South Korea’s epistemic capture

When Korean foreign policy is articulated using the language and logic of U.S. strategic thought, does it only give an illusion of alignment?

In South Korea, there’s an old leftist argument that the foreign policy of the country was long ago captured. It draws a straight line from the chinilpa - Koreans who collaborated with Japanese colonial rule - to the postwar conservative elites who aligned the country’s strategy with U.S. interests.

The claim is that foreign policy was never truly decolonized, merely transferred from one hegemon to another. The argument is largely discredited today… or is it?

Recent debates have focused on the concept of “epistemic capture” - the slow, invisible takeover of a nation’s foreign policy imagination by U.S. paradigms, interests, and language that applies to many countries.

Epistemic capture suggests South Korea’s foreign policy isn’t a matter of alliance alignment. It isn’t a matter of shared interests. It isn’t a matter of mutual trust or values. It’s a matter of whose ideas define reality - and whose interests those ideas ultimately serve. There’s more than a skerrick of truth to the matter.