South Korea's foreign relations will continue to focus on North Korea and the four powers that are intimately involved with the peninsula, namely the US, China, Japan and Russia (these countries are the participants, together with the two Koreas, in the six-party talks aimed at reining in the North's nuclear programme). Inter-Korean relations have deteriorated sharply since November, when North Korean artillery batteries shelled Yeonpyeong, a Southern-held island that lies close to the North Korean mainland. This act of aggression ended the slight thaw that had occurred following a previous spike in tensions in the months after the sinking in March of a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan. As they did after the earlier incident, the US and Japan are again strongly supporting South Korea; the US responded to the shelling by sending an aircraft-carrier group to the area. China has been more equivocal, suggesting that the six-sided talks should resume and declining to condemn the North's action. In January the North made several calls for the reopening of dialogue between the two Koreas, but there were no breakthroughs during military talks that were held in early February.

South Korea will seek to maintain warm relations with the US. Both countries recognise the importance of their strategic partnership in the political and economic arenas. The rise in tensions between the two Koreas in 2010 has bolstered the relationship between the US and the South. The increasingly belligerent signals that have been coming from the North make an early further reduction in US troop numbers in South Korea unlikely and have already prompted the postponement of the planned transfer to South Korea of wartime operational command of joint forces, originally planned to take place by 2012. Relations with China will be cooler in the early part of the forecast period, following that country's failure to condemn either the sinking of the Cheonan (for which the North has denied responsibility) or the Yeonpyeong shelling (which the North admits but claims to have been a response to firing by the South). However, as China is South Korea's largest trade partner by far, there is limited scope for overt antagonism between the two countries.