Belfer Center's Korea Project Co-Leads Planning for South Korean President's Historic Harvard Visit and Speech

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol visited Harvard on April 28 and delivered a major policy speech at Harvard Kennedy School’s JFK Jr. Forum. Following his speech, President Yoon joined Harvard Distinguished Service Professor Joseph Nye for a conversation about security and soft power derived from the country's cultural strength. Yoon also took questions from the large audience of students and others attending the event in person and online.

The Belfer Center’s Korea Project worked closely with Harvard University colleagues and Korean Consulate General counterparts to arrange for the visit and the Harvard speech, the first for a sitting South Korean president. The Kennedy School's Institute of Politics and the Korea Project co-sponsored the historic speech. 

Prior to President Yoon’s visit to Harvard, where he was welcomed by a Harvard delegation including President Lawrence Bacow, Vice Provost Mark Elliott, Korea Institute Director Nicholas Harkness, and Korea Project Director John Park, Yoon was in Washington, D.C. for a State Visit where he joined President Joe Biden in marking the 70th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. Through the Washington Declaration, the two Presidents jointly announced the establishment of a new Nuclear Consultative Group to strengthen extended deterrence, discuss nuclear and strategic planning, and manage the threat to the nonproliferation regime posed by North Korea. 

Graham Allison, Director of the Belfer Center’s Avoiding Great Power Wars Project, said in an article about Yoon’s visit and the Washington Declaration, it is “a ringing reminder of one of the greatest achievements of U.S. national security strategy: its decades-long success in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The agreement strengthened nuclear deterrence coordination between the two allies and offered a greater sense of assurance that South Korea falls under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.”

In the lead-up to President Yoon’s historic Harvard visit, the Korea Project convened the 4th annual Korean Security Summit at Harvard with senior scholars and practitioners, including South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin (MPA ‘85). At the Summit, Kim Gheewhan, President of the Korea Foundation, Eric Rosenbach, Co-Director of the Belfer Center, and Nicholas Harkness, Director of the Harvard Korea Institute, officially announced the establishment of the Korea Foundation Endowment Fund for the Korea Project. 

The Korea Foundation's gift, along with funding through Harvard's Korea Institute, will further strengthen and expand Korea-related policy research and security studies across Harvard.  

"We thank the Korea Foundation, the Korea Institute, and Christopher Jae Woo Koh, who provided a generous gift to the Korea Institute in support of expanding Korean security studies at Harvard," said Korea Project Director John Park.

In May, soon after President Yoon’s visit to Harvard, the Korea Project led a delegation of Belfer Center experts to Seoul, South Korea, to present analyses on rethinking nuclear deterrence, dealing with the North Korean regime's financing of proliferation via crypto theft, and addressing the increasingly complex security situation in Northeast Asia. Led by Park, the Belfer delegation included Matthew Bunn, Principal Investigator for the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA), Francesca Giovannini, MTA Executive Director, Matthew Guasco, Postdoctoral International Security Program and MTA Fellow, and William Tobey, Belfer Senior Fellow and Director of the Office of National Security and International Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Read more about President Yoon’s Harvard address here. 

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