Park Geun-hye’s Election as President of South Korea: Implications for Northeast Asia

Abstract

Park Geun-hye, the first female South Korean president, has brought immense implications to South Korean internal politics as well as external relations. Park’s future foreign policy especially will have a great impact on Northeast Asian international relations judging from her mandate as the responsible politician with years of intensive self-training and keen visions into world affairs. The current Korean Peninsula and its adjacent areas are particularly unstable due to the complicated interaction of competitive nations, which are superpowers (like the United States and Russia), regional powers (like China and Japan), and middle powers, along with unstable and provocative North Korea. In which way and to what extent Park Geun-hye will safeguard her country and interact with others, along with how Park will help to shift the international politics in Northeast Asia, will be one of the pivotal issues for the next five years.