In the Middle of It All: Unpacking South Korea's Foreign Policy Priorities

In the Middle of It All:Unpacking South Korea's Foreign Policy Priorities Darcie Draudt-Véjares (bio) Ramon Pacheco Pardo's latest book, South Korea's Grand Strategy: Making Its Own Destiny, seeks to dissect and understand the intricacies of South Korea's foreign policymaking. Serving as an expansive empirical account, the book systematically explores South Korean politics across eight presidential administrations since 1988. Joining a renewed wave of book-length scholarly endeavors aiming to unravel the complexities of South Korea's foreign policy, Pacheco Pardo introduces three empirical research questions that form the backbone of the book's analysis: "What factors explain South Korea's grand strategy? What are the goals of South Korea's grand strategy? What are the means of South Korea's grand strategy?" (p. 3). These questions set the stage for the book's systematic examination of South Korea's positioning on the global stage since the country's transformative period of democratization. To address these questions, Pacheco Pardo has undertaken commendable empirical research, drawing on an extensive examination of thousands of government documents, primarily from South Korea and the United States, combined with interviews with Korean policy elites. Through this qualitative data, Pacheco Pardo has sought to unearth and provide nuance to the means, goals, and ends of South Korea's national strategy. One of the most important aspects of Pacheco Pardo's book is how seriously it takes the middle-power concept. Indeed, upon my reading, it becomes evident that the true objective of the book lies in the examination of middle powerism rather than grand strategy itself. Across the chapters a straightforward argument takes shape: South Korea has a grand strategy. South Korea is a middle power. Therefore, middle powers can have grand strategies. This set of claims serves as the book's central focus and offers notable contributions to both scholarly conceptualizations of middle powers and their practical applications in policy. International relations scholars, policy researchers, and policymakers alike have all grappled with what constitutes a middle power and how that status affects military strategy [End Page 141] and foreign relations. As Pacheco Pardo notes, scholarly treatment of grand strategy has mainly derived from large-state behavior. He aptly critiques the literature on middle powers, noting that the concept, theories, and policy recommendations vis-à-vis middle powers have been largely developed from Western cases such as Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden (p. 26), and he invites scrutiny into the characteristics that distinguish a middle power from a mid-sized state, sparking a call for greater conceptualization and theorization. I am as yet unconvinced by Pacheco Pardo's somewhat uncritical acceptance that a middle power can indeed have a grand strategy. In the initial chapters, particularly chapters 1 and 3, the book overviews the conceptual landscape of a middle power, intertwining it with the contours of South Korea's particular strategic means, goals, and ends. To define a middle power, Pacheco Pardo unproblematically introduces a set of conditions that are a combination of hard capabilities and soft power: a respectable military, developed economy, and cultural or social attraction. To these, he also adds ideational and behavioral dimensions as critical components: self-identification as a middle power, good diplomatic citizenship, and playing the role of an honest broker in international relations (pp. 24–25). Regrettably, by including so many diverse capabilities, ideas, behaviors, and relationships into the definition of a middle power, the framework or conceptualization leaves little room to account for the internal variation over time and space. In social science speak, this lengthy list of factors, means, and goals (see chapter 3) risks overdetermining the existence and coherence of a grand strategy. Moreover, given that the book argues for a geography-based organization of grand strategy, the theoretical framework and subsequent empirical chapters might have been strengthened and sharpened had the author dug more explicitly into a relational or identity approach and considered how and whether these immaterial aspects of power differentially affect grand strategy across time (e.g., presidential administrations) and space (e.g., the regional targets around which the book is organized). Among the seventy-plus interviewees are non-Korean policy experts, who, based on the...

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