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As a result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Joe Biden of the Democratic Party will take office for the upcoming four years. Although U.S. foreign policy is expected to be more stable and predictable in the Biden administration, it is likely that its foreign policy will produce a modified U.S. global leadership, which has the features of both Trump’s America First foreign policy and the global leader of the liberal international order. Meanwhile, it is anticipated that U.S.-China relations could be more manageable in the Biden administration than it did in the Trump presidency even if U.S.-China strategic competition will persist. To maintain the strategic balance between U.S. and China, South Korea needs to pursue the ‘principled diplomacy,’ aimed at advancing its national interests based on the principles of ‘openness, transparency, and inclusiveness.’

The American government’s broad ranging efforts targeting an array of challenges to US interests posed by the policies and behavior of the Chinese government developed through close collaboration between the Trump administration and both Democrats and Republicans in the Congress. Emerging erratically in the first year of the Trump administration in late 2017, the US government’s hardening against China later demonstrated momentum in gaining greater support in the United States. It reached a high point during the heat of the 2020 presidential election campaign as the most important foreign policy issue in the campaign. South Korea has shown more angst over its vulnerability to negative fallout from the growing US-China rivalry than any other regional power. South Korea is very exposed and has few good options for dealing with the intensifying US-China rivalry. Prevailing assumptions are that a tough US policy toward China will continue in 2021 and strong Chinese retaliation will follow South Korean moves to align with the United States in the rivalry with China.

Security is an increasingly contested concept in terms of referent object and the scope of issues covered in its conceptualization and provision. Traditional approaches have addressed the survival of states in a hostile operating environment focusing on questions of war and peace from the perspectives of national or systemic interstate security. Even if traditional approaches can be seen to have functioned reasonably well within the limited parameters of the old state-centric operating environment, they have fallen short in addressing new challenges to state and international security that do not originate from state actors. They have also proven to be very limited in their ability to embrace nontraditional security (NTS) perspectives relevant to the provision of human security for vulnerable individuals and groups, or biospheric security. Furthermore, there is a lack of understanding and consideration of the intersections and interdependencies between different levels of security analysis and policy provision. This paper, therefore, advocates a holistic model of understanding of the mechanisms of the contemporary security operating environment, and comprehensive policy prescription to address old and new security challenges, traditional and NTS issues, and the spillover between them.