August is for boondoggles.
I spent the first half of mine traveling through South Korea as part of the Asia-Pacific Youth Exchange, a Korean government program that brought together 40 young professionals from Korea, the United States, China, and Japan. There were cultural showcases, palace tours, and working-group proposals for all manner of inventive quadrilateral initiatives. The program was not exactly Track 1 diplomacy, which was part of its value—nobody was really on message.
While we were in-country, North Korea fired ballistic missiles twice. Then, four days after we left Incheon, President Trump ordered a substantial reduction in U.S.-Korean military exercises, linking the decision in part to Seoul’s insufficient support for American operations in Iran. Immediately following, Trump floated a new round of diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, while President Lee Jae Myung called for stronger Korean self-defense and faster transfer of wartime operational control.
From Washington, these developments can look contradictory: Here is a capable ally asking for more protection while demanding more freedom of action; buying an inordinate amount of American technology while building sovereign alternatives; and coordinating more closely with Washington while preserving deep commercial integration with China.
From Seoul, the view looks a bit less haphazard. My ten days in Korea (a good chunk of which were spent co-mingling with aspiring Chinese policy elites) seemed to confirm that the country is not drifting toward strategic neutrality. It is becoming more capable, more economically indispensable, and more deeply integrated with American power—while trying to reduce the vulnerabilities that come with that integration.
1. Korea Wants More Alliance But Less Dependence
For years, Americans have treated Korean strategic autonomy as something in tension with the alliance. Analysts typically ascribe thorny issues like Seoul’s push for OPCON transfer, sovereign AI, continued commercial exposure to China, and the question of whether to pursue an indigenous nuclear capability to any one of: 1) progressive nationalism, 2) conservative anxiety about U.S. abandonment, 3) mercantilism, or 4) distrust in Washington.
An alternative, more interesting interpretation is that these disparate policy debates are expressions of a common strategic logic. Koreans want both a stronger U.S.-Korea alliance and more resilience to independent U.S. decisionmaking. Data from the Asan Institute’s 2026 survey is almost comically clear: On the one hand, 97 percent of Koreans support the U.S.-ROK alliance, with 82 percent favoring retaining U.S. forces on the peninsula. On the other hand, support for an indigenous Korean nuclear arsenal has reached a record 80 percent—with most respondents supporting a nuclear program even in spite of the theoretical American sanctions or troop withdrawals that might accompany its announcement. The Korean public is notably not warming to China. America remains their most favored country, and more than seven in ten prefer the United States to China.
The tension between wanting more integration with the United States—and less reliance on the same—is also well exemplified in North-South relations. On August 15, Lee called for renewed dialogue with North Korea, warned against escalation, and reiterated his intention to replace the North-South armistice with a permanent peace regime. Three days later, as Washington moved to curtail joint exercises, he called for stronger independent defense capabilities, OPCON transfer during his term, and faster construction of nuclear-powered submarines.
Americans instinctively tend to sort these ideas into opposing camps: deterrence versus appeasement, conservative People Power Party versus progressive Democratic Party of Korea. From Seoul, the situation is not nearly so cut-and-dry. Any government within artillery and missile range of North Korea can rationally want to both ameliorate relations and grow more capable of fighting to win—and, in fact, the same can even be said of U.S. policy under Trump.
Nor is more Korean self-reliance necessarily hostile to Washington’s policy objectives. The Trump administration itself has endorsed Korea’s raising defense spending to 3.5 percent of GDP, buying $25 billion in American military equipment by 2030, developing capabilities needed for OPCON transfer, and building nuclear-powered attack submarines with American help. While Seoul sees greater capacity partly as insurance against American abandonment, Washington sees greater allied capacity partly as insurance against an America stretched too thin.
From Washington’s perspective, the United States should want a Korea less dependent on American generosity. This is not the same thing as a Korea less interoperable with American power. Washington rightly worries about Beijing’s leverage over Korean industry, Korean firms deepening production inside China, and the prospect of a shared U.S.-Korea technology ecosystem becoming harder to secure or mobilize in a crisis. This is why the Trump administration has pushed Korea to adopt tighter technology protections, erect trusted supply chains, and implement additional economic security measures.
2. Korea’s China Exposure Is Not a Referendum on Its Future
Seoul is not seriously preparing to split the difference between the United States and China. It is trying to remain firmly inside an American-led order without becoming helpless to its temperamental swings.
Unfortunately for both Washington and Seoul, a significant share of Korean economic power today stems from the latter’s massive installed industrial base in China. Many in Washington seem to treat this fact as evidence of Seoul’s strategic ambivalence: If the Lee administration really shares our assessment of Beijing, why does it insist on maintaining such a sky-high trade relationship with China? After all, Samsung and SK hynix continue to operate enormous chip fabs in Xi’an, Wuxi, and Dalian, and lobby assiduously against restrictions that might make those operations more difficult.
Korea’s China exposure is best understood as the legacy of an earlier era of globalization—one that is predictably depreciating. Samsung’s fab in Xi’an and SK hynix’s operations in Wuxi and Dalian are multi-decade commitments spanning tens of billions of dollars in capital, qualified production lines, and supplier relationships. The debate in Washington sometimes conflates the question of whether Korean firms should continue adding sophisticated capacity in China (certainly not) with whether the United States should make their existing fabs progressively harder to operate (yes, within reason).
The current American approach gets the basic incentive structure right. When Washington ended Validated End User privileges for Samsung and SK hynix’s China facilities in 2025, it shifted them onto licenses intended to maintain their existing operations while denying further expansion or technology upgrades. Korean firms may dislike this arrangement, but Washington has a legitimate interest in ensuring that allied capital and American technology do not sustain ever-more-advanced chip production in China.
The problem is not that Washington is asking Korean companies to abandon their costly facilities in China—it is that this ask is being made without an alternative, positive-sum value proposition in sight. And, in the event they are not made whole elsewhere, Korean firms have an obvious incentive to keep working around American restrictions by furnishing their extant Chinese facilities with Chinese equipment. Put simply, there is a real risk that the chaebols may be tempted to construct parallel supply chains for China in the same way American corporates like Apple and Tesla were captured. As one canary, Reuters reported this month that both Samsung and hynix were evaluating equipment from China’s AMEC. Such a decision would provide a valuable source of revenue and experience for the exact Chinese semiconductor toolmakers American controls were intended to constrain.
A coherent American strategy should therefore pair restrictions on South Korea’s economic relationship with China with a much clearer value proposition elsewhere. Korean firms will maintain depreciating, legacy ties to China, but there should be no expectation that Washington will indefinitely enable their expansion or technological upgrading. At the same time, Washington should pave the way for easier investment, deeper technology partnerships, abundant energy and infrastructure, provide some guarantee of alternative and long-term American and allied customers, and privilege access to the emerging U.S.-led AI and semiconductor ecosystem.
In a nutshell, this is the promise of Pax Silica.
3. Korea Has Become Harder for America to Replace
For any aspiring analyst or practitioner of American foreign policy, Korea has become unavoidable. The relationship between Washington and Seoul today seems to rival the importance of West Germany in the 1970s. My own experience with the country is a case-in-point: I never set out to become a Korea hand, but have naturally been forced to grapple with deeper aspects of the alliance amid tectonic changes in American foreign policy.
At the U.S.-Korea Public-Private Investment Forum in December, I told a group of diplomats that the U.S.-Korea relationship is undergoing a metamorphosis: What began in 1953 as a military alliance forged in blood is becoming a comprehensive economic and technology partnership with consequences for the balance of power far beyond the Korean Peninsula.
The military alliance is still front-of-mind for most Asia strategists in Washington. Debates about American troop deployments, extended deterrence commitments, and the structure of the Tri-Command still dominate Korea studies programs. But layered on top of this is a second relationship—I would argue an even more important one—built from chips, ships, and critical minerals. The fact is that Korean firms increasingly provide the physical capacity needed to turn American technological and military ambition into reality, and Washington is still early in adjusting to this reality.
High-bandwidth memory is the most obvious example. Samsung and SK hynix account for 80 percent of the global market for AI’s most scarce and high-demand component. Meanwhile, Korean shipyards sport berths and dry-dock capacity the United States aims to borrow for naval maintenance and shipbuilding. A litany of Korean manufacturers are responsible for the batteries, transformers, switchgear, organic substrates, and other industrial systems that American data centers, factories, and weapons programs increasingly depend on.
The hardware of the U.S.-Korea alliance is integrating faster than its software can update. While Korean engineers are building memory chips, standing up factories on American soil, and providing auxiliary shipbuilding support, the institutions governing the U.S.-ROK political relationship were largely designed for a world in which America defended Korea and the two countries otherwise maintained mostly separate industrial systems.
Growing pains are to be expected. Greater interdependence will invite mutual vulnerability and therefore more friction. The events of the last year have shown an American immigration decision that affects Korean engineers can inadvertently shut down a U.S. factory. Likewise, a shortage of Korean memory threatens to constrain American AI deployment, while a shortage of Korean transformers puts risks to underlying grid infrastructure. These are no longer commercial irritants sitting beside the alliance—they are modern alliance problems.
To be sure, the U.S.-Korea relationship remains asymmetric. America still provides capabilities Korea cannot reproduce on its own, including frontier technology, deep capital markets, and extended deterrence. But there can be no question that Korea occupies a special place in an American strategy predicated on allied scale. If the first 70 years of the U.S.-ROK alliance were characterized by staking Korean security on American power, then the next few decades may very well see American power increasingly dependent on Korean industry.
The Right Kind of Hedge
The U.S.-Korea relationship finds itself in a turbulent political moment, caught between an American-branded Sunshine Policy and a Seoul bent on self-strengthening. In that context, Washington should worry less about whether Korea is “hedging” and more about what it is hedging against, and how.
Both countries need to get on board with the fact that the alliance is broadening. Washington will not abide by an arrangement whereby American forces and weaponry guarantee Korea’s survival while Seoul reserves the right to opt out of American security interests that extend beyond the peninsula. The Trump administration has made clear the United States seeks allies that generate usable military, industrial, diplomatic, and technological capacity across theaters. Korea, meanwhile, has legitimate reasons to fear being dragged into conflicts it did not choose, or abandoned if American priorities change.
This is why not every form of Korean hedging is created equal. Higher defense spending, competent Korean command of combined forces, more shipbuilding capacity, and sovereign AI built on trusted technology all make the alliance stronger, and will be cheered in Washington. The same cannot be said of dependence on Chinese suppliers in sensitive sectors, an indigenous nuclear arsenal that fractures norms around nonproliferation, or strategic ambiguity so expansive that Washington cannot count on Korea in a major regional contingency.
As threats change and new opportunities abound, Washington and Seoul are building a more interdependent alliance—and a more complicated one. The task now before both countries is to ensure that Korea’s search for resilience produces more allied capacity, not less interoperability.