An annual conference of South Korea’s overseas diplomatic mission chiefs opened Monday with a focus on strengthening its diplomacy amid geopolitical challenges, the foreign ministry said.
Over 180 ambassadors, consuls general and other heads of diplomatic missions in foreign countries have returned home to attend the five-day gathering set to run through Friday.
In his opening speech at the meeting, Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul asked the envoys to put their heads together to find the direction of South Korea’s diplomacy amid the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, growing North Korean nuclear threats and the prolonged wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
“Over the past few decades, we were too engrossed with managing inter-Korean ties and relations with our powerful neighbors that we had accepted our geopolitical environment as our fate and had grown accustomed to dealing passively to whatever situation was facing us,” Cho said.
“The geopolitical crisis threatening our survival is t
oo complex now and our national power and status, as well as the international community’s expectations of us, has grown too much for us to continue addressing our diplomatic policies and issues with such an attitude,” he added.
Cho then urged the envoys to respond flexibly to changes with an “innovative and creative mind,” saying “there is no place to stand” for diplomacy that follows the past.
On relations with the U.S., he said South Korea will “faithfully implement” the agreement from the landmark trilateral summit at Camp David to “institutionalize” three-way cooperation between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo.
Cho also voiced his commitment to communicate closely with Japan to create a “new turning point” in bilateral relations on the 60th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic ties next year.
During the meeting, the envoys will discuss how to carry out three key tasks that the foreign ministry has put forward for this year: robust security diplomacy, diplomacy centered on economy and livelihood
s, and multilateral diplomacy as a global pivotal state.
The participants include Ambassador to China Chung Jae-ho, who has been under investigation over allegations that he verbally harassed an embassy staffer in a practice called “gapjil” in Korean.
Speaking to reporters before the meeting, Chung said “everything will be revealed when the results of the investigation come out.
Source: Yonhap News Agency