What America-First Cybersecurity Means for the U.S.-South Korea Alliance
The new U.S. national cybersecurity strategy presents both opportunities and challenges for the U.S.-South Korea alliance.
The new U.S. national cybersecurity strategy presents both opportunities and challenges for the U.S.-South Korea alliance. The White House released the strategy on March 6, aligning federal cybersecurity policy initiatives with the “America First” doctrine that also shaped the Donald Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. Much like those previous documents, the cybersecurity strategy makes no mention of state actors that pose significant cyber threats to U.S. interests, including North Korea. The strategy nonetheless emphasizes a robust offensive posture in cyberspace, backed by efforts to modernize critical infrastructure, encourage private sector innovation, and build a stronger cyber workforce.
This new U.S. cybersecurity posture offers much for South Korea to consider as the Lee Jae Myung administration finalizes its own National Cybersecurity Strategy, set to be released within the year. Under the current cyber doctrine, introduced by the previous Yoon Suk Yeol administration in 2024, South Korea has pursued more offensive cyber capabilities to proactively detect and neutralize North Korean threats, collaborating with the United States to emulate its “defend forward” cybersecurity approach. Such efforts aligned with the Yoon administration’s more hawkish posture toward North Korea; the document for the first time explicitly named North Korea as the greatest cyber threat to South Korea.
Whether the Lee administration’s cybersecurity strategy continues this trend or follows the U.S. example of scaling back its naming-and-shaming of North Korea remains to be seen. But given both leaders’ preference for a reconciliatory approach to engaging North Korea, it is likely that the U.S. and South Korean cybersecurity postures will align in placing less emphasis on directly challenging adversaries. The shift in U.S. rhetoric could also relieve pressure on South Korea to more forcefully call out China as a cyber threat. Attribution has long been a source of friction, as popular perception in South Korea is that extensive trade with China exposes the country to particularly painful retaliation.
Rhetorical alignment on cybersecurity priorities may smooth alliance relations in the short term, but there is a danger in promoting a U.S.-South Korea strategic framework that fails to address China’s emergence as a peer competitor in cyberspace. It also leaves critical questions unanswered, such as how the two countries can jointly defend their networks and infrastructure from sustained North Korean, Chinese, and Iranian attacks. The ongoing war in Iran and related targeting of U.S. medical device company Stryker only adds to the urgency.
What is clear is that South Korea’s new cybersecurity strategy will focus on building a level of cyber resilience that “will enable Korea to become a top-three AI nation.” With the U.S. cybersecurity strategy emphasizing the importance of building secure supply chains for critical infrastructure, information, and emerging technologies to protect its “national intellectual advantage,” South Korea can position itself as a trusted supplier and resourceful collaborator in securing the cybersecurity supply chain and advancing research into AI-powered cybersecurity tools.
The allies should take advantage of forums such as the ROK-U.S. Public-Private Joint Economic Forum to convene leaders from government, industry, and academia to devise new initiatives to invest in cybersecurity research and development and to align public and private sector incentives that strengthen innovation and resilience. Close consultation and collaboration give the United States the benefit of leveraging an ally’s technical and intellectual expertise to maintain its emerging technology advantage in cyberspace, while giving South Korea the opportunity to learn from the world’s standard makers in corporate cybersecurity governance.
Despite clear opportunities for strategic alignment, the U.S. cybersecurity strategy still does not fully clarify structural issues that could impose short- to medium-term challenges to robust U.S.-South Korea cybersecurity cooperation. Pathways for engaging the United States in international cybersecurity cooperation are murky with the fragmentation of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, the elimination of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s international affairs offices at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the suspension of foreign aid programs such as the Cybersecurity and Digital Connectivity Fund. While military-to-military coordination between U.S. Cyber Command and the South Korean Cyber Operations Command remains intact—if somewhat impacted by increased demand for U.S. Cyber Command’s assistance in offensive combat operations elsewhere—the alliance has lost significant institutional capacity for coordinating civilian cybersecurity policy and overall cybersecurity strategy both between and among the labyrinthine architectures of the U.S. and South Korean cybersecurity apparatus.
It is further unclear how the new U.S. Office of the National Cyber Director, a coordinating body across all U.S. cyber policy, will engage with relevant South Korean counterparts, especially an intelligence body like the National Intelligence Service, which bears significant cyber-coordination responsibilities across the South Korean government.
For the Trump administration, achieving the national cybersecurity strategy’s aim of ensuring “the distribution of cost and responsibility [is] fair across the U.S. and allies who share our democratic values” requires reconstituting the institutional mechanisms that enable regular cybersecurity coordination and discussions of cyber burden-sharing. The rollout of the new strategic document included a promise of several executive orders that will implement the strategy’s policy pillars in the coming weeks; within those orders, the issue of alliance coordination should be carefully considered.
George Sebastian Garcia is Program Officer and Internship Coordinator at the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI). The views expressed are the author’s alone.
Feature image is from Shutterstock.
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