-quoted essay for Foreign Affairs magazine last year, he celebrated how his country, once an impoverished and war-stricken nation, is now featuring among the world’s wealthiest and most industrialised nations.

But Mr Yoon also argued that South Korea should “become an even more responsible and respected member of the international community”. He accused the outgoing Moon Jae-in administration, which doggedly prioritised an ill-fated peace deal with North Korea, of being too “parochial and short-sighted” in its conception of “national interest”, thus undermining the country’s global standing. For Mr Yoon, it was time for South Korea to live up to its potential by becoming a “global pivot state”, which is dynamic, assertive and adaptive to “the needs of the 21st century”.

Once in power, Mr Yoon wasted no time to pursue his new vision for South Korea. He hosted the US President Joe Biden, and the two leaders agreed to support a new regional order under the proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Meanwhile Mr Yoon also became the first South Korean leader to attend a Nato summit, where he touted shared values amid booming defence ties with Europe.

Last year, South Korea’s defence exports, including to Eastern Europe amid the conflict in Ukraine, reached a historic high of $17.3 billion, making it among the largest arms exporters in the world. The sheer breadth of Mr Yoon’s increasingly self-confident foreign policy was fully on display during his first visit to the Middle East, particularly the UAE, where he discussed a series of mega-deals covering defence co-operation, nuclear technology and infrastructure development. In a short space of time, South Korea has transformed from an economic dynamo into a major strategic player across the Indo-Pacific.

To be fair, South Korea’s emergence on the global stage has been long in the making. Following the heavily devastating Korean War in the early 1950s, Seoul pursued an uncompromising policy of national development under a succession of authoritarian leaders.

Thanks to an industrial and trade policy that corralled major conglomerates and suppressed foreign imports, South Korea built an impressive manufacturing base by the 1970s and '80s. This went hand in hand with progressive land reform and the establishment of a world-class education sector.

Even after the country’s transition to democracy in the late-1980s, South Korea’s remarkably successful developmental state remained intact, now shifting into increasingly sophisticated industries. The upshot was the emergence of a technological behemoth and a global manufacturing powerhouse at the dawn of the 21st century.

Nevertheless, successive South Korean administrations, whether conservative or liberal, largely adopted a “non-aligned” foreign policy doctrine. This was primarily due to the country’s acute sense of vulnerability vis-a-vis North Korea, which is still in a state of war with its southern counterpart. But it was also a reflection of Seoul’s commitment to an “economy first” foreign policy approach, which prioritised the maintenance of robust trade and investment ties with all major players.

Under the previous Moon administration, in particular, Seoul had to navigate a testy relationship with the Trump administration, which pushed for a revision of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. It also had to avoid confrontation with China, a top trading partner, over its defence co-operation with the US, a treaty ally that advocated for the deployment of advanced missile systems to its bases in South Korea.

What made South Korea strategically diffident on the global stage, however, was the Moon administration’s commitment to pursuing an intra-Korean peace initiative that could end the standoff between North and South once and for all. Despite several summits with the North Korean leader, however, there was no diplomatic breakthrough.

The failure of his liberal predecessor provided an unprecedented opportunity for Mr Yoon to recast his country’s foreign policy. The timing was seemingly perfect. Over the past two decades, South Korea had been building up not only its own military capabilities, but also its defence industry.

By 2022, as Mr Yoon began to take power, leading South Korean defence companies – namely Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd, Hanwha, and LIG Nex1 Co – bagged more than $10 billion in contracts, placing the country among the world’s 10 largest defence exporters. And the country’s warming ties with Nato allies was consistent with Mr Yoon’s call for potential membership in an expanded Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the “Quad”, power grouping along with India, Australia, Japan and the US.

But the emergence of South Korea as a “global pivot state”, namely an autonomous and confident power with a diverse network of partnerships, was on full display during Mr Yoon’s visit to the UAE, which is famed for its robust relations with all major powers.

Historically, South Korea’s presence in the region had humble beginnings. Back in the 1970s, as many as 200,000 Koreans worked in Iran, which was then undergoing a major construction boom. Over the succeeding decades, Seoul sought to maintain stable ties with all major oil-exporting nations in the Middle East, in large part to secure its own energy security.

In recent years, however, South Korea has experienced a renaissance in its relations with regional states. In fact, bilateral relations are truly multidimensional and reciprocal. To begin with, the UAE alone is the source of up to 10 per cent of South Korea’s crude oil imports, with bilateral trade surpassing $10 billion in recent years.

As Kim Sung-han, South Korea’s director of national security, put it, what made the Yoon visit special was how it helped “strengthen strategic co-operation with our brother country UAE in the four core co-operative sectors of nuclear power, energy, investment and defence”.

The blossoming South Korea-UAE relations reflect a more fundamental shift in the Indo-Pacific geopolitical landscape, as new rising powers enhance bilateral strategic co-operation beyond the dictates of superpowers. After decades of strategic hibernation, South Korea has fully embraced its role as “global pivot state”, now exporting high-tech defence equipment and cutting-edge civilian technology to a whole host of diverse yet likeminded powers around the world.