This essay first appeared in The Diplomat.

For decades, South Korean strategy rested on a stable hierarchy within the international order. The alliance with the United States provided security; Seoul then managed relations with Japan, Europe, China, and regional institutions around that anchor. The alliance remains indispensable, but Seoul can no longer assume that this foundation will stay stable.

The evidence is visible in the way Washington now deals with allies. In 2025, the United States initially announced sharply differentiated “reciprocal” tariffs on South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. Negotiations later produced a 15 percent baseline framework for all three, but the process mattered as much as the final rate. Trade access, industrial investment, defense procurement, and alliance politics were increasingly handled as one bargaining package. Allies were not exempt from economic pressure because they were allies.

At the same time, Europe and Asia have been building connections that would have seemed highly ambitious a decade ago. The European Union signed security and defense partnerships with Japan and South Korea in November 2024. This year, the EU and Japan launched a defense-industry dialogue, while the EU and South Korea signed a digital trade agreement and began implementing cooperation on maritime security, cyber and hybrid threats, information manipulation, space, and the defense industry. The strategic map is becoming more networked. 

The network, however, remains uneven. Japan already has a mature economic partnership with the EU and rapidly expanding defense-industry ties. EU-South Korea relations are deepening, but they still lack the density and regular strategic consultation found in EU-Japan ties. A trilateral format would therefore do more than add another meeting: it would reduce asymmetry among three partners whose capabilities are increasingly complementary.

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South Korea, Japan, and the EU now face four converging challenges and pressures.

The first is demographic. South Korea is aging faster than any other OECD society; Japan’s working-age population has been shrinking for decades; and the EU’s fertility rate reached a new low in 2024. Demography is not a social-policy sidebar. It affects defense recruitment, industrial capacity, fiscal room, technological adoption, and the ability to sustain long-term commitments. Each actor is experimenting with immigration, automation, workforce policy, and welfare reform, but the security implications remain largely compartmentalized.

The second is concentrated economic dependence. None of the three can or should decouple from China. Yet South Korea’s experience after the THAAD deployment, Europe’s debates over economic coercion, and China’s export controls on gallium, germanium, and other strategic inputs have shown that interdependence can be converted into leverage. De-risking therefore requires more than national stockpiles. It requires shared risk maps, compatible certification, co-investment in alternative suppliers, and advance consultation before export controls or industrial subsidies create collateral damage among partners.

The third challenge is U.S. volatility. The United States is still the only actor capable of providing extended nuclear deterrence to South Korea and Japan, and NATO remains central to European defense. But dependence on U.S. power now coexists with uncertainty about U.S. policy. The classic alliance dilemmas of abandonment and entrapment are no longer opposite ends of a spectrum. Today, U.S. allies fear both being left out and being drawn into bargains or contingencies they did not shape.

The fourth pressure is the collapse of the old geographic separation between European and Asian security. North Korean munitions, missiles, and troops have supported Russia’s war against Ukraine. Moscow, in turn, has provided Pyongyang with political cover, economic support, and the prospect of military know-how. What happens on a European battlefield is changing the military balance on the Korean Peninsula. A regional response to a cross-regional threat is structurally inadequate.

This is the case for an EU-Japan-South Korea strategic dialogue. This framework should not be described as strategic autonomy, equidistance, or a hedge against the United States. A better term would be institutionalized hedging: risk diversification through standing, rule-based consultation among allies and partners that remain anchored in the broader U.S.-led system.

The proposal is more feasible than ever before. Japan-South Korea relations have improved significantly in recent years. The January 2026 summit in Nara and the reciprocal summit in South Korea in May demonstrated continuity across leadership changes in both countries since June 2025. The EU already has free-trade, digital, green, and security frameworks with both countries. The task is not to invent three new bilateral relationships; it is to connect existing ones.

The dialogue should begin modestly, through a Track 1.5 process involving officials, experts, and industry. Its early agenda must be concrete and specific: a joint critical minerals and supply chain risk assessment; consultation on export controls and investment screening; cooperation on AI, cyber resilience, and digital standards; exchanges on demographic and defense workforce adaptation; and shared monitoring of North Korea-Russia military cooperation. Successful projects could then be elevated to ministerial working groups.

Two design choices are essential. First, the initiative must remain function-driven. It is not NATO, not the Quad, and not an anti-China coalition. Its purpose is to reduce vulnerability without demanding economic separation. Second, it should be complementary to relations with Washington and transparent about that purpose. Horizontal networks strengthen alliances when they help allies absorb shocks, coordinate positions, and arrive at consultations with greater capacity.

For South Korea, the need is particularly acute. Japan already has the G7, a mature economic partnership with the EU, and expanding European defense ties. Seoul’s international weight has grown faster than its institutional depth. An EU-Japan-South Korea dialogue would help close that gap.

Horizontalizing alliances is not a vote of no confidence in the United States. It is insurance for the moments when the United States wavers, overreaches, or changes course. The postwar hierarchy cannot simply be preserved by demanding more reassurance from Washington. Its resilience will depend on whether allies can build connective tissue among themselves before the next crisis forces them to improvise.

This article was written by Dr. Thomas Fingar, who played an early role in the establishment of SPICE before helping to establish and then leading Stanford’s U.S.–China Relations Program before moving to the U.S. State Department where he served twice as Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research. He later served as Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council before returning to Stanford in 2009. This is the sixth of several articles—focusing on the 50-year history of SPICE—that will be posted this year.

The celebration of SPICE’s 50th anniversary attests to the continuing vitality, impact, and success of ideas and constructive activism engendered by unique circumstances at Stanford in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Bay Area China Education Project (BAYCEP) and its successor organization, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), did not just happen and its success was not assured. Many innovative projects were launched during that turbulent and transformative period but few survived or had a lasting impact. It is worth reflecting on what made this Stanford initiative different and more successful.

Context matters and it is useful to recall the political and academic environment at the time. It was the golden age of area studies when universities and the national affairs enterprise struggled to understand the societies, cultures, politics, and policies of the more than 100 ‘new’ nations that regained independence or emerged from revolution after World War II. New social science methodologies were developed to support this undertaking, and new ways to teach foreign languages and foreign cultures broadened horizons and facilitated people-to-people interactions that transformed exotic ‘others’ into fellow travelers on planet earth. Stanford was at the forefront of both the area studies and methodological revolutions.

The Vietnam War was a second critical shaper of information and ideas. This was the first ‘television war’ and it gave an immediacy to what was happening in Washington and on the other side of the world. The ‘enemy’ was humanized and the draft forced ordinary Americans to think about people, places, and government policies that were opaque and increasingly personal. Antiwar activism included demonstrations and ‘teach ins’ to educate the public about what was happening and why. These activities occurred in the context of growing dissatisfaction with many gaps between American values and everyday injustice affecting racial minorities, women, the elderly, and the poor. Determination to do something about increasingly unacceptable conditions was rampant.

These factors, and others such as the large size of the area studies community at Stanford and the leadership of key faculty, coalesced in ways that galvanized determination and efforts to link area studies-focused academic research to political action, classroom instruction, and public education. The logic was straightforward. Those at the leading edge of area studies had both an opportunity and an obligation to use what they learned about other countries and cultures to inform and influence politicians and policymakers so that they would see the error of their ways in Vietnam and Asia more broadly and adopt policies more conducive to mutual understanding, peace, and shared prosperity.

The logic of the situation and our understanding of the importance of public opinion in a democracy also drove us to seek ways to use our understanding of Asia to bring Asia and Asians into American classrooms. That meant, among other things, expanding coverage of Asian culture and history in American secondary school textbooks and developing teaching materials and training programs for high school teachers. Fifty years later, it is difficult to imagine how little information and teaching material was available. One reason that is the case is that the founders of SPICE used their knowledge of American education, textbook publishing, and teacher training to move beyond the Europe-centric content of what was and is taught in the United States.

The energy and activism during the formative period did not dissipate when graduate students earned their degrees and embarked upon the next stage of their careers. Some continued to work in and through the SPICE structures. Others accepted positions in the U.S. Government and other nonacademic institutions so that they could play direct and indirect roles in shaping official understanding and public policies. Their activities both contributed to public understanding and utilized increased public awareness and understanding to influence public policy. 

There is a bigger story to be told than the narrow component that was and is the SPICE program, but to say that is not to diminish the importance and impact of the classroom and public education achievements of the people and projects undertaken in the decades since SPICE was originally conceived. I am proud to have been a part of those early efforts and even prouder of the fact that SPICE remains as vital and vibrant as it is today and that I still have opportunities to lecture in its programs. 

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In its June 20, 2026, edition, the Nikkei Shimbun's Market Beat financial analysis column, titled US Stocks Attract Japanese Money, examines how the U.S. stock market is becoming a "major league" that is increasingly attracting capital from Japanese individual investors. Several factors drive this phenomenon:

• Massive IPOs: Unprecedentedly large IPOs, as seen by SpaceX, are capturing global attention and investment.
• Structural Advantages: U.S. markets are moving fast to include new, large companies in major stock indices, which forces index-tracking funds to buy shares and creates automatic demand.
• 24-Hour Trading: U.S. exchanges like the NYSE and Nasdaq are moving toward near 24-hour trading to specifically capture Asian daytime investors, making it easier for them to participate.

The column describes how Japanese investors are increasingly bypassing domestic options to capture the immense growth driven by American AI, data infrastructure, and advanced technology IPOs. "Founders and early-stage investors prefer large-scale markets that offer price discovery, liquidity, and visibility. This is likely to accelerate the concentration of innovative companies in the United States," says Curtis Milhaupt, the William F. Baxter-Visa International Professor of Law and APARC faculty affiliate.

The article notes that the speculative nature of advanced tech sectors inevitably fuels market volatility and could pose risks for Japanese investors looking across the Pacific, urging Japanese investors to identify promising domestic companies.

This blog first appeared in The National Interest.

The return of President Donald Trump to the White House has not only increased geopolitical volatility – it has fundamentally altered expectations about how far major powers are willing to go to secure strategic advantage. What once seemed rhetorical excess—such as his repeated remarks about acquiring Greenland – now appears less implausible in light of recent events. From the escalating crisis in Venezuela in early 2026 to the ongoing Iran War as of May 2026, the United States has signaled a willingness to pursue geopolitical advantage with fewer constraints than before.

Against this backdrop, the Arctic is no longer a peripheral theater. It is rapidly emerging as a central arena where climate change, energy security, and great-power competition intersect. The question is not whether the Arctic matters, but how states will position themselves in a region where the rules are still being written.

A Strategic Arctic, not a Peripheral One

The renewed US interest in Greenland should not be understood narrowly as a territorial ambition. Rather, it reflects a broader strategic calculation about the Arctic. The melting of Arctic ice – combined with technological advances—is making previously inaccessible resources and shipping routes increasingly viable. In this sense, Greenland is not the story – the Arctic is.

The Arctic is estimated to hold roughly 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its natural gas, making it one of the last major frontiers of global energy development. At the same time, new maritime routes such as the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and the emerging Transpolar Sea Route (TSR) promise to significantly shorten shipping distances between Asia and Europe.

For major powers, the implications are profound. Russia has already positioned itself as the dominant Arctic actor, leveraging its geography and resource base. China, through its “Polar Silk Road” initiative, seeks to embed the Arctic into its broader connectivity strategy. Meanwhile, the United States, increasingly viewing the region through a strategic lens, is attempting to mobilize its alliances to counterbalance these moves.

As recent studies suggest, the Arctic is becoming a new frontier of great-power competition – one where economic, military, and legal dimensions are deeply intertwined.

Why South Korea Is Paying Attention to the Arctic 

For South Korea, interest in the Arctic may appear surprising at first glance – especially given the ideological orientation of its current progressive government. Traditionally, progressive administrations in Seoul have emphasized engagement with continental powers such as China and Russia, while seeking rapprochement with North Korea. They have also shown interest in infrastructure connectivity across the Eurasian landmass.

Yet the Arctic presents a different kind of opportunity – one that aligns with both geopolitical necessity and economic ambition.

Eunjung Lim, a professor in the Division of International Studies at Kongju National University (KNU), is a visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC from April 2026 to February 2027. She is also a member of the governing board of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network and a member of the Subcommittee on Energy and Just Transition of the Presidential Commission on Carbon Neutrality and Green Growth. She earned a BA from the University of Tokyo, an MIA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

As U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to visit Beijing on May 14-15, 2026, for a highly anticipated summit with President Xi Jinping, the world is watching to see if the two leaders can stabilize a U.S.-China relationship strained by disputes over trade, technological race, the future of Taiwan, and the rippling effects of the conflict with Iran.

Trump’s trip to Beijing – already rescheduled once due to the conflict in the Middle East – has been described as having tremendous symbolic significance. Yet, expectations for a breakthrough on specific deliverables should remain low, according to Susan Thornton, a China expert and former U.S. diplomat. Thornton joined APARC Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui on the latest episode of the APARC Briefing video series to analyze the potential outcomes of the Trump-Xi summit and the high-stakes dynamics shaping U.S.-China relations.
 

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Trade and Tech: A Call for a Paradigm Shift

On the economic front, Thornton drew on her deep experience in trade negotiations to critique the lack of focus in U.S. policy.

"The biggest problem for U.S. negotiators is deciding what it is that we want from China," she said. "We tend to give them a long list of revolving priorities, which [makes it easy for the] other side of the negotiating table to just fob them off and not actually commit to anything over years of negotiations.”

On the technology rivalry between the two powers, Thornton urged a shift in strategy. Rather than pursuing sweeping export controls that are often unilateral and incomplete, she advocated for a narrower, multilateral approach focused on the most sensitive technologies, combined with a greater emphasis on American innovation. AI governance is one of the areas Thornton believes could be a common ground for Washington and Beijing to align their policies.

“It's going to be very hard for the United States to contain China's technological ambitions and growth,” she said. “I don't think that we're exactly competing on the same metrics. I question how it is that we're going to be able to keep China from getting technologies that are dual-use but might be useful in some military application when these things are basically economy-wide products.”

When it comes to technological competition, "We need to try to run faster than China, not be constantly trying to trip China up and looking in the rearview mirror," Thornton urged. "I don't think that's going to bode well for the long-term development of the U.S. tech sector."

The Taiwan Flashpoint: A Longer-Term Challenge

While Taiwan remains the most dangerous flashpoint that could trigger a kinetic warfare between the United States and China, Thornton believes that the immediate risk of conflict has receded, in accordance with recent U.S. threat assessments that no longer see 2027 as a likely target date for a potential Chinese takeover of the island.

Beijing, she argued, is closely watching the domestic political situation in Taiwan and how the leadership in Taipei views U.S. reliability and support. “I think the Chinese have determined, based on both of those things they've been watching, that they can afford to wait a bit longer, see what happens.”

Thornton cautioned, however, that, even as a conflict over Taiwan may no longer pose an immediate-term threat, “it is a problem that is going to develop over the coming decade.”

Diplomacy in a Multipolar World Order 

When asked about the future of the global order, Thornton described a trend toward fragmentation. If the United States steps back from its global leadership role, it is difficult to see who else would be willing or able to shoulder the cost of providing global public goods, she said. A “thinner world order,” with the United Nations at its center, may eventually find favor with countries that can afford to pay for some of those goods, she reflected.

In a closing advice for aspiring foreign service officers, Thornton argued that the emergence of a multipolar world reinforces the need for skilled diplomacy. “As the global order changes and more countries come into the mix of the councils of politics in the world, the United States will have to lean back toward diplomacy more,” she predicted.

“We're going to need very good diplomats,” she concluded, because it will be significantly harder to be an American diplomat in a fragmented world order in which the United States is no longer the single overwhelmingly dominant power.

Corruption is typically understood as a sign of weak institutions and failed governance. But what if it is a deliberate political technology used to consolidate power, discipline rivals, and reshape political systems?

This is the argument advanced by University of Chicago sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang in the latest episode of the APARC Briefing series. Drawing on years of ethnographic research across Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Myanmar, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as offshore tax havens, Hoang uses a comparative Asian lens to show how both democratic and authoritarian governments strategically align with private capital, reinforcing elite power. Hoang joined APARC Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui to share core insights from her work.
 

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Kimberly Kay Hoang speaks on the APARC Briefing series with host Kiyoteru Tsutsui.

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She argues that corruption discourse often operates as a political tool, widely seen across Asian political economies and increasingly evident in the United States during the Trump era. This rhetoric, she says, tends not so much to dismantle institutions but to reshape them, concentrating authority in the executive and weakening checks and balances. According to Hoang, these patterns reflect a broader global shift toward more oligarchic forms of governance, where political power is increasingly concentrated among transnational elites.

"We often think of corruption as a failure of governance – that it's a weak state, and weak states can’t govern," Hoang says. "But in Southeast Asia and in other parts of East Asia, it has become an instrument for governance. It's a way of consolidating political power, weaponizing corruption."

From Vietnam's Hostess Bars to Global Finance

Hoang's research journey began in an unexpected place: working 12-hour shifts in Vietnamese hostess bars in 2009-2010, shortly after the global financial crisis. What started as an ethnographic study of the sex industry and human trafficking in Vietnam evolved into something far larger: a story of Asian ascendancy and Western decline playing out in micro-transactions.

"I started to witness local Vietnamese men turning down deals with Western businessmen and taking extraordinary deals from investors from China, parts of Southeast Asia – Hong Kong and Singapore – and Korea, Taiwan," Hoang recalls. When she examined foreign direct investment data, "the numbers lined up to what I was seeing at a micro level."

But when she presented these findings in the United States, the response was skeptical, even hostile. "People would say, 'Okay, yes, the economy is in decline, but America still has the strongest military,' or 'China is really dependent on the American economy, so if the American economy collapses, so will China's,'" she remembers. "It was a huge oversight of American arrogance to just believe that [Asian ascendancy] was impossible."

Her continued research led her to follow not just the money but "the people who move the money" – from Vietnam and Myanmar to Hong Kong and Singapore, and ultimately to offshore tax havens in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the Seychelles, and the Cayman Islands.

The Architecture of Global Capital

What Hoang uncovered was what she calls an "architecture of global capital" – an invisible financial infrastructure built by "hidden engineers" including specialized wealth managers, lawyers, and financial advisors who coordinate across borders to move elite wealth beyond the reach of any single nation-state.

The scale is staggering: approximately $7.6 trillion in household wealth is hidden offshore globally, with the top 0.01% avoiding about 25% of their tax obligations through legal structures and shell corporations.

"We have to move beyond national boundaries," Hoang argues, "because global oligarchs choose the sovereigns and choose the jurisdictions that govern their financial transactions and activities."

This system creates what Hoang describes in her book, Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton University Press), as a web of legal and financial gray zones that allow wealth to compound while evading accountability.

Corruption as Governance Mechanism

Hoang’s work exposes the connections between the rise of global elites, corruption, and the emergence of oligarchic governance. Across both Asia and the United States, she explains, corruption discourse operates as a mechanism for reshaping democratic governance by means of dissolving the boundary between political authority and economic power.

"What does that mean? It means that we no longer rely on institutions," she says. "People who have executive authority can just go after their rivals."

This creates what Hoang calls "anticipatory compliance," a situation in which political and economic elites preemptively align themselves with power centers. The mechanism works through strategic ambiguity: when corruption charges can be selectively deployed, everyone becomes potentially vulnerable, leading to self-regulation through fear.

While this pattern is well-established in countries like China and Vietnam, Hoang sees similar dynamics emerging in the United States. "Under the Trump administration, we've seen charges of corruption being weaponized as a tool of governance," she notes, while emphasizing that elements of this already appeared under the Biden administration.

Democratic Reordering, Not Collapse

When explaining the impacts of corruption discourse on democratic governance, Hoang is careful to distinguish between democratic collapse and what she terms "democratic reordering." Rather than overtly capturing the state, global oligarchs work through existing institutions, gradually redefining their function through moralized narratives, weakened oversight, selective enforcement, and strategic risk management. The outward forms of democracy remain intact, but the independence of courts, election fairness, and accountability mechanisms are steadily eroded. "They increasingly serve concentrated elite interests."

In comparing the United States to China, Hoang notes a crucial difference: "China has a long view. They're playing a 50-year view [...] If we're in this constant [electoral] cycle, and we've delegitimized oversight and political authority, [...] we need to have stronger independent institutions that outlast whoever is in office."

Finding Hope in Resistance

Despite her sobering analysis, Hoang sees reasons for optimism. "What gives me hope is that, if you look carefully, there are a lot of resistance movements," she says. "I think there's a growing battle between the millionaires and billionaires."

She points to resistance not just from grassroots movements but from millionaires who "don't want to live in a billionaire oligarchy world, who feel economically precarious vis-à-vis the extreme inequality."

The challenge, she argues, is that both mainstream and social media highlight extremes while missing the middle-level discourse and resistance movements that are actively organizing.

Kimberly Kay Hoang is Professor of Sociology and the College, and Director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago. In addition to Spiderweb Capitalism, she is the author of Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (University of California Press). Her forthcoming work examines U.S.-China power relations in offshore financial centers.

The full APARC Briefing conversation with Hoang is available on APARC’s YouTube channel.