Every discussion about South Korea’s foreign policy options begins with the same unspoken constraint: what will Washington tolerate? Proposals for strategic realignment, closer ties with China, or regional multilateralism are not dismissed because they’re impossible—they’re dismissed because they’re implausible within the context of U.S. political expectations.
Read about Korea policy for more than ten minutes and you’re head explodes in a cloud of tedious talking points, over-technical documents, and dense strategy papers that have not changed for 30 years. If the goal is to craft better policy, then traditional methods are no longer enough. It is time to embrace a sharper tool: speculative fiction.
For a country as geopolitically charged and historically complex as Korea, one might expect a rich tapestry of speculative fiction — alternate histories, emotional futurisms, surreal dystopias — flowing from English-language writers.
Policymakers want something simple. They want a story. One that tells them who’s good, who’s bad, what went wrong, and how to fix it. And they’re not wrong. Stories stick. Data doesn’t. Narrative wins. Every time.
Fiction can be speculative but more often reflects reality from a different perspective. Either way, sorting fact with fiction builds creativity in strategic analysis.
In international relations, you’d think the people with the clearest view would be those who’ve been trained in the field—foreign policy analysts, diplomats, think-tanks pundits, journalists, and political scientists. They have the education, the experience, and an understanding of the inner workings of governments. But sometimes, the people who see things most clearly are those who aren’t bogged down by all that expertise—outsiders like novelists, playwrights, and artists. Why is that?
Folktales might seem like relics of childhood, full of fantastical elements far removed from the real world but these stories also carry tradition, cultural values, and societal norms that subtly influence the way we think.
There are events in life wholly unbelievable. Events we look back on and imagine everything would be so different, if only there were five words, four meters, three cars, or two seconds separating one action from another.
