Author Description

This report provides an interim evaluation of US-ROK cooperative efforts in the Indo-Pacific. First, it assesses where priorities converge and diverge between the Moon administration's NSP and the Trump administration's Indo- Pacific Strategy (IPS), as this has policy implications for the US-ROK collaboration under the Biden administration in terms of the joint regional engagement. It examines how the NSP's pillars of prosperity, security, and people map onto those of the IPS, in order to explore how the Republic of Korea and the United States have approached cooperative efforts to date and to what extent those efforts have achieved their stated objectives or require further development. In pursuing this analysis, the report finds that the progress seen across a range of broad US-ROK cooperative efforts, outlined in joint government fact sheets released in 2019 and 2020, reflects a series of unique opportunities and challenges the two countries face in the region.