Yoon's Desperate Power Grab

Yoon is flagrantly abusing his power, and this should be the end of his presidency.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law today:

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared “emergency martial law” on Tuesday evening, accusing the opposition of “antistate” activities for paralyzing the government with impeachment motions.

Yoon’s decision is a desperate, illegitimate move by an extremely unpopular president. He had a 25% approval rating earlier this week, and that seems sure to sink much lower now. The opposition Democratic Party has been causing Yoon some headaches, but then that is what an opposition party does in a democratic system. Accusing them of being “anti-state forces” aligned with North Korea is absurd raving, and it should be dismissed as such.

Yoon is flagrantly abusing his power, and this should be the end of his presidency. Even the head of Yoon’s own People Power Party, Han Dong-hoon, has said that the martial law declaration was wrong. The National Assembly has the power to overturn a martial law declaration, and the members are reportedly already preparing to do that.

This is the first time martial law has been declared in South Korea since the end of the dictatorship almost forty years ago. I assume that there will be widespread opposition and massive protests against Yoon’s declaration, and I expect that there will be overwhelming pressure on Yoon to resign. He has been a terrible president before now, and after this he will have to go.

There were warning signs for years that Yoon was an erratic and authoritarian politician. E. Tammy Kim wrote last year that “Yoon, too, is pushing South Korea in a repressive direction, back to the bad old days of the dictatorship, with no protest from his American partners.” The Biden administration embraced Yoon because they thought that he would be useful to their China containment agenda and because he was willing to curry favor with Japan. They must have thought that they could overlook Yoon’s misconduct at home as long he delivered what they wanted on foreign policy, but it turns out they made a bad bet. As I wrote last year:

The Biden administration has tied itself and its ambitions in East Asia to an erratic, unpopular leader with authoritarian tendencies. That’s probably not going to work out very well for the administration’s plans.

This is an internal South Korean matter, and the U.S. should respect that. Washington should not attempt to lend any support to Yoon to shore him up. No one in Congress or the administration should try to justify Yoon’s power grab. With any luck, the political crisis in Seoul will be over before Trump takes office next month, but we probably aren’t that lucky.