The Failure of Yoon's Desperate Power Grab
It’s clear that electing Yoon was a terrible mistake, but with any luck South Korea will not have to live with that mistake for much longer.
More than a week after Yoon’s attempted coup, the South Korean president is digging in his heels and refusing to quit. Yoon is now under investigation for insurrection, and he is under a travel ban so that he cannot leave the country. The disgraced president delivered another speech in which he repeated many of the same deranged claims he made when he declared martial law. He has vowed to “fight to the end.” Yoon’s party shielded him from impeachment last week, but that support has crumbled as more details about the coup have come to light and Yoon refuses to resign:
South Korea’s ruling party has thrown its support behind attempts to impeach embattled President Yoon Suk Yeol over his ill-fated decision to declare martial law that sparked a political crisis and widespread public anger in the country.
It seems likely that the second impeachment attempt will be successful. Yoon cannot continue as president after what he did, and he should be out of office soon. Fortunately, his attempt to smash the opposition with martial law failed and destroyed what remained of his presidency in the process. It’s clear that electing Yoon was a terrible mistake, but with any luck South Korea will not have to live with that mistake for much longer.
The fallout from the attempted coup has been swift. Following his arrest, the former defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun, attempted suicide in jail, but he was stopped from ending his life. There are reports that the former defense minister was attempting to provoke a crisis with North Korea earlier this year to create a pretext for a martial law declaration:
South Korea’s former defence minister Kim Yong-hyun ordered a drone deployment to North Korea to lay the ground for martial law declaration, it has been alleged.
Park Beom-kye, a lawmaker from the main opposition Democratic Party, said on Monday that Mr Kim ordered the deployment of drones to the North Korean capital Pyongyang in October, hoping to instigate a retaliatory attack from the North and use it to justify last week’s martial law declaration.
If true, Yoon and Kim’s plans for a power grab were even more dangerous than we realized last week. It is fortunate that North Korea didn’t take the bait. If they were willing to go that far to create an excuse for a coup it shows that Yoon and his allies threaten both South Korean democracy and stability on the Korean Peninsula. Hardliners often pose more of a threat to the security of their country than anyone else.
Considering how erratic and reckless Yoon has proved to be, it is absurd how closely the U.S. embraced him before now. He has been the lynchpin for the Biden administration’s plans for closer trilateral cooperation between the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, but he was able to do this only by ignoring South Korean public opinion and disregarding his country’s interests. Even if Yoon hadn’t attempted a coup, his foreign policy legacy would have been short-lived.
The U.S. tends to judge the quality of foreign leaders by their willingness to follow Washington’s lead. Because of that, most American policymakers saw Yoon as reliable and solid when he was anything but that. In reality, Yoon proved to be one of the worst elected leaders of an allied country in decades. U.S. policymakers should have been paying closer attention to Yoon’s serious, well-known flaws, and they shouldn’t have invested so much time and effort in someone so inept, authoritarian, and irresponsible. The warning signs were all there, but Washington preferred not to see them because Yoon was saying what hawks wanted to hear.
I read an interesting connect-the-dots supposition that ties Yoon's attempted "coup" to weapons deliveries to Ukraine. South Korea, a major arms exporter, has a very popular (over 80% of the population according to polls), long-standing policy of refusing to supply arms to countries in conflict. Last March, Biden's crew leaned on Yoon to violate that policy by providing desperately needed 155 millimeter artillery shells to Ukraine by using the U.S. as a transit smokescreen (except that the artillery shells were never delivered to the U.S. but rather furnished directly to Ukraine from South Korea). Then out of the blue and according to reports which have never been confirmed by even a scintilla of credible evidence, North Korea deployed tens of thousands of its troops to support Russia. And some of those troops had even engaged in combat with Ukrainian troops. If Yoon had succeeded in his efforts to successfully sell a contrived national security crisis and declared martial law, count on the fact that South Korean arms and artillery would be pouring into Ukraine.
This all carries the stink of a badly executed, boneheaded intelligence operation to arm the Ukrainians at the behest of the U.S. with the knowledge and approval of the U.S./C.I.A.
Four cheers for the people of South Korea! It looks like Yoon and his Defense Minister are going to be held to account for their crimes against the people of South Korea and the reason for this accountability is the insistence of the people of South Korea. Hopefully, Yoon and his Defense Minister will spend the rest of their lives in something equal to a Supermax prison here in the United States. A fate worst than death! Also, hopefully, the South Koreans will cease to be nothing but another military outpost of the United States and seize control of their own destiny. The South Koreans, as intelligent and informed as they are, must be aware of the US government’s at best silent complicity in this attempted coup against their freedoms and sovereignty. The best thing about these hopes is that they are not based on wishful thinking, but rather based upon the courage, integrity, and intelligence of the people of South Korea. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!