South Korea’s fringe views on a post-American Asia

Fantasies on the political fringe shape what people are willing to accept when reality shifts.

In South Korea, the idea of a post-American Asia—that is, a regional order no longer anchored by the U.S. alliance system—invites wildly divergent visions. Nowhere are these differences more vivid than at the ideological extremes.

On the far left and far right of South Korea’s political spectrum, the same scenario—the U.S. pulling back or leaving Asia altogether—is interpreted not just differently, but in diametrically opposed terms. One side sees opportunity; the other sees existential danger.

The extreme left imagines the end of American primacy in Asia as a long-awaited opening. Their logic is rooted in historical resentment and nationalist longing: the American presence, they argue, has artificially frozen the division of the peninsula. They see the 1953 armistice not as a peace mechanism, but as a leash.

If that leash were cut, if America’s deterr…