Last month, South Korean voters elected Yoon Suk-yeol as their next president.
It was a hotly contested race, which Yoon won by a razor-thin margin of just 0.7%. What will the conservative People Power Party candidate’s victory mean for South Korea and East Asia?
For starters, Yoon’s government seems poised to shift away from its predecessor’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” in the Sino-American rivalry and restore South Korea’s security and economic ties with both the United States and Japan. Whereas outgoing President Moon Jae-in’s first official phone call following his 2017 electoral victory was with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Yoon’s first call as president-elect was with U.S. President Joe Biden.