Geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China will exert the most influence on the national security landscape in the Indo-Pacific and throughout the world over the next few decades. But the Korean Peninsula has a frustrating if predictable tendency to not only exacerbate these tensions but present independent and in some ways more dangerous threats. 

South Korea’s new submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that it tested last year were, among other things, a signal to Pyongyang that Seoul is willing to invest in several capabilities and systems that target North Korea’s nuclear weapons, increasing those