At a seminar on reactionary politics in South Korea, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa sociologist Myungji Yang argued that the large far-right mobilizations defending former President Yoon Suk Yeol after his martial law declaration were not an isolated development. Instead, they were the product of decades of ideological conflict, authoritarian legacies, and organizational infrastructure on the Korean right.

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Cold War Legacies and Conservative Hegemony

Yang argued that much of the existing scholarship on the far right focuses on globalization, economic insecurity, and anti-immigrant politics. In South Korea, however, the far-right is shaped less by immigration than by the country’s Cold War history and deeply entrenched anti-communism during the authoritarian era.

For decades, anti-communism functioned as a dominant state ideology, defining the boundaries of acceptable political thought. Under authoritarian governments, even moderate reform movements could be dismissed as sympathetic to communism or North Korea. Yang argued that these ideological structures were never fully dismantled after democratization.

As a result, the boundary between mainstream conservatism and the far right remains blurred. Yang suggested that what is often labeled conservatism in Korea would be considered far-right politics in many other democracies.

Far-right politics in Korea is organized around anti-communism, hostility toward North Korea and China, and strong pro-Americanism. It is also tied to nostalgia for authoritarian leaders such as Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee, and, increasingly, Chun Doo Hwan, who are remembered by supporters as figures who protected the nation and delivered economic growth.

Building a Right-Wing Infrastructure

Rather than viewing the far right as a fringe movement, Yang described it as a broad right-wing infrastructure made up of parties, religious groups, intellectuals, media organizations, and grassroots activists.

She emphasized that these actors are closely connected. Conservative politicians often participate in far-right rallies, while influential pastors, online personalities, and activists help shape the broader political agenda and organize these events. In this sense, Yang argued, the Korean far right cannot be understood simply through party politics or street protests alone. It is the interaction between formal institutions and social movements that gives the far right its durability.

Yang traced the growth of this infrastructure to the “lost decade” between 1998 and 2008, when reform-oriented governments and former democracy activists became newly influential. Many conservatives viewed this period as a moment of political and cultural displacement. In response, the “New Right” invested heavily in think tanks, publishing houses, online media, and cultural organizations to spread conservative worldviews and challenge the legacy of the democratization movement.

Drawing on ideas of cultural hegemony, these groups focused not only on elections but also on shaping how Koreans think about history, democracy, and national identity.

New Strategies and New Constituencies

Yang also highlighted how the Korean far right has adopted new forms of mobilization. Far-right activists increasingly portray themselves as defenders of freedom and democracy, borrowing the language of civil disobedience and resistance. In their view, they are protecting South Korea from totalitarian threats associated with North Korea, China, and the domestic left. Some even compare their actions to the struggles of figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, framing themselves as guardians of democracy rather than opponents of it.

At the same time, anti-feminism has become a powerful source of support, particularly among younger men. Yang noted that many men in their twenties and thirties have been drawn to right-wing politics because anti-feminist rhetoric resonates strongly with their frustrations and sense of exclusion. These appeals have allowed the far right to expand beyond its traditional base of older anti-communist conservatives and build support among a younger generation.

Yang also pointed to the far-right’s growing transnational connections. Korean conservative activists increasingly borrow strategies, messaging, and organizational models from global right-wing movements, while cultivating relationships with foreign donors and international conservative networks.

Yang concluded that South Korea’s far right is best understood as “old wine in a new bottle.” Its core narratives – anti-communism, fear of the left, and nostalgia for authoritarian order – are not new. What has changed are the strategies, technologies, and social coalitions through which those ideas are expressed.

Key Takeaways
 

• Cold War legacies remain central: anti-communism and authoritarian political culture continue to shape South Korea’s right-wing politics.
• The boundary between conservatism and the far-right is often blurred in Korea, making far-right ideas more socially accepted than in many other democracies.
• South Korea’s far-right operates through a broad infrastructure of parties, churches, media outlets, and protest movements rather than through fringe groups alone.
• Old narratives have found new forms: anti-feminism, social media, conspiracy theories, and transnational conservative networks are helping the far right expand its influence.

Kerstin Norris is a research associate at APARC’s Korea Program and managerial editor of The Journal of Korean Studies.

The Journal of Korean Studies (JKS), the flagship peer-reviewed publication in the field of Korean studies, returns to Stanford University’s Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) with the publication of Volume 31, Issue 1. JKS publishes a broad range of original scholarly articles related to Korean history, culture, politics, and society. The journal also publishes reviews of new Korea-related books, making it both a venue for original research and a guide to the field’s expanding literature. Its contributors and readership span disciplines and continents, bringing together historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists representing the wide range of disciplinary approaches in Korean studies.

The journal’s institutional history traces the arc of Korean studies in the United States. The journal was originally established in 1969 at the University of Washington in Seattle, the early center of gravity for Korean studies in America. After the publication of two standalone volumes (1969, 1971), James Palais, an influential historian of premodern Korea, shaped the journal's intellectual character through serial publication (1979-1987). Michael Robinson, at Indiana University-Bloomington, carried the journal forward as editor (1988-1992) before a long publication hiatus. In 2004, JKS was revived at Stanford University by co-editors Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Korea Program at APARC, and John Duncan, professor of Korean history at UCLA and former director of its Center for Korean Studies. It was housed at Stanford until 2008. The journal has since been guided by editorial leadership at the University of Washington (Clark Sorensen), Columbia University (Theodore Hughes), and The George Washington University (Jisoo Kim). JKS returns to Stanford under the new editorial team of Paul Chang (Shorenstein APARC), Yumi Moon (Department of History), and Dafna Zur (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures).

JKS welcomes manuscripts from researchers at all career stages, working across the full range of topics, periods, and methodologies reflected in the field of Korean studies. Korean studies is undergoing genuine growth with new generations of scholars producing compelling work that is reshaping our understanding of Korea’s past and present. The Journal of Korean Studies exists to support and disseminate that work.

Kerstin Norris is a research associate at APARC’s Korea Program and managerial editor of The Journal of Korean Studies.

Indo-Pacific nations are racing to adapt to a world in which the United States has become fundamentally unpredictable. The 2026 Oksenberg Conference, hosted by the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), gathered scholars and foreign service veterans at Stanford University to assess how regional stakeholders are confronting what Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney had famously named "a rupture, not a transition" in the post-World War II order. The conference took place as Carney was in the midst of an Indo-Pacific trip, visiting Australia, India, and Japan to forge "middle power" trade alliances, and as the United States joined Israel in a war against Iran.

“For Indo-Pacific countries, the question is no longer just how to balance between Washington and Beijing,” said APARC Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui in his welcome remarks, “but how to understand and respond to the emergence of a multipolar world in which the United States is less predictable, less committed to multilateral frameworks, less invested in alliance maintenance, and more willing to pursue narrowly defined national interests at the expense of broader international stability.”

The panelists agreed that, while the U.S. retreat from the eight-decade-old international order it had previously championed creates multiple opportunities for China, Beijing is not naturally filling the vacuum, and regional powers are not pivoting toward it but instead scrambling to diversify security and economic partnerships. The consensus is that the international system is moving toward multipolarity and the world toward an increasingly unstable period, and no one knows yet what will replace the disintegrating post-WWII order.

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China Sees Opportunity in Multipolarity

To commemorate the legacy of the late Michel Oksenberg, a renowned scholar of contemporary China and a pioneer of U.S.-Asia engagement, the Oksenberg Conference, an annual tradition sponsored by APARC and led by the center’s China Program, gathers individuals who have advanced U.S.-Asia dialogue to examine pressing issues affecting China, U.S.-China relations, and broader U.S. Asia policy.

At this year’s convening, the first panel, moderated by Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar, focused on how China perceives, interprets, and responds to the new vulnerabilities and opportunities in the international system.

Speaking via video link from Beijing, Da Wei, a professor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University and the director of its Center for International Security and Strategy, said China views the current moment as neither ideal nor catastrophic but better than recent alternatives.

China has experienced three scenarios, Da explained. First, from the 1990s through the Obama era, China benefited greatly from the U.S.-led liberal order, but was increasingly criticized by the West. Second, during Trump's first term and the Biden administration, while facing mounting pressure of decoupling in a bipolar system, China was forced into a camp with Russia, which Da characterized as Beijing’s “worst scenario.” Now, under Trump's second term, the shift toward multipolarity has redirected pressure away from China and onto multilateral institutions and U.S. allies – "the least bad option" from Beijing’s perspective.

Da argued that “culturally, China has a very low appetite for global governance or leadership.” China sees itself primarily as a regional power, he said. Rather than filling the vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal from international institutions, "we want to be powerful and respected in the region. I don't think China has a very big appetite for leadership in faraway regions, except for economic interests." He contrasted this “Emperor's perspective,” demonstrated by China’s foreign policy, with the U.S. “boss perspective.”

Susan Shirk, a research professor at the University of California, San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and director emeritus of its 21st Century China Center, noted that China's response to Trump's trade war has been robust, muscular, but disciplined. "The Xi Jinping administration was operating in a more disciplined manner than it had previously," she said, contrasting this approach with what she called Xi's "rash reactions” to Japan and failure to engage Taiwan diplomatically.

Shirk stated that, while Trump's alienation of U.S. allies through extreme tariffs and military interventions has created clear opportunities for China to expand its influence and further divide Washington from Europe and Asian partners, Beijing has only modestly exploited these openings.

She emphasized that Xi's support for Russia in its war against Ukraine represents "self-defeating overreach" that undermines China's ability to improve relations with Europe. "Russia represents an existential threat to Europe," she said. "Xi Jinping really doesn't grasp how important this is."

Mark Lambert, a recently retired U.S. State Department official who served as China coordinator and deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, contrasted the Biden administration's China strategy with the current U.S. policy vacuum.

The Biden approach, he explained, was rooted in U.S. relations with five Asian treaty allies plus NATO and positioned China as the only country with the means and capabilities to reshape the post-World War II order. It required "all hands on deck" to address this challenge through what U.S. officials called a "lattice work of relations": the Quad involving India, AUKUS with Australia, the Camp David summit between South Korea and Japan, and strengthened linkages between NATO allies and East Asian partners. China's support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine unified Europeans in understanding the China challenge in ways never seen before. The administration also successfully reframed Taiwan's importance, emphasizing that Taiwan's chip dominance was vital to global prosperity.

Today, Lambert argued, the United States either has no China strategy or “one so classified that neither our allies nor our practitioners know what it is.” On security, trade, technology, and international cooperation, the United States has given China “fantastic opportunities,” he noted.

Allies’ Transactional Coping Strategies

The second panel, moderated by Laura Stone, a retired U.S. ambassador and APARC's inaugural China Policy Fellow, turned to other regional states – South Korea, Japan, Russia, and India – and how they read the geopolitical landscape and devise strategies to shape the regional order.

Victor Cha, the D.S. Song-KF Chair and professor of government at Georgetown University and president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), noted that "every U.S. ally around the world is looking at a Plan B," pointing out that, in the first year of the second Trump administration, allies were not acting on these plans, but that "we’re now at a threshold where many of them are executing their Plan B's."

Cha identified seven types of behavior that U.S. partners have adopted when dealing with the Trump administration. These are drawn from a recent CSIS project on ally and partner responses to the paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy. First is prioritizing face-to-face meetings with Trump himself, "because there's a recognition that the policy process in the United States is broken,” Cha said, “and that policy making is not being informed, as it traditionally has been, by foreign policy professionals. It's all happening at the leader level."

Other strategies include minimizing risk to avoid what Cha called "the Zelensky moment" – the public humiliation Ukraine's president suffered in the Oval Office in February 2025 – and preparing "trophy deliverables," such as South Korea's promise to buy Boeing airplanes and Japan's commitment to purchase Ford trucks.

“The America First policies have effectively put the custodial burden of maintaining the alliance on the partner,” Cha said. “Whether it's Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, or whoever it might be, the burden traditionally has been on the United States, but now it's on the partner. They're the ones who have to try to maintain this relationship. So it's about minimizing risk.” 

South Korea's recent summit with Trump yielded a $350 billion investment package, yet soon after, U.S. immigration authorities raided a Hyundai facility, and Trump threatened 25% tariffs on Korea.

"Why take all this abuse?" Cha asked. His answer: South Korea and Japan see no alternative to the United States on security, and they secured previous concessions in areas such as nuclear submarines, ship building, and enrichment and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, which they do not want to renegotiate. 

One positive outcome, Cha pointed out, has been the unexpectedly warm bilateral relationship between Japan and Korea. Despite having leaders who would normally clash – a far-right conservative in Japan and a progressive in South Korea – the uncertain geopolitical environment has brought the two countries together.

He predicted China would eventually use economic coercion against South Korea over the U.S.-Korea nuclear submarine agreement, just as it did during the 2016-17 THAAD dispute and is currently doing to Japan. "It's not happening now because I don't think China wants bad relations with Japan and Korea at the same time, but it's coming," he said, adding that this development will likely push South Korea closer to the United States and Japan.

Japan Reconsiders Alliance Dependence as Its "Too Big to Fail" Status Proves No Shield

Katherine Monahan, a 2025-26 visiting scholar and Japan Program Fellow at APARC and a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State, said Japan's relationship with the United States is "too big to fail," but that has not prevented serious strain between the two allies.

Having served in Tokyo as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Japan until April 2025, Monahan shared that, when Trump's Liberation Day tariffs hit Japan with a 25% rate, the Japanese could not believe that was the figure next to their name, while other allies were at 20% and 15%. They wondered, “Don't we have any special relationship at all?”

Monahan called attention to a recent Foreign Affairs article by Masataka Okano, Japan's former national security advisor, in which he argues that Japan needs to take strategic autonomy more seriously. When made by a former Japanese official, such a statement represents a significant shift in the nation’s mindset, she said. 

Japan is also reconsidering previously used language around "de-risking" from China in favor of diversifying trade with multiple partners, including China, Canada, and Europe. This shift is happening on the backdrop of the current war with Iran, as 90% of Japanese oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. “Japan has to start balancing sources and supply chains,” Monahan argued.

Russia Exploits American Unreliability

Russia expert Kathryn Stoner, the Satre Family Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said America’s unpredictability under Trump represents pure opportunity for Vladimir Putin.

"Putin knows Trump. He gets him," Stoner said. "They have a not-completely dissimilar worldview." Trump's red carpet welcome for Putin at last year's Alaska summit, despite the Russian leader's indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, sent a powerful message, Stoner asserted. So did Trump's lack of concern for democratic values and his criticism of U.S. allies.

She reminded the audience that Putin has been in power for 26 years and has watched multiple U.S. presidents come and go, adapting successfully to each. Putin wants multipolarity, she said, and Trump’s actions have emboldened him. Putin’s goal is to “reclaim Imperial Russia as a global power and restore what he views as its proper sphere of influence,” extending through Ukraine and Belarus into Poland, up to German borders in the west and to the south, through Moldova, Serbia and Bulgaria, to the Black Sea in the east, all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula. 

According to Stoner, the Russia-China relationship is significantly more durable than many believe. The relationship between the two powers extends beyond oil sales to investment, defense coordination, and sophisticated military exercises. “It kind of doesn't matter whether there's love lost or not. There's an opportunity to be gained on both sides."

"Russia's economy is actually not on the verge of collapse," Stoner added. "It has completely retooled toward the military."

India Feels Betrayed

Emily Tallo, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, who studies how political elites structure foreign policy debates in democratic countries, especially in India, explained that New Delhi felt especially betrayed by Trump's foreign policy pivot.

The first Trump administration had centered India as a key partner against China. In May 2025, however, when an India-Pakistan conflict flared up, Trump claimed credit for brokering peace, but India took issue with his threat of trade measures to bring an end to the conflict. He then hosted Pakistan's army chief at the White House and signed deals with Islamabad. "This was a twist of the knife for India," Tallo said.

Trump also imposed 50% tariffs on India, including a penalty for buying Russian crude oil, which was not applied to China, and backed out of a QUAD summit in New Delhi.

India now views China as its primary security threat, and the recent India-Pakistan crisis, in which China supplied all of Pakistan's weapon systems and possibly intelligence, made New Delhi’s two-front threat fears a reality. "India is really sensitive to any hints of U.S. retreat in the Indo-Pacific, and any acceptance of Chinese Hegemony in the region," according to Tallo.

She concluded that, like other regional powers, India is committed to preserving the U.S. partnership but is diversifying and seeking a “Plan B.” It finalized free trade agreements with the European Union and the United Kingdom, agreed to purchase French Dassault Rafale jets, and conducted a pragmatic reset with China, citing U.S. unreliability as cover to stabilize a difficult bilateral relationship.

“India wants to be a regional power aligned with but not allied with the United States [...] They want to be considered as the United States’ main partner in Asia and a major counterbalance to China.”