He traveled to 15 countries and held 45 summit meetings, according to his vice foreign minister, a pace that far outstrips his recent predecessors: both Moon Jae-in and Yoon Suk Yeol visited nine countries in their respective first years.
Much of that effort went toward restoring national dignity after Yoon Suk Yeol's brief martial-law declaration and subsequent impeachment, said Second Vice Foreign Minister Kim Jina at a Sejong Institute forum Thursday.
"Over the past year, we have managed crises and expanded opportunities amid an unstable international environment," Kim said.
The sixth Sejong Special Policy Forum, held Thursday afternoon at the institute's conference room, brought together specialists on the United States, Japan, China and North Korea to assess the first year of President Lee's diplomacy and security policy ahead of the administration's first anniversary next month.
Panelists broadly agreed that Lee's "pragmatic diplomacy" had stabilized South Korea's external relations after a turbulent period, but warned that Seoul must now move from crisis management to a more durable strategy.
Crisis management also held up surprisingly well under Donald Trump's second presidency, which unleashed a barrage of tariffs on allies and adversaries alike on Liberation Day in April 2025. During his campaign, Lee had pledged a diplomacy "grounded in national interests," describing the alliance with Washington as the foundation of his foreign policy and calling for trilateral cooperation with the United States and Japan.
Lee Seung-joo, a professor of political science and international relations at Chung-Ang University, described Lee's first year as dominated by tariff negotiations and argued that Seoul had developed what could be called a "Korean model" of tariff bargaining. The Trump administration's strategy of pressing multiple trading partners simultaneously created a dynamic in which early deals became benchmarks for later negotiations.
Seoul, which entered talks later than some competitors due to a domestic leadership vacuum, had to move quickly while managing uncertainty, he pointed out.
South Korea also leveraged its role as host of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Gyeongju, where Lee chaired the leaders' meeting and presided over a session on artificial intelligence and demographic change.
Still, Lee Chan-song warned that alliance modernization is beginning to expose differences. He urged the government to choose its language carefully in Washington, saying terms such as "strategic coordination" or "strategic alignment" would be preferable to "strategic autonomy." He also called on Seoul to prepare for the post-Trump era.
His remarks came after Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, told a U.S. House Armed Services Committee hearing that Seoul and Washington aim to meet the conditions for OPCON transfer no later than the first quarter of 2029. South Korea handed wartime operational control to the U.S.-led U.N. Command during the 1950–53 Korean War, retook peacetime OPCON in 1994 and has since pursued a conditions-based transfer of wartime command.
Japan
Lee Ki-tae, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute, said the administration had chosen a careful but effective path — managing historical disputes without allowing them to block cooperation on security, supply chains and advanced technologies.
"The Lee Jae Myung government is doing well in South Korea-Japan relations," Lee Ki-tae said, though he cautioned that "the current South Korea-Japan relationship is closer to a conditional expansion of cooperation than to full reconciliation."
He described the relationship as a "managed" phase: Seoul remains mindful of domestic sentiment on history-related issues, while Tokyo has adopted a practical approach that emphasizes trust-building over quick symbolic breakthroughs.
A January summit between Lee and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Nara was a key milestone.
Takaichi, just three months in office, performed "Golden" and "Dynamite" at the gathering. A few months later, she is due to visit Lee's hometown of Andong — also an ancient city, coincidentally — next week, continuing the shuttle diplomacy.
Lee Ki-tae said the future of South Korea-Japan ties will depend less on dramatic gestures and more on policy continuity and crisis management. He identified intelligence sharing, supply chain resilience, technology security, disaster relief and nontraditional security as areas where both sides can produce results without excessive political risk.
He also warned that the two countries do not fully share the same priorities on North Korea. Seoul's preferred approach combines exchanges, normalization and denuclearization, while Japan places stronger emphasis on denuclearization and the abduction issue. Any restart of diplomacy involving Pyongyang, he said, would require close advance coordination between Seoul and Tokyo.
China
Kang Jun-young, a professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said Beijing had expected a liberal South Korean government to tilt toward China after years of stronger Seoul-Washington alignment under the previous conservative administration. That it has not, he argued, should itself be read as a mark of success.
"If Beijing thinks the Lee Jae Myung government did not come as close to China as it expected, that means the Lee government did well," Kang said.
Lee's first summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Gyeongju in November, set a constructive tone as the two leaders agreed on the need to cooperate for peace on the Korean Peninsula. Xi's visit was his first to South Korea in 11 years. The two met again in Beijing in January, with denuclearization, economic ties and cultural exchanges on the agenda. Lee later said the summits helped put bilateral relations "back on track."
Kang also flagged growing Chinese naval activity in the Yellow Sea as a serious security concern given its proximity to South Korea's capital region, calling for clearer red lines on high-risk security issues and more active cooperation in lower-risk areas such as culture, tourism, climate, local government exchanges and academic cooperation.
North Korea
Little progress has been made on the North Korean front.
Park Won Gon, a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University, said North Korea's shift is not merely rhetorical but constitutional, military and nuclear in nature.
"The Lee Jae Myung government's North Korea policy must go beyond the short-term goal of resuming dialogue and expand into a long-term national strategy responding to North Korea's structural strategic shift," Park said.
In the first half of 2026, North Korea institutionalized its hostile state-to-state relationship with the South. A revised constitution added a territorial clause and dropped all references to unification, reinforcing Pyongyang's break from the idea of inter-Korean relations as a temporary division within one nation. In March, state media reported that Kim Jong-un formally designated South Korea the "most hostile state" and reaffirmed the North's nuclear status.
Park said the implications are profound. By redefining the South as an enemy state rather than a partner in national reconciliation, Pyongyang is constructing political and ideological justification for the potential use of nuclear weapons. The North's doctrine now combines conventional military modernization, nuclear force development and a legal framework that has discarded the old language of peaceful unification.
With past inter-Korean military agreements effectively rendered void, Park said Seoul should explore indirect communication channels through the U.N. Command or third-party intermediaries — not as political concessions, but as minimum safety devices against escalation.
The Lee government has nonetheless kept the door to dialogue open. National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac has described Lee's "END" initiative — exchange, normalization and denuclearization — as a mutually reinforcing structure in which progress in one area helps advance the others, with the overarching goal of ending confrontation and hostility on the Korean Peninsula through an integrated approach.
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