The warmth of Korean American relations during the era of President Yoon Suk Yeol has always been a little too good to be true.
Everything seemed to be going so well as American and South Korean troops conducted joint exercises and President Biden got Yoon and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to clasp hands last year in “tripartite” ecstasy at Camp David. But now, suddenly and without warning, we’re thrust into a new era, with Yoon declaring martial law for the first time in almost 50 years.
Yoon’s demise would not be exactly the equivalent of a war, but the shock of his imposition of martial law, and then his almost immediate reversal of that decision, caught everyone totally by surprise. Some intelligence agents claim to have had a sense of what was coming, but, if so, they neglected to pass the word to the ambassador, Philip Goldberg, or the commander of American forces in Korea, Gen. Paul LaCamera.
American officialdom is falling back on familiar cliches. The alliance, they persist in saying, is “ironclad,” and of course “there’s no daylight between us.” But we know those expressions of solidarity are open to question and confusion. Another word bandied about by Americans is “resilience,” for the Korean capacity to stick together and move on through the miasma of political conflict, protests, unrest and uncertainty about where the country is going.
Where was the CIA, the know-it-alls who so often are caught knowing very little? Somehow it often seems that way through modern Korean history. The odd expert may claim to have read or heard that some American advisers in South Korea saw the North Korean invasion coming in June 1950, and others, with perfect 20-20 hindsight, swear they knew the Chinese were pouring into the upper reaches of North Korea five months later. But certainly Gen. MacArthur had no idea.
The problem is not just that Yoon has been unpopular. He was elected in 2022 as an antidote to a left-leaning president, Moon Jae-in, who had also been unpopular — and who came out looking like an idiot in his attempts to get along with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
That wasn’t entirely Moon’s fault; he had thought he would be immortalized as the leader who brought the two Koreas back together after he met with Kim in Pyongyang in April 2018. This was a full two months before Donald Trump, in the most publicized event of his first presidency, consorted with Kim in Singapore — the beginning of a bromance that may or may not have stood the test of time.
Trump’s walkout from the second summit with Kim, in Hanoi in February 2019, doomed Moon’s presidency. Kim showed how little he thought of this inferior nuisance from the South by steadfastly ignoring him, refusing to see him again. Kim had never cared about Moon. He was sure he had to get through to Trump for the deal that would legitimize his nuclear program and demonstrate his superiority over the entire peninsula, even if he was not about to open a second Korean War just to prove the point.
Yoon, after defeating the next leader of the Minjoo (or Democratic Party), has not been so bad a president. His greatest success has been resuscitating the military relationship with the U.S. Moon had done his best to destroy it, blocking joint field exercises with American troops, snubbing senior American officers, all in the belief that Kim would see him again if he just demonstrated his independence from Washington. It didn’t work.
In this political season, the problem is the Minjoo leader, Lee Jae-myung, whom Yoon defeated by less than 1 point in the 2022 election. He is accused of numerous crimes while amassing a fortune in real estate and construction while mayor of Seongnam, a bustling city just south of Seoul, and he has been convicted and given a suspended sentence for making false statements while losing his first campaign for presidency. He is likely to run again — quite soon, if Yoon is forced out of the job.
The uproar at the top of a system the Americans thought they had firmly on their side raises familiar qualms. No way can Washington feel comfortable about dealing with the likes of Lee. We already bow and curtsy before too many corrupt leaders. Will Washington’s diplomatic tastemakers now be prostrating themselves before Lee, overlooking the widespread view that he should be going to prison, not to the heights of power?
In Yoon, Americans believed they had their man. In the absence of Yoon, it will take all the skills of the best diplomatic double-talkers and mealy mouths to perpetuate a bond that’s gone through innumerable ups and downs since President Harry Truman came to the rescue of the South in the Korean War.
Just think of the problems of the 18 years and five months of the presidency of Park Chung-hee, whose assassination in 1979 led to the rise of another general, Chun Doo-hwan, who perpetuated dictatorial rule by proclaiming martial law and ordering troops into Gwangju, the southwestern city that remains the hotbed of anti-government sentiment, putting down an uprising at the cost of approximately 200 lives. And then there were the weeks of vigils in central Seoul, hundreds of thousands hefting electronic candles in paper cups, demanding the demise of Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, ousted, impeached and jailed in 2017.
It’s a safe bet the special relationship between Washington and Seoul will endure, shaken but too deeply embedded in the society to fragment. With Trump in the White House, though, you never know. His calls for Korea to ante up as much as ten times the billion dollars a year that it’s paying for American troops and bases to defend the South are viewed with alarm by all sides in Seoul. And what if, precipitously, he ordered the withdrawal of American troops, now about 28,500, most of them headquartered at America’s biggest overseas base at Camp Humphreys, 40 miles below Seoul?
The deep divisions in the South all play into the hands of North Korea. Kim Jong Un, having totally cut off any prospect of dialogue with Yoon, declaring the South “the enemy,” is now watching silently. He may want to talk again to Trump, and he might conceivably be open to communication with Seoul, but he will insist on no one’s terms but his own.
Whoever leads the South, Kim can only gain strength from the ruckus, knowing that he has both Russia and China on his side, waiting for the time when he can reunite the entire peninsula.
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.
