The end of ‘swinging inside’? Republic of Korea’s strategic reckoning in an era of great-power competition

This article examines South Korea’s evolving grand strategy as a geopolitical swing state under intensifying US–China competition. It addresses an apparent puzzle: despite expectations that the progressive Lee Jae Myung administration would revive strategic ambiguity, Seoul has so far continued to move towards heavy hedging or quasi-balancing against Beijing. Drawing on a two-level neoclassical realist framework, the article argues that South Korea’s long-standing hedging strategy has become increasingly constrained in the 2020s. Earlier administrations moved between light and heavy hedging as domestic ideological contestation filtered external pressure, producing what this article calls ‘swinging inside’. Yet intensified US–China rivalry has narrowed the space for ‘choosing not to choose’. The Lee administration is therefore treated as a provisional test case showing how far the centre of gravity in South Korean grand-strategic discourse has moved. The article substantiates this claim through evidence of partial economic de-risking and shifts in security alignment, while also emphasising the instability of this convergence. Domestic factional contestation, backlash against US ‘predatory hegemony’, and more radical autonomy-seeking scenarios may still reopen space for renewed hedging or strategic reversal. South Korea’s grand strategy thus remains an unfinished swing under conditions of systemic pressure and domestic change.