Balancing domestic expectations and delicate relations with neighbours while trying to deal with North Korea’s race to become a nuclear power will make for a challenging five-year term.
The key question is whether North Korea does have nuclear weapons that it can readily use against the United States and its regional allies, South Korea and Japan.
Any intensification of the military tension between North Korea and the United States would be calamitous, and requires a patient, innovative and informed approach by policymakers.
Regardless of how the US sending an aircraft carrier group to the Korean Peninsula plays out, the international community will ultimately have to accept and learn to manage a nuclear North Korea.
Beyond her own personal humiliation, the ramifications of Park’s fall are already reverberating from domestic South Korean politics into the fraught geopolitics of Northeast Asia.
Tensions in Asia may soon boil over. If U.S. leaders fail to seek pathways to peace, the consequences may be grim, warns former National Security Council member.
Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Discipline of Politics & International Relations, Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University