On 4 January 2021, less than a week before the scheduled visit of South Korea’s First Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-kun, Iran seized the South Korean chemical tanker Hankuk Chemi and its 20-member crew near the Strait of Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. South Korea immediately dispatched the Cheonghae anti-piracy unit to waters near the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian government insists that a “technical” matter of marine pollution triggered the seizure, but Tehran has so far not presented the evidence according to South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The 8th Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea was held from 5 to 12 January in Pyongyang. A total of 7,000 delegates participated in the congress, almost five years after the 7th congress of May 2016. Nominally, the congress is the highest body of the Workers’ Party of Korea, tasked with reviewing the party’s work and setting up policy guidelines until the next congress. The centrepiece of the congress that just finished was Kim Jong-un’s nine-hour work report, in which he addressed key domestic and foreign policy issues. For the most part, the report seems to have consolidated messages that the North Korean government and state media have been laying out in recent months.

President Moon Jae-in delivered the traditional presidential New Year’s Address on Monday. With his non-renewable five-year presidential term coming to an end in 2022, the speech served Moon to highlight the key goals and policies that he seeks to push for during his last full year in office. As usual, the speech focused heavily on domestic issues but also touched on foreign policy issues including inter-Korean relations. With his popularity at record lows but still higher than his predecessors at the same point in their presidency, the New Year’s Address also served Moon to discuss some of the main concerns for the South Korean population. These include the starting date for the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine programme.

The EU and South Korea are celebrating the tenth anniversary of their strategic partnership this year. Throughout the past decade, South Korea has become the Asian country with the deepest relationship with the EU. It was the first country in Asia to sign and implement a free trade agreement with the EU, which also doubled down as the EU’s first-even new generation FTA. Brussels and Seoul also have a Framework Agreement in place to underpin their political relations. Furthermore, the EU and South Korea have also signed and implemented a Crisis Management participation agreement allowing South Korean troops to join EU missions. As of 2020, South Korea is the only Asian country with these three key agreements covering economic, political, and security relations with the EU in operation.

The EU and South Korea are celebrating the tenth anniversary of their bilateral strategic partnership in 2020. We asked leading Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia security experts based in Europe to reflect on the successes, failures, and potential areas of future cooperation between the two partners (the responses were collected by December 4th). A total of twelve experts participated in the survey. 

There was good news for South Korea’s defense industry in the second half of 2020. As part of the Australian Army’s modernization projects, the K-9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer was selected as the preferred negotiator for a 833 million USD artillery acquisition project. In 2015-19, South Korea’s arms exports increased by 143 percent with its share in global exports increasing from 0.9 to 2.1 percent. South Korea’s world ranking as an arms exporter rose in 2018 from 12th to 10th, in line with a year-on-year increase in sales volume from 10.47 billion to 11.18 billion USD. Overall, these are hopeful signs for the defense industry, but they are too weak to promise a “new dawn” and a return to its former glory.

The Korea Matters for Europe/Europe Matters for Korea publication maps the relationship between the Republic of Korea and the European Union’s 27 Member States. Covering a diverse range of topics including security, trade, investment, educational exchange and cultural connections, this publication highlights the importance of the Korea-EU relationship.

What is the perspective of key EU member states towards South Korea? While EU-South Korea relations have attracted growing attention in recent years, the relationship between key EU member states and the Asian country remains underexplored. This report addresses this omission by describing and analysing the recent evolution of the relationship between Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Romania and Slovakia, on the one hand, and South Korea on the other. The report covers the areas of economic relations, security relations, bilateral relations and North Korea, and cultural relations.

South Korea joined fourteen other Asia-Pacific countries in signing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). By some measures, this is the biggest regional trade agreement in the world, accounting for over 30 percent of world GDP (PPP) and 30 percent of the world’s population. RCEP negotiations were formally launched in 2012, which shows that the negotiation process has not been easy. But once the agreement enters into force, it will slash tariffs and unify rules of origin – thus strengthening Asia-Pacific economic integration. The expectation is that South Korea and Japan, the two largest exporters of high-tech goods in the region, will be among the major beneficiaries of the agreement.

President Moon Jae-in has welcomed incoming president Joe Biden by reiterating the value of the ROK-US alliance. What kind of South Korea will Biden be facing? For many years, South Korea has been able to implement a more or less autonomous foreign policy. Facing constraints, yes. But also putting South Korean interests first. It is a South Korea that is more independent and confident in its foreign policy goals and sees a strong alliance with the United States as a crucial component of its foreign policy. For many South Korean policy-makers, their country’s rise as a regional power – and, increasingly, as a more important player in global affairs – has been facilitated rather than constrained by the ROK-US alliance. It is also a South Korea that will be willing to support US initiatives aimed at checking China’s rise – as long as they don’t openly challenge Beijing.