Yoon Brings South Korea Closer to NATO

Not for nothing Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, was armed to the teeth in hosting the annual NATO summit from July 12 to 13. State-of-the-art air defense suites such as Patriot and NASAMS systems lined the southern edge of the city. The usually calm capital brimmed with thousands of soldiers and state officials along with fighter jets, artillery pieces, and anti-drone systems.

Lithuania’s less than ideal geographical position warranted as much. Its east borders Belarus, a Kremlin puppet home to Russian tactical nukes. To the west lies Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave packed with planes, warships, and missiles. Surely, the agenda in Vilnius was somber as NATO leaders considered how to continue to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia’s invasion.

Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s president, set foot into this cauldron of tensions paired with solemn pledges in July – the first time a South Korean president had visited Lithuania.

This was Yoon’s second time attending a NATO summit, but he left a more lasting impression this time. As his first outing abroad as president, Yoon’s trip to Madrid for the 2022 NATO summit was marked by handshakes, schmoozing, rhetoric, and a sales pitch for South Korean companies. In Vilnius, however, he managed to produce concrete pledges. And Yoon’s commitment to NATO's new ethos is music to its members.

He agreed to sign up to NATO’s Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation System (BICES), a cache of military intelligence to support future operations. He even stated an intention to sync BICES with intelligence from the South Korea-U.S. Nuclear Consultative Group. He expanded the scope of South Korea’s engagement with NATO to include nonproliferation, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies.

Besides Yoon’s general alignment with NATO, he discussed plans with Finland, the latest into the NATO fold, to increase cooperation in information technology and supply chains. He also looked to collaborate with Estonia on defense production.

After Vilnius, Yoon headed to Poland, which is expected to spend 4 percent of its GDP in 2023 on defense and which Yoon described as South Korea’s “gateway into Europe.” In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland placed the biggest defense order in South Korea’s history. On July 14, Yoon and his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, staged the South Korea-Poland Business Forum to extend the bilateral cooperation to Ukraine’s reconstruction.

Yet dwarfing all, Yoon made a surprise visit to Ukraine, in another first: No South Korean president had previously visited an active warzone outside the country. Having toured sites of desolation and massacres in Ukraine, Yoon offered Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy $150 million in humanitarian aid along with promises of demining hardware. He also pledged to scale up South Korea’s participation in reconstruction efforts. Yoon and Zelenskyy had met before, in May on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan. That Yoon chugged into Ukraine – a 12-hour journey by car – and that the two leaders seemed chummier than ever aren’t just symbolic notes.

It presages the greater integration of the fates of Europe and the Indo-Pacific, echoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s remark that “what happens in Europe matters to the Indo-Pacific'” and vice versa. Yoon himself said in a speech during the NATO summit, “In this hyperconnected era, the security of Europe and Asia cannot be separated.”

As if to corroborate the message, Pyongyang fired off an intercontinental ballistic missile that notched the longest ever flight time for a North Korean missile ahead of Yoon’s meetup with his Japanese counterpart, Kishida Fumio, in Vilnius. China also indicated deep displeasure over Yoon’s second attendance at a NATO summit, threatening heightened tension with Beijing.

Yet Yoon’s journey through Eastern Europe – especially the last leg to Ukraine – was also bedeviled by censure at home. His schedule coincided with a series of deadly floods in South Korea that claimed over 40 lives. It didn’t help that the first lady went shopping for designer brands while in Europe.

Yoon was scolded by critics for not shortening his trip to return home, personally control disaster relief, and commiserate with the bereaved and displaced – just as Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Yoon’s critics pointed out, did during the G-7 in May. It also didn’t help that Yoon’s presidential office observed, with a sense of indifference, that “it won’t change much whether or not he goes to Seoul right now.”

From defense to deluge, a lot is on Yoon’s front burner. Fingers crossed they don’t boil over all at once.