South Korea’s Diplomacy Has an Institutional Problem

In October 2025, a South Korean man escaped human trafficking captivity in Cambodia. When he rushed to the Korean Embassy in Phnom Penh for help, he was reportedly turned away—it was outside office hours. There was no 24/7 consular response. The embassy had just one police attaché and two staff to handle a surge in kidnappings, fraud cases, and rescue operations, out of a total of fifteen personnel.

The Cambodia crisis of 2025 saw 513 suspected cases of missing Koreans reported to local police between January and early November. The incident exposed what analysts had long suspected: South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) lacks the institutional capacity to match the country’s expanding global role. In an effort to ensure adequate responses to future crises, the ministry has promised to expand the consular division with increased funding. However, the incident shed light not only on overseas Korean missions but also on an institutional problem that spans the entire Korean diplomatic apparatus.

Korean diplomats stride onto the global stage with Indo-Pacific initiatives, APEC summits, and nuclear-submarine negotiations. But the very institution tasked with sustaining this momentum has changed far more gradually than the demands placed upon it.

Inside Korea’s Foreign Service Shortage

In 1994, MOFA headcount was about 2,092; in 2024, it stands at just 2,896, a mere 30 percent increase over three decades. By comparison, the U.S. Department of State employs nearly 27,230 people, while mid-sized powers like France and Japan field diplomatic corps many times larger. Italy, a country with a comparable population, employs approximately 7,000 career diplomats, more than twice the number Seoul affords. Meanwhile, of Korea’s 193 overseas missions, 102 operate with five or fewer staff. At MOFA headquarters in Seoul, there are 935 staff members in 2025, up from just 814 in 1994. 

Meanwhile, South Korea’s global engagement has exploded over the past 30 years. Trade volume has surged more than sixfold since the early 1990s. Outbound tourists have increased more than twentyfold. Seoul has gone from zero free-trade partners in 1994 to 22 FTAs with 59 countries. As these international linkages broadened, MOFA’s staffing structure changed more slowly.

The Foreign Ministry Is Bleeding Its Mid-Career Core

Voluntary resignations within the foreign ministry have more than doubled, jumping from 34 in 2020 to 75 in 2023, concentrated among mid-career professionals bearing the heaviest workloads. 

The appeal of a foreign service career is fading: the competitiveness ratio for the entry-level diplomat cadet exam fell from 42.8:1 to 36.2:1, converging with other civil service tracks it once far outranked. Experts cite long hours and heavy workloads, coupled with pay that fails to compensate for the intensity of the work.

The Interplay of Personnel and Expertise

On paper, this appears to be a simple personnel shortage. But this has been compounded by a deficit of specialized expertise, creating situations in which a single diplomat handles portfolios across multiple divisions.

The generalist model remains one of MOFA’s defining characteristics in its hiring and retention of personnel. Career diplomats follow a single track: a grueling two-round civil service exam, a year of training at the Korean National Diplomatic Academy, then rotations every two to three years across headquarters and overseas postings.

But as global diplomacy grows more technical, the monolithic hiring process has come under renewed discussion, and Seoul’s foreign ministry has tried to diversify at the margins. It designated “open positions” for mid-career temporary hires and, in 2013, created a separate application track to encourage regional and functional specialists to join the foreign ministry, exempting them from the first-round examination.

The special intake of functional and regional experts peaked at 31 percent of new diplomats in 2013, then plummeted to 8 percent by 2020 before being scrapped. A renewed specialist exam introduced in 2021 yielded five hires in its first year, then none in 2024 or 2025. The regional specialist track was also quietly halted in 2022.

The “open positions” program, intended to source mid-career individuals for temporary, senior-level positions at MOFA for a fixed period, has fared no better. From 2023 to 2024, MOFA converted 10 positions meant for external talent into internal postings filled by career diplomats. Half of those jobs had never once been filled by an outsider; they were repeatedly filled by insiders until MOFA claimed no suitable external candidate could be found.

When Outsourcing Fails

In theory, the foreign ministry can simply “outsource” functions to specialized agencies, making it more efficient. The creation of the Overseas Korean Agency in June 2023 appeared to support this approach. When the new agency launched to handle diaspora programs, MOFA’s Korean Nationals Overseas Protection Division was halved, dropping from 28 staff to 14.

But the Overseas Korean Agency focused on diaspora welfare rather than consular emergencies. The headquarters division it replaced was the ministry’s crisis-management hub—responsible for coordinating surge deployments, triaging overseas incidents, and linking embassies with domestic law enforcement. Halving that unit left missions without an institutional backstop when caseloads surged. Cases involving Korean nationals abroad had already grown from 10,664 in 2014 to 23,596 in 2024, a 121 percent increase.

The consequences surfaced in Cambodia. After reports of deaths in captivity in October 2025, MOFA scrambled to dispatch 40 temporary consular officers to Phnom Penh. The government recently approved a minor amendment to restore—and expand—the previously slashed consular division.

How Other Countries Adapt

Governments elsewhere have moved in the opposite direction. Japan has set a national goal to increase the number of diplomatic personnel from 6,674 in 2024 to 8,000 by 2030, with an emphasis on regional experts and longer-term geographic assignments. According to the Lowy Institute’s 2024 Global Diplomacy Index, Türkiye has recently increased its overseas posts so rapidly that it surpassed Japan and France. India is also enlarging its diplomatic posts as its global role grows.

Several major powers have also institutionalized specialist tracks alongside generalist rotations. Germany’s foreign ministry largely separates headquarters-based policy specialists in the Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) from field-based, operation-heavy diplomats in the Federal Office for Foreign Affairs (BfAA), allowing both to develop distinct competencies. The United States operates a special counsel fellow track for regional experts, and the UK focuses heavily on hiring economic specialists in its foreign service program, separate from generalist diplomats.

A Foreign Policy Without Institutional Muscle

Analysts have long noted that South Korea’s diplomacy swings wildly with domestic political winds, and that bipartisan polarization leads each new administration to reverse or discard its predecessor’s foreign policies, preventing sustained strategies and leaving no consensus on handling key relationships with China, Japan, or North Korea. Some observers question whether Seoul’s diplomacy follows a coherent long-term vision or is simply reactive dealmaking with whichever great power exerts pressure.

In this context, MOFA’s difficulties in retaining talent, cultivating specialists, and incorporating outside expertise may be one factor preventing the ministry from anchoring a consistent line.

To its credit, MOFA has initiated organizational restructuring. In May 2024, it announced the annexation of its Office of Korean Peninsula Policy into a broader Office of Strategy and Intelligence—though the reorganization downgraded the ministry’s only unit specializing in inter-Korean affairs, burying it under a larger office housing three other bureaus. In 2025, MOFA launched an AI Diplomacy Division and signaled interest in external hires.

The ministry is also moving to significantly improve the once-slashed consular division: the official FY2026 budget shows a 6.3% year-on-year increase in funding for working conditions and a 5% increase in capacity-building for overseas mission staff. It also promises to create a subdivision within the current consular division for protecting Korean nationals abroad.

Yet even with recent moves to increase consular staffing after the Cambodia crisis, the overall personnel picture remains stagnant. The ministry’s November budget presentation projected slower growth in ordinary personnel costs, from 4.6 percent in FY2025 to 3.5 percent in FY2026—suggesting little meaningful shift toward a larger or more specialized corps.

During a recent in-flight press conference returning from the G20 summit, President Lee remarked that he felt the need to “reorganize Korea’s foreign-affairs workflow in a much more systematic way,” noting that external relations remain “extremely fragmented.” He had reportedly discussed the matter thoroughly with the foreign minister and national security adviser. Perhaps such reform would position MOFA as a central agency to coordinate the fragmented apparatus. Perhaps it would begin with hiring more diplomats across a wider range of specialties.

After all, Korea’s diplomatic crisis doesn’t begin at the 38th parallel or in the contested West Sea. It begins in the ministry’s own hallways.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: MOFA Building, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made