It's better to have a distant ally than a nearby one?

Overweight bald but dandruff-laden be-suited American strategists telling Korean audiences how to deal with China are a meme of South Korea’s foreign policy conferences

It should be a meme of South Korea’s foreign policy conferences. An overweight bald but dandruff-laden be-suited American strategist tells a Korean audience how to deal with China. If you can continue listening through the gargling and croaking strategic affairs baritone, two lines will inevitably dribble out.

The first is an introductory statement “I have many Korean friends.” Now this could be because of a genuine misunderstanding of human relationships but more likely has to do with the reciprocal think-tank annual free airfare and hotel junkets that underpin the relationship. The second is the gravitas draped “it is better to have a distant ally than a nearby one,” followed by a momentary pause to emphasize the depth they assign to it.

Let that settle in for a second. A speaker from a country with not far over a hundred years in the region lecturing an audience from a country that has maintained its independence vis-a-vis a neighboring giant for thousands of years - and it’s all based on the misreading of a now cliched strategic studies maxim.

It appears ancient, almost self-evident. In contemporary debates, it’s used to explain why states like South Korea align with the United States rather than China. You hear its echoed everywhere like it’s part of realist canon.

In a realist world of competing sovereign states, proximity breeds threat, distance reduces it, and rational actors balance accordingly. From that vantage point, Korea’s alignment with a distant United States against a nearby China looks not just sensible, but inevitable. Why even John Mearsheimer repeats it off the cuff when he turns to the region in his many interviews. How can it be wrong?

This understanding rests on a misreading. By using this phrase, strategists display an unwillingness to think beyond their own point of view. They often misunderstand the specific origins of the phrase, Korea and its history, and arguably even realism itself (I know, I’m saying that in relation to a phrase Mearsheimer uses often enough? Crazy!)

First, the phrase and the strategic logic behind it, is geographically and temporally bound. It derives from the strategic thought of Han Fei during the Warring States period, often summarized as “ally with distant states, attack nearby ones” (远交近攻).

It was never intended as a universal principle of international politics. It was a tactical prescription for a specific environment: a fragmented Chinese world of multiple competing states with relatively comparable capabilities and at least some capacity to engage across distance.

When Western analysts pick up this phrase, they tend to read it through their own historical experience, one shaped by city-states and great powers maneuvering within a plural system of formally equal sovereigns. This is the intellectual backdrop of realist theory. Multiple actors, fluid alliances, strategic choice, and the recurring logic of offshore balancing.

It is this world that informs Mearsheimer’s reading of contemporary alliances. Korea aligns with the United States because it is distant. China is threatening because it is near. The logic appears timeless, portable, and universal.

Second, Korea and its history require a nuanced understanding of the phrase. To say that Korea “allied” with China is to impose a European conceptual vocabulary onto a fundamentally different regional order. Under Joseon, Korea did not form alliances with China in the modern sense. It participated in a hierarchical system centered on imperial China, first under the Ming dynasty and later the Qing dynasty. This was not a balance-of-power system composed of interchangeable partners. It was a structured hierarchy in which status, ritual, and predictability mattered more than contractual alignment.

The so-called tributary system was not an alliance framework. It was a mechanism for managing relations within that hierarchy. Korea acknowledged Chinese primacy and, in return, gained access to trade, diplomatic recognition, and a degree of security within a stable order. When Japan invaded in 1592, Ming China intervened—not as an ally bound by treaty obligations, but as the defender of a regional system in which Korea was embedded. To call this an alliance is to misidentify the nature of the relationship. Alliances imply bargaining among equals. This system operated through graded status and relational obligation.

The structural conditions required for the “distant ally” principle simply did not exist. China was overwhelmingly powerful and immediately adjacent. Japan, the other nearby power, was not a distant counterweight but a proximate and often hostile force. There was no external great power capable of projecting sustained influence into Northeast Asia. No Britain offshore, no United States over the horizon. Korea did not face a set of strategic options among which it could choose. It faced a constraint.

In that environment, the choice was not between distant and nearby allies. It was between embedding within the dominant regional system or risking isolation and destruction. Korea chose integration—not out of deference, but as a rational strategy to reduce uncertainty and survive within a hierarchical order. The alternative was not a better alliance. It was exposure to overwhelming force.

But even this framing, which treats alignment as a response to structural pressure, still assumes that what is being chosen is an “alliance” in the strategic sense. Korea’s history demonstrates that “alliances” and “alignment” were as much about strategy as about domestic political contests.

Within Joseon, relations with China were inseparable from internal struggles over authority, legitimacy, and control. Alignment with the Ming dynasty and later the Qing dynasty was not simply about external security; it was a way of stabilizing rule at home. Recognition from the Chinese court could validate a monarch, discredit rivals, and anchor a contested political order. To be acknowledged externally was to be secured internally. What appears, in Western terms, as “alliance behavior” was often a mechanism for consolidating domestic authority.

This dynamic becomes even clearer in periods of internal instability. In the late nineteenth century, as the old regional order fractured, Korean factions did not suddenly discover the abstract logic of distant allies. They reached outward—to Qing China, to Meiji Japan, to Russia—not to optimize the long-term strategic position of the Korean state, but to win immediate political struggles within it. External alignment became an extension of internal contestation. Foreign powers were not simply partners; they were levers in domestic political competition.

From this perspective, the modern alliance with the United States follows a recognizable pattern. It is often described, particularly in realist analysis, as a strategic response to external threat—a rational balancing move against a nearby power. But this misses how deeply the alliance was embedded in domestic political projects from its inception. The alignment with the United States was about securing and maintaining a particular political order within South Korea and potentially across the entire Korean Peninsula. It underwrote regimes, structured economic development strategies, and defined the terms of political legitimacy.

The alliance, in other words, has consistently functioned as more than a strategic arrangement. It has been a domestic political resource—a means of locking in authority, shaping institutional outcomes, and resolving internal conflicts in favor of particular actors and visions of the state. Its endurance cannot be understood purely in terms of external threat or balance-of-power logic, because its utility was always internally focused.

What this reveals is not a failure of Korean strategy, but a limitation of Western conceptual frameworks. By treating alliances as primarily strategic tools chosen by coherent national actors, Western analysis overlooks how, in the Korean case, alignment has been driven by internal political imperatives. It sees balancing where there is political consolidation, external calculation where there is domestic contestation, and timeless strategic logic where there are historically contingent practices.

Lastly, those who deploy this phrase reveal a deeper misunderstanding—not just of Korea, but of realism itself when viewed from a middle power perspective. Realism posits that the primary aim of a state is survival. In the United States, this has often been recast as the maximization of power and constant balancing. For smaller states, this is not just misleading—it is frequently untenable.

Survival does not come from seeking leverage in a system you do not control, but from recognizing its structure and positioning oneself within it to minimize existential risk. Dealing with the reality of the system! Autonomy is always partial, choices are constrained, and overreach invites consequences that cannot be managed.

From this vantage point, the idea of simply choosing a distant ally to offset a nearby power borders on fantasy. It assumes a degree of agency middle powers rarely possess and misunderstands sovereignty itself.

Sovereignty is not preserved through defiance alone, but through adaptation—through calibrating alignment, accommodation, and restraint in response to shifting pressures. Alliances are tools, not guarantees; they can entangle as much as they protect. For a state like Korea, realism is not about balancing in the abstract, but about ensuring a viable fit within the system it inhabits.

Now think about the future of the alliance. If the Korea - US alliance is not based on strategic logic, but rather largely on domestic political contests, what happens when the alliance no longer provides domestic political legitimacy? What happens when the alliance is seen as an impediment in political contests?

Using Western conceptualizations of alliance to analyse Korea ultimately leads to systematic error. They assume a world of autonomous choice and strategic optimization, when Korea’s historical experience has been one of adaptation within externally structured orders.

Korea, like any historical middle power, does not transcend the system it inhabits—it fits into it. Its success has never depended on the abstract selection of allies, distant or otherwise, but on how effectively it positions itself within the prevailing and emerging regional order. Alliances, in this sense, are secondary. What matters is not who Korea aligns with, but how well it aligns itself with the structure of the system it cannot escape.

So the next time an overweight bald but dandruff-laden be-suited American strategist clears his throat and begins—“I have many Korean friends”—and with rehearsed solemnity starts the line about distant allies, it is worth pausing. What follows is not insight, it’s performance—a pretty shitty, useless one at that. So boo them off stage, dust the dandruff off the back of the couch, and bring on someone with a tad more sense!