The international order is being shaken by wave after wave of crises. The US-China rivalry has spread far beyond tariffs and technology controls into critical minerals, energy, supply chains and even the normative architecture of global governance.

Onto this structural turbulence have been layered the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran war – conflicts whose reverberations now register at gas-station pumps on every continent. Fragmentation of trade, disruption of energy flows and bottlenecks in critical-mineral supply chains have produced a complex crisis that feeds on itself. We have entered an age of ‘Un-Order.’

South Korea’s response, under President Lee Jae Myung, has been to pursue pragmatic diplomacy anchored in national interests – with diversification toward strategic autonomy as its organizing principle.

Strategic autonomy here refers to the breadth of action through which a state can design and execute its national interests without being pulled into the orbit of any single great power. For South Korea it does not mean rejecting alliances; it means recalibrating all external relationships – alliances included – through Seoul’s own strategic judgment.

That choice is correct. But South Korea has been here before. The New Southern Policy and the Indo-Pacific Strategy that followed both promised to lift the country’s diplomacy beyond the peninsula and beyond its fixation on the great powers. Both fell short.

The real test of President Lee’s southward pivot, then, is not how bold its vision appears, but whether South Korea has built the foundations to carry it. Without that groundwork, ambition hardens into routine.

On its face, the Lee administration’s first year suggests it grasps these stakes. Soon after taking office in June 2025, President Lee embarked on an intensive round of summit diplomacy – engaging counterparts at the G7, the United Nations and the G20 and successfully hosting the APEC summit in Gyeongju.

It was a moment to restore Seoul’s presence on the multilateral stage after a period of strain and shrinkage, and to signal that South Korea had returned as a predictable, constructive middle power.

The opening phase took fuller institutional shape in 2026: state visits to Singapore and the Philippines in March, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s state visit to Seoul later that month, and state visits to India and Vietnam in April. Two intertwined logics run through this approach.

The first is the substantive upgrading of existing partnerships – and, in the process, a well-timed pivot toward the diversification of South Korea’s strategic portfolio. Seoul’s relationships with all of these five capitals have been elevated, moved in each case to a higher tier that before.

In diplomacy, the character of a relationship is not merely semantic; it signals how seriously two states take each other and how firmly they are committed to working together.

The strategic partnership with Singapore, established in 2025, was launched in earnest during the state visit, during which President Lee underlined its overdue character – saying he could hardly “understand why South Korea and Singapore had not forged a strategic partnership sooner.”

With Indonesia, South Korea has newly established a “Special Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” – a designation Seoul has accorded to no other country. The “special” prefix institutionalizes a half-century of layered firsts since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1973: the first overseas investment, first arms export, first joint fighter-jet development.

With Manila, Seoul has committed to a partnership through which the two countries can steadfastly navigate this era of upheaval marked by geopolitical uncertainty and global technological competition.

With New Delhi, the ambition runs farther still: a roadmap to transcend the existing Special Strategic Partnership and lift bilateral cooperation across its full breadth – a partnership in which the two countries pledge to be ideal partners in realizing each other’s national development visions.

Particularly telling was President Lee’s declaration in Vietnam that “Vietnam’s Future Is Korea’s Future” – a statement whose significance reaches well beyond its wording.

Underlying these formulations is a shared premise: that the rise of partners coincides with South Korea’s prosperity, and that such relationships must rest on mutual indispensability rather than transactional exchange.

Taken together, these countries span the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Western Pacific and range economically from a developed city-state to large emerging economies.

Such a heterogeneous yet complementary group is a deliberate strategic choice – one designed to reduce dependence on any single power or region while expanding the depth and breadth of South Korea’s diplomatic portfolio.

The second logic is the diversification of agendas attuned to the changing order of the twenty-first century. The summit diplomacy mapped the new agenda with unusual specificity.

The strategic industries that will define the new economic order – semiconductors, secondary batteries, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, shipbuilding and defense – together with the restructuring of the supply chains for the critical minerals and raw materials that sustain them, have moved from optional to existential.

In this age of economic warfare, even the great powers feel insecure; states large and small have awakened to their vulnerability to foreign economic coercion, and excessive dependence on any single country has come to imply a strategic vulnerability in itself.

Indonesia, the world’s second-largest producer of nickel and cobalt and a supplier of LNG and coal to South Korea, occupies a decisive position in the secondary-battery and energy agenda.

Vietnam – host to more than 10,000 Korean firms, South Korea’s third-largest trading partner and its top recipient of cumulative outbound investment – anchors a manufacturing value chain and a high-tech industrial cooperation hub.

India, with a market of 1.4 billion and a leadership role across the Global South, is emerging as a major consumer and production partner in digital, semiconductor, pharmaceutical, shipbuilding and space industries.

Standing at the interface between critical minerals and shipbuilding infrastructure, the Philippines has become a testing ground for new strategic-industrial cooperation – through the resumption of the Bataan nuclear power plant project and expanding defense cooperation.

Singapore, the hub of logistics, finance, and digital infrastructure, is the node and gateway connecting all these flows into ASEAN. Across the agenda map that defines twenty-first-century strategic competition, these five countries are no longer disparate bilateral relationships but mutually reinforcing nodes.

And yet ambition alone does not deliver results. South Korea, as noted, has attempted Southern diversification before and the gap between aspiration and outcome was significant. Why did those efforts through the New Southern Policy and the subsequent Indo-Pacific Strategy fall short? Two primary problems, more than circumstance, explain why.

The first is the political-cycle problem: under South Korea’s single five-year presidential term, signature foreign-policy initiatives rarely survive a change of government.

The second is the gravitational pull of the North Korean issue. Whenever inter-Korean tensions or the nuclear issue flare up – and they always do – diplomatic energy, presidential attention and the government’s best officials are pulled back to the peninsula, leaving Southeast Asia and India chronically under-resourced.

These were not failures of imagination; they were failures of follow-through. Any new pivot that does not address them will replicate them.

This time, however, two structural tailwinds are at work.

The first is that today’s compound crisis itself enforces solidarity – at least in economic, technological, and supply-chain security – among middle powers. Paradoxically, an environment in which no country can survive alone is generating structural incentives for cooperation.

The second is that the leaderships of South Korea’s partner countries are mobilizing every available national resource to escape the crisis and propel a new leap forward. Indonesia’s Golden Indonesia Vision 2045, India’s Viksit Bharat 2047, Vietnam’s 2045 vision, the Philippines’ AmBisyon Natin 2040, and Singapore’s Forward Singapore and  Smart Nation 2.0 all signal that demand for the kind of partnership South Korea can offer is real and rising.

South Korea possesses the capabilities to meet this convergence. In semiconductors, shipbuilding, nuclear power, defense, digital infrastructure, and cultural content it holds nearly all the strategic industrial assets its partners require.

The summit diplomacy of 2025–2026 has demonstrated the will. What remains is the harder, less photogenic work of structural follow-through – not the count of memoranda signed, but the strategic coherence binding individual projects, the depth of implementation and the durability of follow-on momentum. Without it, the pivot to the south will join its predecessors as yet another diplomatic ambition that delivered little. With it, South Korea has a real chance to help shape the new international order alongside its partners in the Indo-Pacific – rather than simply reacting to what others decide.

This round of summit diplomacy can – and should – mark a turning point. Together with its Southeast Asian partners and India, South Korea has the chance to become three things at once: a steady partner in navigating an era of profound uncertainty, a shared springboard for moving forward amid the upheaval of the international order, and a responsible contributor to building a more peaceful and prosperous world.

Wondeuk Cho, PhD, is the director of the Center for ASEAN-Indian Studies at Korea National Diplomatic Academy in South Korea. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of KNDA.