South Korean turmoil undermines U.S. alliance-building in Asia (original) (raw)

SEOUL — For four years, President Joe Biden made South Korea a key partner in his effort to contain China’s growing global influence. But following President Yoon Suk Yeol’s thwarted attempt to declare martial law last month, political chaos in Seoul is calling into question whether the outgoing U.S. president was right to place so much trust in a leader who undermined the democratic stability of his nation, officials and analysts say.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken kicked off his final tour Monday as the top U.S. diplomat in a South Korean capital riven by protests and division. It was an extraordinary visit to a close U.S. ally given the hour-by-hour events unfolding in the capital and questions over the fate of Yoon, who was holed up in the presidential compound resisting attempts to arrest him, as Blinken visited senior leaders elsewhere in the city.

Chants from Yoon’s supporters, who have blocked investigators’ access to their leader, could be heard in the guest rooms of Blinken’s hotel.

By virtue of history, geography and politics, South Korea has been a key U.S. partner in the region for generations. But the country is experiencing its worst political crisis in decades, which began with Yoon’s stunning decision on Dec. 3 to impose the nation’s first martial law declaration in more than 40 years, only to reverse it hours later.

Biden bet heavily on Yoon, hosting him in Washington for a chummy state dinner in 2023 and anointing him host of his third Summit for Democracy, which was held in Seoul in March — only for the Korean leader to deal the most serious challenge to his country’s democracy in more than a generation.

“What sets democracies apart from other systems is precisely how we respond to challenges, including internal challenges,” Blinken told reporters after meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul, adding that he had “serious concerns” about what Yoon had done.

“When we have challenges to our systems, we don’t pretend they don’t exist. We don’t ignore them. We don’t sweep them under the rug. We confront them,” Blinken said. “Sometimes that’s painful, sometimes that’s not pleasant to look at, but it goes to the very strength of our systems.”

Yoon was a conservative leader whose unusual openness to partnership with South Korea’s historical rival Japan offered Washington a chance to build a three-way effort against China and North Korea. But that effort is now in disarray. Yoon gave no warning to the Biden administration before he declared martial law last month, and his subsequent resistance to arrest has further destabilized the nation as it braces for a new approach from President-elect Donald Trump.

“The alliance has been resilient — incredibly resilient — but it’s definitely different right now,” said Jenny Town, director of the Korea program at the Washington-based Stimson Center. “This is a unique case that we haven’t seen before, and I think there are a lot of questions of how this ends.”

With a recent poll showing that Yoon’s popularity has increased since his efforts to resist arrest, Town said, the looming question of Yoon’s fate and the potential changes in South Korean leadership mean Washington is facing an unpredictable partner in Seoul.

Blinken faced unusually sharp questioning on Monday from South Korean reporters, one of whom demanded to know why the Biden administration “was not strong enough” to persuade allies to respect democratic principles after framing global affairs as a confrontation between autocracies and democracies.

U.S. officials have said that they were always aware Yoon could lose power to a less Japan-friendly rival but that they did not expect his short-lived effort to declare martial law — a move that evoked South Korea’s military dictatorship, which ended in 1988.

Yoon was impeached on Dec. 14 because of his martial law declaration. The Constitutional Court, whose role is similar to the U.S. Senate in an American presidential impeachment proceeding, will now decide whether to uphold the impeachment and remove him from office.

Yoon is also under criminal investigation and could be arrested — the first South Korean president to face such a scenario — over his martial law actions. Last week, Yoon’s presidential guards faced off with investigators for more than five hours, eventually forcing them to suspend their efforts to detain him.

Cho, the foreign minister, speaking alongside Blinken, brushed off concerns about Seoul’s standing in the world.

“If you focus just on the vulnerabilities without a magnifying glass, maybe you would feel that you are uncertain about the future of Korea, but I believe that the international community is focusing on the resilience,” he said.

The paralysis that has settled on Seoul impedes Washington’s efforts not only to mount an effective defense against China and North Korea, but also its ability to support Ukraine. Yoon had been willing to dig into his nation’s stockpiles of artillery shells to indirectly support Kyiv’s need for the munitions, which have been in short supply.

Despite the urgent challenges on the world stage, Seoul’s deepening leadership crisis is expected to continue for many months.

The acting president, Choi Sang-mok, whom Blinken also met with on Monday, is the second interim leader to take the helm after Yoon’s impeachment. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who initially took over from Yoon, was himself impeached Dec. 27 amid criticism from the opposition that he was stalling judicial appointments at the Constitutional Court that are needed to continue Yoon’s impeachment process.

Choi is juggling four top leadership positions — including acting president, deputy prime ministerand finance minister — while the won, South Korea’s currency, has plunged to its lowest level in nearly 16 years and the government responds to one of the world’s deadliest airline crashes in years.

Ahead of his meeting with Blinken on Monday, Choi convened a meeting with top officials to assess whether South Korea is prepared for the transition to the Trump administration and a Washington led by a president who is skeptical of defense pacts, including with Seoul.

Choi acknowledged that the instability in his country is hampering its readiness to cooperate with the Trump administration, according to Yonhap News, South Korea’s semiofficial news agency.

Meanwhile, North Korea launched a ballistic missile Monday off its east coast, the South Korean military said. It was Pyongyang’s first ballistic missile test of the year and its first in two months — and served as a reminder of the precarious security environment on the Korean Peninsula during the prolonged leadership vacuum in Seoul.

Yoon’s supporters are looking ahead to Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, seeking to align his efforts to cling to power with Trump’s strategy four years ago to deny the results of an election he lost. At pro-Yoon gatherings, protesters have waved English-language “Stop the Steal” signs and said they are hopeful Trump will rally to their side.

Some of Yoon’s critics, meanwhile, expressed frustration that Washington has done little to criticize the president’s actions.

“We just really haven’t gotten much pushback from the Biden administration for the fact that the ally who they courted and who courted them has gone totally off the reservation,” said Mason Richey, an international relations professor at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

“And that undermines … the foundation of what they say has been so critical for the alliance ever since Biden took over, which is to say that it’s supposed to be based on a set of liberal values,” Richey said.