Korean Foreign Policy: Park Geun-hye Looks at China and North Korea

Park Guen-hye was inaugurated as the eighteenth president of the Republic of Korea (ROK) on February 25, 2013, winning 51.6 percent of votes in the December 2012 presidential election. During the presidential campaign, Park pledged to change the foreign and North Korean policies of her predecessor Lee Myung-bak after realizing their limitations and failures. As with the Lee government, she emphasized the importance of maintaining credible deterrence against the North through the US strategic alliance. However, she proposed trustpolitik as the new benchmark for her foreign policy, which is essentially the process of trust-building on the Korean Peninsula and the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative, often referred to as the Seoul Process. Whereas the former aimed at improving inter-Korean relations through exchange and cooperation, and confidence-building measures (CBMs) in the political and military arenas, the latter attempts to shape a new regional environment in Northeast Asia by fostering cooperation in nontraditional security issues.