Since taking office in May, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has sought to follow through on campaign promises to reorient the country’s foreign policy, including with the U.S., China and Japan. But if Yoon and his advisers were correct in their premises, they were naive about how this promised reorientation would work in practice.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s selection of a new politburo at last week’s 20th party congress set the tone for the next five years and sent a message: that loyalty trumps competence, and security—in its many dimensions, for both Xi and China—must be a top priority. Two events at that congress also stood out as indicative of the trends taking shape under Xi’s rule.
Despite global attention on Taiwan, the state in the Indo-Pacific region facing the most difficult security dilemmas with regard to a more aggressive China under Xi Jinping is Vietnam. Hanoi is struggling to manage the adverse effects of a deterioration in bilateral relations that began when Xi first took power a decade ago.
