This book attempts to make recommendations on South Korea’s national strategy for 2030 in the areas of foreign policy, national security, and unification strategy based on the predictions about international environment and regional order in Northeast Asia as well as the inter-Korean relations. In this regard, it intends to set appropriate mid- to long-term policy goals in a variety of issue areas for South Korea’s national security.

Despite the fact that South Korea has emerged as a middle power, ranking tenth in the global society, considering Northeast Asia’s particular security environment, South Korea lives amongst major powers. In order to develop South Korea’s appropriate survival and development strategies for the year 2030, a clearheaded and strategic vision is required. The structural changes taking place both globally and regionally have significant effects not only on the major powers but also for the countries in the region. Through a vision of a middle power diplomacy, South Korea will have to come up with a comprehensive strategy for realizing these goals. In this regard, this book analyzes South Korea’s national defense and security framework, security policies of major powers in the region including the U.S. and China, proper strategies for new security threats that are beyond the boundaries of nation-states, and various new security threats from an international economic perspective.

The major objective of this series is to assess and introduce a vision and action plan on three different policy areas—diplomacy, security, and unification—in order to find appropriate policy recipes for South Korea’s national survival and prosperity in 2030. The Sejong research fellows as well as the outside experts contributed to this volume, which is a result of a series of brainstorming for finding collective vision and strategy. In 2005, the Sejong Institute published a five-volume series titled ROK’s National Strategy 2020. Assessing and suggesting South Korea’s national strategy every ten years and guiding through appropriate policy measures continues to be a significant project.

Volume No.: 2016-2

Publisher: The Sejong Institute

Publication Date: April 25, 2016

Length: 166 Pages