Beyond Middle-Power Hedging: Political Leadership and South Korea’s Semiconductor Diplomacy in the U.S.–China Chip War 2017-2025.

During the last decade, semiconductors have become much more than a technological or economic issue. They have moved to the centre of geopolitical competition, especially between the United States and China. Export controls, industrial subsidies, and restrictions on supply chains have made chip production a question of national security and political power. For South Korea, this creates a difficult dilemma. The country is home to major semiconductor companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, but its freedom of action is limited. It relies on the United States for security guarantees and access to advanced technologies, while China remains an important market and production base for Korean firms. This paper looks at how South Korea managed this security/trade dilemma between 2017 and 2025. Its main hypothesis is that South Korea’s semiconductor diplomacy cannot be properly explained through simple categories such as balancing or bandwagoning. Rather, it should be understood as a form of hedging, shaped by structural constraints and conditioned by political leadership. The argument is that alliance dependence, economic exposure to China, and the structure of global semiconductor supply chains set the limits of what South Korea could realistically do. Within those limits, however, leaders still mattered. Moon Jae-in and Yoon Suk-yeol presented and managed outside pressures differently, especially in their rhetoric, diplomatic visibility, and degree of alignment with the United States. Methodologically, the thesis relies on qualitative document analysis, supported by trade and industry data as well as expert interviews. It applies theories of alignment, asymmetric and weaponised interdependence, hedging, and political leadership to show that South Korea’s policy was neither simple alignment with Washington nor neutrality between the two powers but a constrained attempt to preserve strategic flexibility.