“President Lee would have attended the Nato summit but for the US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities,” Lim Eul-chul, an international relations specialist and professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies think tank, told This Week in Asia on Monday.
“It would be reading too much into it to see this decision as a signal to China or a shift in South Korea’s diplomatic calculus under the new government,” Lim added, noting that the Lee administration was still formulating its regional and global strategies.
But other observers cautioned that optics matter when it comes to geopolitics.
Lee might have been concerned “that a strongly worded joint statement could offend China”, suggested Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
