ABSTRACT
The challenge of managing big power relationships has long been a compelling feature on the Korean Peninsula and remains a pressing demand on South Korea in the twenty-first century. Korea’s long and often painful historical experience as a pawn in great power struggles during the dynastic, colonial, and Cold War eras has taught Koreans a bitter lesson about the need to balance security and autonomy, and to avoid, as the proverb goes, being crushed like a shrimp in the fight among whales. In Chapter 14, John Delury argues that three overarching imperatives have faced leaders in Seoul in the contemporary period: how to keep close ties among the major powers and avoid choosing between them; how to be proactive in the security dilemma presented by North Korea without alienating the big powers; and how to sustain a popular mandate for the approach to major powers. South Korea is likely to continue to search for the right balance between a hegemonic US and a rising China, for a formula for inter-Korean relations that has regional and allied support, and for a grand strategy that maintains broad public support.
