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Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, was designed to help protect South Korea against attacks from North Korea; instead it became the biggest obstacle to relations between Beijing and Seoul in decades when its deployment was announced in 2016.
Fearing the system could allow the US to monitor its capabilities, China declared THAAD a threat to the status quo. The system, which has no offensive strike capacity, led Beijing to declare an unofficial trade war on South Korea, hitting the likes of Lotte Group with business suspensions on spurious grounds, squeezing tourism revenue by suspending sales of package tours to South Korea, and even hurting the K-pop business.
It was an extraordinary moment of Chinese heavy-handedness, and should have been a warning to the US about how Beijing treats its neighbours.
The dovish Moon Jae-in, who came into office the following year, only encouraged future deployments of this strategy by acquiescing to Chinese demands with his “Three Nos” policy: No extra THAAD deployments, no participation in a US-led missile-defence network and no involvement in a three-way alliance with the US and Japan.
His successor Yoon Suk Yeol pledged to expand the THAAD system. There’s no immediate sign of that happening, but Yoon’s administration has rejected the Three Nos and said the matter is “not negotiable”.
Perhaps there’s less at stake now: A zero-COVID Beijing can’t exactly cut off tourists to South Korea this time. But the threat from North Korea hasn’t gone away, even if the rogue nation’s place in the headlines has diminished from the days of “fire and fury”; Pyongyang has already fired more ballistic missiles in 2022 than any other year.
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