Strategic flexibility and South Korea’s return to the frontlines of conflict

The frontline is shifting again—and South Korea was walking toward it with its eyes wide shut. Some in the Lee Administration are not.

Strategic flexibility—the U.S. doctrine that deems forward-deployed forces, including those in South Korea, ready to respond to crises anywhere in the region—is knitting the Korean and Taiwan theatres together once again.

In the early Cold War, the fates of Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula were not seen as distinct. They were treated as two nodes in a single strategic contest between the U.S.-led bloc and the Communist powers of China and the Soviet Union. U.S. forces stationed in South Korea and the Taiwan Strait patrolled overlapping threat environments, responding to crises in either theatre with a regional logic of containment.

By the 1990s, that logic had shifted. The Cold War was declared over, and the strategic linkage between Korea and Taiwan was decoupled. South Korea focused inward—its military prioritized defense against the North, and its diplomacy sought regional stability, not expeditionary entanglement.

That separation between Korea and Taiwan is now being undone.

For South Korea, the decision to allow these forces to be used beyond the peninsula was finalized under the Yoon Administration, but its implications are only now being more closely considered. Advisors coming into power under the Lee Administration are not unquestioningly dedicated to the concept. Some are vehemently opposed.