ABSTRACT
South Korea's security policy change illustrates both incremental and dramatic characteristics in its overall trends of change, contents of change, and scope and levels of involvement. A historical-comparative approach explores the historically continuous and discontinuous patterns of South Korea's policy change as influenced by international systemic and domestic institutional factors. This chapter reviews the critical factors that determined South Korea's security policy change throughout the Cold War era, transitional phase, and post-Cold War era. During the Cold War era, conditional factors that determined South Korea's security policy change were both the bi-triangular antagonistic system and the nation's authoritarian military regime. South Korea's security policy behaviors can best be described in terms of policy patterns, conditional factors, and critical determinants as well as institutional capacity in dealing with contextual changes. The primary security policy objective of the US has been the maintenance of regional stability through a balance-of-power approach in Northeast Asia.
