Can US ties with South Korea survive ongoing chaos on the peninsula?
The turmoil surrounding South Korea’s impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol is bitterly disillusioning to U.S. officials and think-tank influencers who had thought Seoul and Washington were getting along famously. Americans were just as shocked as Koreans when Yoon declared martial law on Dec. 3, as well as when the assembly voted down the martial law decree and then impeached President Yoon by four more votes than the requisite two-thirds of its 300 members.
The prospect of Korea’s constitutional court either approving or disapproving the impeachment, ousting Yoon as president or reinstating him with the authority that he lost with his impeachment, inspires scenarios ranging from civil war to business as usual.
As much as the State Department and Pentagon wish the Korean crisis would calm down enough to ensure the Korea-U.S. alliance emerges unscathed, the bond is in danger, with no chance of reconciliation between Yoon’s conservative People Power Party (PPP) and the left-leaning Minju (or Democratic Party). The Minju, the dominant force in the National Assembly, spearheaded Yoon’s impeachment and now is pressuring the badly scarred PPP regime and the courts to dispose of Yoon. His foes want him imprisoned for “insurrection” — the reason a district court in Seoul issued a warrant for his arrest at the behest of the high-level Corruption Investigation Office.
Serving the warrant, though, was another matter. First the investigators had to breach thousands of Yoon sympathizers blocking the way, and then, once they got into Yoon’s compound, his security people refused to let them near him. Initially, the investigators gave up and left, resolving to come again in a portent of long-term civil unrest. Finally, after the police refused to help serve the warrant, the investigators got another warrant as Yoon stood fast. All this as Antony Blinken, shoring up U.S.-Korean relations in his last foreign foray as secretary of State, met with leaders of both sides.
In Washington, the deepest concern is that the crisis will go from bad to worse. The worst-case scenario would be for civil strife to break out in Seoul and other cities, as hundreds of thousands take to the streets while the court delays ruling on Yoon’s impeachment. Six of the court’s nine judges must uphold the impeachment motion for Yoon to lose his job permanently. As the court took up the impeachment motion, three of its nine seats were vacant. Needing only a simple assembly majority to impeach the acting president, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, a former ambassador to the U.S. who had automatically taken over from Yoon, the Minju-led assembly quickly impeached him after he refused to approve all three selections.
Armed with impeachment as a weapon, the Minju-led majority was hardly appeased after the new acting president, Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok, who serves as the finance minister, accepted two of the three Minju choices for the court. Minju leaders are holding over Choi’s head the threat of also impeaching him, along with other Cabinet ministers, badly crippling the government’s normal functions.
In a spiraling standoff, it is difficult to see any chance of reconciliation between left and right. Assuming that Minju adherents will never accept an adverse judicial outcome, their supposedly non-violent “candlelight vigils” may well erupt into violence fueled by extremists in a deeply divided society.
For official Washington, the battle over Yoon’s impeachment spells the end of painstaking efforts to reverse the anti-Americanism of the previous president, Moon Jae-in, a leftist who dreamed of reconciliation with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. Moon had clung to the fantasy ever since meeting Kim at Panmunjom in April 2018, two months before President Trump and Kim staged their historic summit in Singapore.
Moon persisted in imagining a deal with North Korea even as Kim refused to see him after Trump walked out of his second summit with Kim in Hanoi in February 2019 when Kim refused to agree to stop producing nuclear warheads. In vain hopes for North-South reconciliation, Moon jeopardized the U.S.-Korea alliance by blocking joint exercises of U.S. and South Korean troops. American defense strategists were overjoyed when Yoon, after narrowly defeating Minju leader Lee Jae-young in 2022, endorsed large-scale U.S.-Korean war games. But the vision has vanished with Yoon’s impeachment.
America, falling back on cliches, insists the bond between the U.S. and South Korea remains “ironclad,” but worries the allies will never renew the kind of exercises seen as essential for training for defense against the North.
Also at stake is “trilateral” cooperation fostered by President Biden when he got Yoon and Fumio Kishida, then Japan’s prime minister, to rendezvous at Camp David in August 2023, laying the groundwork for a permanent bond among the three nations. The so-called Spirit of Camp David infused what resembled a de facto three-nation alliance despite the legacy of Japanese colonial rule over the entire Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
These days, no one is harking back to Camp David.
Instead, the Americans give the impression of support for whoever’s the acting president, praying that the Minju will not go on in driving out one government leader after another. The fear of “candlelight vigils” devolving into violence raises the specter of military and police forces diverting from defense against North Korea, as in the era before the democracy movement of 1987 that led to presidential elections every five years. The mass protests that resulted in the impeachment, ouster and jailing in 2017 of Park Geun-hye, daughter of the long-ruling dictator Park Chung-hee, assassinated in 1979 were largely peaceful.
With conservatives fed up with the Minju’s relentless efforts at stifling the government, however, this time may be different. The Minju, led by Lee Jae-myung, former mayor of Seongnam City south of Seoul and former governor of Gyeonggi Province surrounding the capital, promises to undo many of the gains achieved during the first two and a half years of Yoon’s administration. If the constitutional court were to approve Yoon’s impeachment, Koreans would vote for a new president in a snap election 60 days later. Lee, avoiding charges for which he faces trial in real estate and financial scandals, would almost certainly run again.
Reviving Moon’s search for a deal with the North, Lee could be expected to block U.S.-South Korean joint exercises while looking for an “end-of-war” agreement — if not a peace treaty — replacing the Korean War armistice. Of course, the North’s Kim Jong Un would stick to his demands for an end to the U.S.-South Korean alliance and withdrawal of America’s 28,500 troops while refusing to give up his precious nukes and missiles.
This worst-case scenario, however, does not have to happen. Trump, now president-elect, has indicated he would like to talk again to Kim, with whom he professed to have fallen “in love” at their Singapore summit. He has let it be known that he might not be averse to pulling out U.S. troops while demanding the South pay far more than the $1.1. billion a year agreed on as its share of U.S. defense costs in 2025.
It's possible, if Lee were to become president, that he would want to maintain close ties with the U.S. for the sake of mutual interests ranging from economic to cultural as well as military. In Washington, a return to normalcy would come as a relief regardless of who’s in charge in Seoul. The current crisis has been a nightmare from which the Americans would hope to awaken and discover the alliance, at least, endures as it has ever since the Korean War.
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.
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