South Korea's People Power Party candidate and former prosecutor Yoon Seok-youl has won the Blue House in the closest presidential race in South Korea's history.
A major foreign policy challenge that awaits Yoon will be to navigate relations with a more assertive yet economically critical China, all while the U.S. increases its pressure against South Korea to support its Indo-Pacific strategy that emphasizes containing rather than cooperating with China.
To maintain regional stability and good relations with both the US and China, Yoon will have to be clear about how far South Korea is willing to go on matters like defending Taiwan in case of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
Some in Washington will argue that South Korea should join a coalition against China despite the fact that South Koreans are far from sold on such a containment strategy. According to the 2021 survey by Korea Institute for National Unification, support for a balanced/neutral stance on U.S.-China rivalry outweighed support for strengthening the alliance or strengthening cooperation with China every year from 2016 to October 2021.
Similarly, a survey conducted by the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University from 2018 to 2021 showed stronger preference for maintaining relations with both US and China, compared to strengthening US-ROK alliance or strengthening cooperation with China. So while passions may have run high during the campaign, it would be prudent for the Yoon administration to take a more moderate stance on the “strategic dilemma” presented by the deteriorating U.S.-China relationship.
A related challenge for the new South Korean president is North Korea. During the campaign, candidate Yoon expressed support for deploying additional anti-ballistic missile defense systems while strengthening deterrence against North Korea. Yet a deterrence-only strategy without meaningful reassurances has failed to stop North Korea’s nuclear armament and increased North Korea’s desire for nuclear weapons as a security guarantee.
A recent peace game exercise conducted by the Quincy Institute, U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Sejong Institute of South Korea found that a new analytical approach to the North Korea issue that puts equal emphasis on peacebuilding and denuclearization is needed to break the deadlock in talks between the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, and other stakeholders in the region. Successful diplomacy and peacebuilding with North Korea will require a shift in the minds of conservatives in South Korea and the United States who tend to view North Korea as a permanent menace rather than as a rational actor.
From surging Covid-19 cases to the real estate bubble to mending ties with young women voters, President-elect Yoon has a full plate awaiting him. Embarking on a balanced strategy toward the United States, China, and North Korea will ensure that the Yoon administration has the flexibility to enact his campaign pledges. It will also allow him to avoid unnecessary and costly conflicts at a time of heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Jessica J. Lee was formerly senior research fellow on East Asia at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Previously, Jessica led the Council of Korean Americans, a national leadership organization for Americans of Korean descent. Prior to CKA, Jessica was a Resident Fellow at the Pacific Forum and a senior manager at The Asia Group, LLC
Yoon Suk-Yeol, the presidential candidate of the main opposition People Power Party, who was elected South Korea’s new president on Thursday, holds bouquets as he is congratulated by party’s members and lawmakers at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea March 10, 2022. Lee Jin-man/Pool via REUTERS
On Friday, as three U.S. destroyers headed towards waters off of Venezuela and President Nicolás Maduro mobilized 4.5 million militiamen in response, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a one-word tweet: “#Guyana.”
The post included a screenshot of a statement from the Guyanese government, which echoed concerns from Washington about Venezuelan transnational organized crime, all but offering support for the military escalation. Those concerns are based on the debunked assertion that Maduro is the head of the “Cartel of the Suns,” using drugs and gang violence as a weapon of war against the U.S.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez responded by saying that Rubio’s tweet is proof that “who rules in Guyana” is not the Guyanese president, nor Rubio, but rather a multinational oil company — Exxon Mobil.
She may have a point. Yet many in the Washington establishment refuse to acknowledge Exxon’s influence.
Since 2015, Exxon has been leading the exploration of some 11 billion barrels of oil in Guyana, and Rubio has all but committed to a U.S. security guarantee for Guyana and Exxon. On a visit to Guyana in March, he warned Venezuela against attacking Exxon’s oil fields. “It would be a very bad day for the Venezuelan regime if they were ever to attack Guyana or attack ExxonMobil,” Rubio said then.
Meanwhile, Exxon’s competitor Chevron has sought to engage with the Venezuelan government. Chevron has operated in Venezuela since the 1920s, almost uninterrupted, including during the governments of Presidents Hugo Chávez and Maduro. The Trump administration has allowed Chevron to operate in Venezuela under unknown conditions, pumping around 200,000 barrels of oil per day. Though the State Department is insistent that it is helping U.S. companies “without helping the Maduro regime,” critics of engagement with Venezuela claim the “Chevron model” is simply providing a lifeline to Maduro.
This proxy war has boiled over into the world of nonprofits. Washington-based think tanks more heavily-funded by Exxon tend to be more in favor of maximum pressure, whereas those that receive more funding from Chevron appear more supportive of the Chevron model.
It has become a common refrain among these critics that experts who are not sufficiently hawkish on Venezuela are deemed to be shills for Chevron, oftentimes without evidence. A Manhattan Institute fellow suggested recently that another D.C. think tank, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is being paid by Chevron to whitewash Maduro. But when RS contacted CEPR they responded categorically that they take no money from Chevron.
"CEPR does not receive any funding from Chevron or from Venezuela, or from any corporation or government. It’s a stated policy, in fact, on our website in various places, and we are proud that we — unlike so many think tanks in DC — do not take money from governments or corporations," CEPR said in a statement sent to RS on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Carrie Filipetti, the Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition, recently took to LinkedIn to explain why she resigned from the Atlantic Council’s Venezuela Working Group. Filipetti said she had left following what she considered to be “an outrageous missive they published that seemed to provide cover for Maduro's theft of democracy, freedom, and a future for millions of Venezuelans.” The reason for that push, she suggested, could be found “shining in capital letters on the terrace of the Atlantic Council's fancy new 80,000 sq ft building: Chevron.”
However, many critics of the Chevron model are themselves embraced by the oil lobby. Exxon has become a symbol of the maximum pressure campaign and an “enemy of the Venezuelan people” according to Maduro, for working with neighboring Guyana in territory disputed by Venezuela. Exxon donates at least $900,000 per year to DC’s top 20 think tanks, according to an RS analysis.
The Venezuelan government nationalized the country’s last privately owned oil fields in 2007, and while most multinational oil companies accepted the new laws for regulation, ConocoPhilips and ExxonMobil refused. Then-Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson valued the seized assets at some $10 billion, but a World Bank arbitration tribunal ordered Venezuela to pay only a fraction of that at $1.6 billion.
Exxon’s revenge came in the form of Venezuela’s next door neighbor: Guyana. In 2015, Tillerson — who became President Trump’s secretary of state two years later — began working with Guyana to explore 11 billion barrels of oil in waters claimed by Venezuela. Venezuela in turn began threatening to invade its neighbor in late 2023 over the disputed territory, known as Essequibo, sending troops to the border for military exercises and building highways needed for an invasion.
Filipetti’s own organization, the Vandenberg Coalition, was founded by Elliott Abrams, who the London Observer reported was “the crucial figure” in a 2002 attempted coup against Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. In an email, the organization told RS that it does not accept corporate or foreign donors, though it does not publicly disclose its funders. “The issue is not that Chevron, Exxon, or any other company gives money to think tanks,” Filipetti told RS, "the issue arises when a company has a direct financial stake in the outcome of a particular policy on which the think tank is active.”
Both Exxon and Chevron clearly have a financial stake in policy towards Guyana and Venezuela. Exxon’s own executives have acknowledged on numerous occasions their direct financial stake. Asked about Venezuela’s claims over the region, Exxon CEO Darren Woods made clear where the company stands. “We can do what we can do, which is making sure that we’re helping the government of Guyana by producing the resources efficiently,” he said.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) receives over $250,000 annually from ExxonMobil. Despite also accepting over $250,000 every year from Chevron, CSIS has been among the loudest critics of the Chevron Model of joint ventures in Venezuela and even lists Exxon CEO Darren Woods on its Board of Trustees. When a Venezuelan ship approached an Exxon oil facility demanding information in March, CSIS fellows expressed support for the military to protect Exxon’s interests, saying that “[a] coordinated response…which aims to deter Venezuela from further military action towards its neighbor, is sorely needed.”
Last December, Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado spoke at a CSIS event about Maduro’s “oil lifeline” provided by Western companies such as Chevron. In her remarks, she promised to “develop the energy sector, oil gas, and renewables to make Venezuela the most attractive energy partner in the Western Hemisphere.” After the event, several CSIS fellows voiced support for “returning to a pressure campaign” against Venezuela, starting with more sanctions and revoking Chevron’s oil license.
Many CSIS fellows have also been supportive of the maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela, even potential U.S. military intervention. In 2019, Grayzone confirmed that CSIS hosted a private roundtable titled “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela” attended by former National Intelligence Council and National Security Council officials.
Cristina Burelli resigned as a Senior Associate Non-Resident fellow at CSIS two years ago, alleging that the think tank censored her over criticism of Guyana, the country hosting Exxon’s oil fields. Burelli’s research concluded that Guyana has “enabled and encouraged the destruction of ecosystems in the Disputed Area west of the Essequibo River.” Her article was published and taken down the same day, August 17, 2022.
Commenting on Filipetti’s LinkedIn post, Burelli said that shortly before the piece was published, CSIS President John Hamre “hosted President Irfaan Ali of Guyana at an event sponsored by Exxon,” adding that “[t]oo many ‘think tanks’ in DC are no longer places to think—they’ve become pay-to-play platforms.”
The Manhattan Institute also has longstanding ties to ExxonMobil, having received $1.3 million in funding from the oil conglomerate since 1998. In an article last year titled “Drill, America, Drill!” a contributing editor to the organization’s City Journal publication wrote that “[t]he people of Guyana are on track to join those in Norway and Qatar near the top of the world’s per capita GDP rankings because of the remarkable volume and velocity of their own new offshore oil production.”
In an article in January, another contributing editor held up Exxon’s venture in Guyana as a model: “In recent years, the pace at which industry brings newly identified offshore resources into production has accelerated dramatically. Consider Guyana, where an Exxon-led offshore development went from discovery to production in less than five years.”
Those critical of U.S. engagement with Venezuela have been quick to point out Chevron’s funding of the nonprofit world, but conveniently avoid mentioning funding from one of its biggest competitors, Exxon. While there are plenty of other competing oil companies that fund think tanks, the two oil giants have become emblematic of the binary policy options towards Venezuela that have defined, and will continue to define, the Chavismo era: engagement, or maximum pressure?
Quincy Institute researcher Lee Schlenker contributed to this article
keep readingShow less
Top photo credit: Philippine Navy personnel salute an Indian Navy vessel in the South China Sea, off the west coast of the Philippines, on Aug. 4, 2025, during their first naval exercise with India, a two-day event that started the previous day (Kyodo via Reuters Connect)
After calming down a little during the early part of this year, the South China Sea is on the boil again. Two serious incidents have brought home the fact that the situation is becoming critical, and a Philippines-China military crisis could happen anytime, potentially pulling the United States in.
On August 11, two Chinese vessels, one of which was a Chinese navy craft, collided while chasing a Philippine ship off Scarborough Shoal. The collision was serious, and several Chinese coast guard personnel possibly died in the collision. Any Chinese deaths would mark the first loss of life in the China-Philippine tussles in years.
Soon thereafter, there was a swarming incident in the second hotpot in the South China Sea, Second Thomas Shoal, where an aging Philippine ship, the Sierra Madre, with a handful of troops has been berthed since 1999. Though there were no injuries, Chinese craft camewithin 50 meters of Philippine military positions on the shoal.
The concern in Manila now is that China may respond to the acute embarrassment and losses it suffered in the collision by trying to forcibly seize or dislodge the Sierra Madre or take another similar aggressive action. The head of the Philippine military,General Romeo Brawner, has asked his troops to defend the post at Second Thomas Shoal “at all costs” and reiterated the “red line” of the death of even a single Filipino in contested waters.
The crossing of this line, General Brawner said, could invoke the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States. The same red line was firstarticulated by Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself during the 2024 Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore.
China’s nine/ten-dash lines were ruled illegal in 2016 in a ruling at The Hague by an international tribunal constituted under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. China is unquestionably violating international law and interfering with Philippine sovereign rights and maritime jurisdiction through its intrusive activities.
However, the United States is far from helping. As laid out in a Quincy Institute brief in February 2025 (“Defending Not Provoking: The United States and the Philippines in the South China Sea”), Washington has expanded its military sites and exercises in the main Philippine island of Luzon northward, far from the South China Sea, and provocatively close to the Taiwan theater. Taiwan is the reddest of red lines from Beijing’s perspective.
The United States has also deployed advanced missile platforms to Luzon, which have little utility in countering Chinese gray zone tactics in the South China Sea. Moreover, Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) by the U.S. Navy, like the oneconducted just two days after the serious August 11 collision, will not deter, but only further destabilize the situation. There was no pressing need to conduct this FONOP, certainly not so soon after the collision incident, when Chinese nerves were on the edge.
Calls are already being made in the United States for a direct U.S. naval role in Philippine resupply missions to Second Thomas and Scarborough shoals. In the coming days, these calls will doubtlessly multiply. But such escorts can only heighten the risk of a U.S.-China war over specks in the ocean that are an American interest, but far from a vital one.
Amilitary crisis in the South China Sea must be avoided. All sides need to pull back and let temperatures cool down at this fraught moment. Otherwise, the summer may turn out to be a long hot one in Asia.
keep readingShow less
Top image credit: www.youtube.com/@aljazeeraenglish
In a new Al Jazeera docuseries called the Business of War, the Atlantic Council’s Mark Massa was left speechless in response to a question from journalist Hind Hassan about the think tank’s funding from weapons manufacturers. Massa, whose think tank accepted at least $10 million from Pentagon contractors in the past five years, paused for a revealing ten full seconds before stumbling through a non-answer.
“There have been some other think tanks and other organizations that have done an analysis of the recommendations that have been given by the Atlantic Council, and they found that it tends to benefit those same weapons companies that are also providing a lot of money towards the Atlantic Council,” Hassan said, adding, “How do you respond to that?”
“Well, all I’ll say is that the Atlantic Council has a very strong intellectual independence policy for our researchers and the work that we, that we produce,” said Massa, who is a deputy director in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
Hassan pressed the question.
“How can you unravel from the interests of weapons companies when there’s money coming in from them? I’m just trying to understand what the reasoning is behind that.”
Then, the 10-second-long pause — one second for every million dollars that the Atlantic Council accepted from weapons companies over the past five years.
“I think you’re right that it's something that a lot of people have commented on, the relationship…the relationship between, you know, the interests, we see this, we see this, you know, we see this often,” Massa said, seeming to stammer. “But I would say that, you know, if you’re interested in learning more about the Atlantic Council’s intellectual independence policy, I can connect you with people at my company who can talk to you about that.”
Massa struggled to respond because it is a plainly obvious appearance of a conflict of interest. The top 50 foreign policy think tanks in the U.S. accepted at least $35 million from top Pentagon contractors in the past five years. The Atlantic Council took over $1.2 million from SAAB, $850,000 from General Atomics, and $750,000 from RTX (formerly known as Raytheon). The real figures are likely far higher, because there is no legal requirement for think tanks to disclose their funding sources.
No matter how good a think tank’s intellectual independence policy is, think tank experts are aware of who their donors are. Sure enough, oftentimes those donors include friendly household names such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, companies that are less interested in pure academic research than they are in price-gouging the Pentagon and, for example, selling bombs being dropped in Gaza. As the executive director of a prominent DC think tank recently told me, “every donor has intent.”
Maybe what’s most revealing about the interview is that Massa mistakenly refers to the Atlantic Council as a “company” even though it is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Companies are beholden to shareholders, and those shareholders are looking for a return on investment. Think tanks have investors, too, but the return on investment that weapons companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are looking for is not monetary, at least not immediately. Instead they are hoping for the think tank to produce reports sympathetic to their bottom line, which are in turn cited by inquiring lawmakers and Pentagon officials to justify procuring more F-16s and ICBMs. That is their return on investment.
You don’t have to look that far for evidence of that. Earlier in the same interview, Massa defended the U.S.’s right to use nuclear weapons to respond to cyberattacks, chemical weapons, and bioweapons:
“At the end of the day, if an adversary is inflicting strategic damage on the United States, it might not matter if that’s through large-scale use of nuclear weapons or through other high-consequences strategic attacks. There’s nothing magical about nuclear weapons,” he said.
Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor on the Sentinel ICBM program, has given at least $350,000 to the Atlantic Council since 2019.
Massa, like other fellows at the Atlantic Council, has advocated for more investment in nuclear weapons such as the Sentinel program. He co-published a piece at the Atlantic Council titled, “Don’t cut corners on US nuclear deterrence,” which argued that there is “simply no room to cut the number of ICBMs at this moment” and that investment in the Sentinel program “is necessary but not sufficient to maintain strategic deterrence.” The Sentinel program has sparked controversy due to the program’s soaring cost — recent estimates indicate it could cost up to $160 billion, more than double its initial $77 billion price tag — which goes unmentioned in Massa’s piece.
At the very least, the Atlantic Council is commendably transparent about its funding sources. Over a third of the major foreign policy think tanks do not reveal anything at all about their donors, and some think tanks are trending in the wrong direction. The Center for American Progress, for example, quietly took down its donor list earlier this month, citing concerns about the Trump administration’s “targeting leaders and institutions that have challenged the president’s actions.”
Kudos to Hassan for asking a question that most in Washington are afraid to. Until journalists and policymakers call this what it is — a conflict of interest — weapons contractors will keep getting the best return on investment in town.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.