of Confusion over impeached South Korean President Yun Seok-YeolThis is deeply disillusioning U.S. officials and think tank influencers who thought South Korea and Washington had a famous relationship. When Mr. Yun declared martial law on December 3, and when Congress rejected martial law and then impeached President Yun with four votes exceeding the required two-thirds of the 300 members, Americans also I was just as shocked as the Koreans.
South Korea's Constitutional Court could approve or disapprove the impeachment, potentially removing Yoon from office or restoring the powers he lost in the impeachment. inspire scenarios From civil war to business as usual.
The State Department and the Pentagon hope that the Korean crisis will subside so that the Korea-US alliance remains intact. The bond is at stake, There is no possibility of reconciliation between Yun's conservative People's Power Party (PPP) and the leftist Minju (Democratic Party). The Democratic Party, a powerful force in the National Assembly, took the lead in impeaching Yun and is currently pressuring the deeply wounded PPP government and the courts to punish him. his enemy I want him in jail The Seoul District Court issued a warrant for his arrest on the orders of the High-Level Corruption Investigation Bureau, citing “riot''.
But executing the warrant was another matter. The first thing the investigator had to do was Infringing on thousands of Yoon's supporters And once they entered Mr. Yun's compound, his security guards refused to let them near him. At first, the investigators gave up and left, only to decide to come back in the harbingers of long-term social unrest. Finally, after police refused to cooperate with executing the warrant, investigators obtained another warrant as Mr. Yoon stood still. All this as Antony Blinken Strengthen US-South Korea relations On his last overseas trip as Secretary of State, he met with leaders of both countries.
The gravest fear in Washington is that the crisis will get worse. The worst-case scenario would be for hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets and civil war to erupt in Seoul and other cities while the courts delay their impeachment decision. Six of the court's nine judges must support the impeachment charge that would permanently disqualify Yoon from office. While the court takes up the impeachment motion, 3 out of 9 seats were empty.. Only a simple majority of Congress was needed to impeach Prime Minister Han Do-soo, the former ambassador to the United States and acting president, who automatically took over from Yoon, but the Min-ju-led Congress has allowed Yoon to pass all three elected officials. He was immediately impeached because he refused to approve.
Armed with impeachment, the Min-ju-led majority was hardly appeased even after Vice Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok, the new acting president and finance minister, accepted this. 2 out of 3 people Minju's choices in court. Democratic leaders, along with other ministers, have threatened to impeach Choi, seriously disrupting the normal functioning of the government.
Amid the swirling conflict, there is no prospect of reconciliation between the left and the right. Assuming Minju's supporters never accept an unfavorable judicial outcome, their supposedly nonviolent “candlelight vigil” devolves into violence fueled by extremists in a deeply divided society. There is a good chance that it will.
For U.S. officials, the fight to impeach Yoon marks the end of a painstaking effort to overturn the anti-Americanism of former President Moon Jae-in, a leftist who dreamed of reconciliation with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. President Moon had clung to that illusion ever since he met with Kim at Panmunjom in April 2018, two months before Trump and Kim met. held their historic summit In Singapore.
After Trump took office, Moon continued to envision a deal with North Korea even though Kim refused to meet him. I walked away from the top for the second time. During a meeting with Kim in Hanoi in February 2019, Kim refused to agree to halt production of nuclear warheads. President Moon's hopes for inter-Korean reconciliation were in vain, and he put the U.S.-South Korea alliance in jeopardy by blocking joint exercises between the U.S. and South Korean militaries. American defense strategists were overjoyed when Yoon, who narrowly defeated Minju leader Lee Jae-yong in 2022, said this. Supported a large-scale US-Korea war game. However, with Yoon's impeachment, that vision disappeared.
The US returns to its usual cliché and insists that the ties between the US and South Korea remain.ironclad,But allies fear it will never resume the types of exercises deemed essential for defense training against North Korea.
The “trilateral” cooperation that President Biden cultivated when he invited Prime Minister Yoon and then-Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to meet at Camp David in August 2023, laying the foundation for permanent ties between the three countries, is also in jeopardy. It's on the verge of death. so-called Camp David Spirit Despite the legacy of Japan's colonial rule over the entire Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, it injected something resembling a de facto Triple Alliance.
No one remembers Camp David these days.
Rather, it gives the impression that Americans support whoever is acting president and hope that the Democratic Party does not continue to oust government leaders one after another. fear of “Candlelight Vigil” There are concerns that the outbreak of violence could divert the military and police from defending North Korea, as they did before the 1987 democracy movement that led to presidential elections every five years. The resulting large-scale protests impeachment, expulsion, imprisonment Park Geun-hye, daughter of long-term dictator Park Chung-hee, in 2017. assassinated in 1979 It was mostly peaceful.
But this time may be different, as conservatives are tired of Democrats' relentless efforts to rein in government. Minju, led by Lee Jae-myung, former mayor of Seongnam city in southern Seoul and former governor of Gyeonggi province, surrounds the capital.promises to recoup much of the gains achieved The first two and a half years of the Yun administration. If the Constitutional Court approves Yoon's impeachment, South Koreans will vote for a new president in a snap general election 60 days later. Lee will almost certainly run again, avoiding charges he faces in a real estate and financial scandal.
President Moon could be expected to revive his search for an agreement with North Korea, and Mr. Lee would block U.S.-South Korea joint exercises while seeking an “end of war” agreement, if not a peace treaty. .Alternative to the Korean War Armistice Agreement. Of course, North Korea's Kim Jong-un will stick to his demands for an end to the US-South Korea alliance and the withdrawal of 28,500 US troops, while refusing to give up his valuable nuclear and missile assets.
However, this worst-case scenario doesn't have to happen. Mr. Trump, who is now the next president, he indicated that he wanted to speak again Kim, who has publicly announced that they are not on good terms. “in love” At the Singapore summit. He has made it clear that he may be willing to withdraw U.S. troops while demanding that South Korea pay far more than $1.10. An annual amount of $1 billion was agreed to be shared in the US defense budget in 2025.
If Lee becomes president, he may want to maintain close ties with the United States for mutual benefits ranging from economic to cultural to military. In Washington, You will feel relieved when things return to normal. No matter who is in charge of Soul. The current crisis is a nightmare from which Americans hope to wake up and discover that the alliance has been around since at least the Korean War.
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflicts 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 on Asian affairs.
