Reframing Conflict in East Asia: Korea Before Taiwan? - Jeffrey Robertson

This book reframes both the analytical framework and the empirical focus of Indo-Pacific security debates, challenging the Taiwan-centric analytical bias.

Comparing Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula through geography, politics, economics, military operations, and the management of war, the book contends that Korea offers the US a more favorable theater for strategic competition with China than Taiwan. Highlighting how political priorities and institutional bias override strategic logic, the book questions the supposition that Taiwan must be the central theater of U.S.–China strategic competition and demonstrates how that assumption has narrowed Indo-Pacific thinking. The work connects classical geostrategy and modern warfare, to demonstrate how technological change is shifting the balance between continental and maritime power and how South Korea's growing strategic value simultaneously increases its vulnerability, thereby raising urgent questions about the alliance's purpose and Korea's place in U.S.–China competition. In light of the shifting balance between continental and maritime capabilities, the Korean Peninsula emerges from this analysis as a more favorable and operationally viable theater—despite remaining largely absent from a public debate fixated on Taiwan.

This book will be of much interest to students of East Asian politics, Asian security studies, foreign policy, and International Relations.