Park faces balancing act in ASEM summit

President Park Geun-hye faces a tricky balancing act at the upcoming Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Mongolia, a venue likely to be marked by geopolitical tensions over a set of thorny issues including the South China Sea dispute, observers said Wednesday.

Park will attend the two-day multilateral summit, slated to take place on Friday and Saturday in Ulaanbaatar. The biennial gathering will be attended by the leaders of more than 50 countries including Japan, a key ally of the United States which is not an ASEM member.

The summit comes a few days after an international tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands, rendered a landmark ruling against China's territorial claim to the lion's share of the resource-rich South China Sea.

Though the legal case at the Permanent Court of Arbitration was brought by the Philippines in 2013, it has been seen largely as a high-stakes battle between China and the U.S. -- the two major powers with which South Korea has been striving to maintain close ties for security and economic reasons.

Washington has led an international campaign to protect the "global commons" -- the freedom of navigation and flight in the strategically crucial waterway, while Beijing has pushed to beef up its territorial claims by building artificial islands in the disputed waters.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have also engaged in maritime disputes with China that has delineated its claim to the waterway with "the nine-dash-line," a maritime demarcation line that takes in more than 80 percent of the South China Sea.

The long-simmering row over the sea is not in the official agenda for the ASEM summit. But it is likely to emerge as an important topic among the ASEM participants during their multilateral or bilateral encounters, analysts said.

What kind of stance the South Korean leader will present over the territorial issue has drawn keen attention as Seoul has sought to further strengthen ties with the U.S and China. The U.S. is South Korea's top security ally, while China is its crucial partner for trade, tourism and joint efforts to denuclearize North Korea.

"The ASEM summit this time could put Park in a difficult position due to a series of ongoing issues including the South China Sea spat and the friction with Beijing (over the decision by Seoul and Washington to deploy an advanced anti-missile system to Korea)," said Lee Dong-ryul, a China expert at Dongduk Women's University.

Park is unlikely to directly mention the South China Sea issue at the gathering as South Korea is not among the claimants to the contested waterway -- although the sea involves a crucial shipping route for the export-reliant South Korea, observers noted.

Should she feel the need to stake out her position, Park is likely to repeat her earlier statement. During the East Asia Summit in Malaysia in November last year, the president said that the freedom of navigation and flight must be protected, and that the waterway must not be militarized.

Attention is also being drawn to whether Park will meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang bilaterally on the sidelines of the ASEM summit.

Officials here said that Park's schedule for a summit with Abe or Li has not been fixed yet. But the three leaders could briefly meet one another during the multilateral summit gatherings, analysts said.

Above all, the most crucial task for Park is to drum up support from the ASEM members to pressure Pyongyang to abandon its evolving nuclear and missile programs.

Park is expected to use the multilateral summit to urge participants to faithfully enforce U.N. Security Council (UNSC) sanctions, which were adopted in May in response to Pyongyang's nuclear test in January and long-range rocket launch the following month.

Launched in 1996, ASEM is a consultative body aimed at strengthening cooperation between Asia and Europe in political, economic, social, cultural and other areas. The summit is held biennially, with the last one held in Italy in 2014.

ASEM consists of 51 member states and 2 regional organizations: the European Union and the secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. (Yonhap)