#WTH: South Korea's disastrous mistake

The flirtation with martial law upends U.S. plans for Asia

It’s tempting to dismiss the brief imposition of martial law in the Republic of Korea as a moment of insanity, quickly defused by rule of law and a return to normalcy. Or, if you’re not someone who typically gives a damn about what happens in Seoul, it’s tempting to move on to something more immediate — an assassination in New York; a pardon in DC (substack coming!); a troubled SecDef nomination. Well, listen up: This attempted coup is a disaster, and not just for South Korea. It will matter to us, sooner rather than later.

Marc and I asked our colleague Zack Cooper to join us and explain the bizarre turn of events in Asia, and he left us profoundly concerned. Listen yourself. Or stick with my Clif Notes.

Long story short, Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, a pro-American conservative, has been at daggers drawn with his opposition-dominated National Assembly for some time. He can’t pass a budget, can’t proceed normally with the nation’s business, and, er, in a fit of frustration, pique, and truly misguided strategery, he declared martial law this week. Worse yet, he discussed this decision with very few colleagues, tried to get the military to shut down the National Assembly to ensure he could not be reversed — as Korean law allows — and generally screwed himself and his allies. Within hours, martial law was reversed unanimously by the legislature, and apparently, the crisis was over.

Except it wasn’t. Yoon’s future in office is far from assured, and with him goes the future of the U.S.-ROK alliance. Who cares, you ask? You do. North Korea is still at war with the South, never having signed an armistice. North Korea’s loony dictator Kim Jong Un is accelerating his nuclear weapons program and apparently traded help in refining that program plus advanced missiles for sending Nork troops to die for Russia in Ukraine.

Then there’s the rapprochement that Yoon has forged with Japan, two critical American allies in Asia who have never managed to reconcile. With him goes a vital entente at the center of U.S. China strategy — a phalanx of American allies capable of facing up to whatever Xi Jinping has planned for the next couple of years. Once the opposition takes over in Seoul, we’ll return to the pro-Communist, anti-American style of governance that characterized South Korean rule last time Donald Trump was in office. And guess what? That means more bad news…

Much as we have had troops in Germany, Italy, and Japan since the conflicts of the 20th century, we have also had troops in South Korea, facing the North and deterring bad behavior. In his first term, Donald Trump was inclined to pull those troops out, disgruntled with South Korea’s investment in its own defense and its burden sharing. What are the odds he decides to keep them there once Seoul flips back to a North Korea-loving capital? Low.

Do we pull out all of our 28,000 troops, Zack asks. Or do we pull out some of those troops, and then listen to Seoul’s requests for the deployment of or development of nuclear weapons on their territory? It’s not dumb: China is accelerating its nuclear program. So is Pyongyang. So is Russia. South Korea is surrounded, and nuclear weapons are a serious deterrent. But then the cat’s out of the bag. If South Korea goes nuclear, what does Japan do? What about Australia?

We’re basically looking at the possibility of nuclear breakout all over Asia. And remember, even if you’re an ardent isolationist, even if you don’t care about the future of Korean democracy, you’re still facing the possibility that the Russian-Chinese-North Korean-Iranian axis is calling the shots by threatening destruction if we don’t accede to their demands. And don’t forget, the bad guys in each of these countries have already proven they are willing to share both nuclear and missile technology with the worst of the worst.

What happens in Seoul doesn’t stay in Seoul. And as we watch our allies around Europe and Asia flail, it’s no solace to think that it is the United States — the incoming Trump administration — that represents the most stable and secure government among our global democratic allies. We need friends, but right now our friends around the world are making a mess of things.

HIGHLIGHTS

What the hell is happening in South Korea?

ZC: Boy, what a crazy 24 hours. So the short version is that the South Korean President, Yoon Suk-Yeol tried to announce martial law, which has a terrible history going back to 1979 when this was last attempted. And the end result I think is that Yoon and maybe the conservatives will get tossed out of power one way or the other. So he may get impeached, he may resign, but either way, he's basically dead in the water. And we can go into the implications of all this for the US, but I'll just say it's bad, it's terrible. It couldn't be worse from an American perspective.

Was this a coup by President Yoon?

ZC: There is a legal mechanism which Yoon Suk-Yeol used, which is that you can declare martial law and then the National Assembly, which is the Korean Parliament, can essentially vote, which they did to reject that declaration. But it appears that Yoon tried to use military forces to prevent the National Assembly from getting there to have the vote. And that looks a lot like a palace coup. Bottom line, it didn't happen. And I think the ROK military broadly was probably against this idea. It doesn't sound like a lot of people were consulted beforehand, but I think everybody is just in shock in Seoul right now. And the implications of this are going to be widespread for years, if not decades, not just in Korea, but in the region.

What was going on leading up to the martial law declaration?

ZC: The Korean president has a five-year term, and Yoon Suk Yeol was barely elected, a razor-thin margin when he won his term. Almost immediately things started to go bad. This is not a guy who's been a career politician, he's not particularly good at politics. He was a prosecutor, and the progressives in Korea have been attacking him left and right and very successfully. So his approval rating has been dropping rapidly down into the twenties. And there has been legislation that he was trying to get through, especially on spending, and that basically failed over the last week. And I just don't understand then why Yoon chose the nuclear option, which has basically destroyed not the progressives as he was hoping, but actually his own conservative party. It is really hard to know.

Was Yoon already in a lot of trouble before this declaration?

ZC: Part of what's tough about Korean politics is that the divisions are so nasty in Korea between the progressives and the conservatives. And for the most part, if you're a Korean leader after you leave office, you end up in jail now. It's not a great place to be. And you get huge public protests pretty frequently against whoever happens to be in power. And so almost every recent Korean government has basically collapsed or struggled over the finish line. Yoon had been in real trouble. He, for a lot of Americans, is actually a pretty great fit. He's very pro-American. He tried to make up with Japan and made a lot of progress on that. He was fairly anti-China, anti-North Korea, and I would say a lot of progressives are not.

And so there were fights over foreign policy. There were also just a huge number of fights over domestic issues. And that's kind of where things broke down last week about spending priorities. And the National Assembly, the Parliament is controlled by the progressives, and so they basically have been blocking everything Yoon wants to do. I think that's why Yoon got so frustrated. But then to go and try and declare martial law that step, what was going on in his head and what it sounds like are two or three people that he consulted about this. I don't think anyone really understands that yet.

What are the biggest implications of this short-lived act?

ZC: Just to focus on foreign policy for the minute. I think that's where the implications are the biggest. Look, so the progressives, what they really want in Korea is to make up with the North. Now, I'm not sure that Kim Jong Un has any interest whatsoever at doing this. He just over the last few months has been blowing up the shared facilities that North Korea and South Korea have. So it is not like he's looking for unification tomorrow. But that is the core foreign policy difference. Or in some ways a domestic difference between the left and the right, which is that the left and Korea really genuinely wants to fix things with the North and they think it's possible, despite the fact that going back what it is, 80 years now, relations between North and South haven't been particularly great.

So I think that's where we're going to see the immediate shift. But it's beyond that. Yoon Suk Yeol wanted to make Korea into what he called a global pivotal state. So they've been helping Ukraine, they've been deepening ties with Europe, they've been improving ties with Japan, all at the expense of the relationships with North Korea, with China, with Russia. I think the progressives are going to come in and try and reverse a lot of that momentum.

How many U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea?

ZC: Theoretically they're 28,500. I think we're actually quite a bit lower than that, but still that's a lot of folks. And I think troop numbers are the first thing I thought about when this all happened because the South Koreans knew that they needed to build a relationship with Trump right after he won. They initially hoped to go to Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower and see him there. But the Trump team said, "Look, we've got this Logan Act. I don't really want to have foreign leaders coming to see me." So they delayed. But Yoon Suk Yeol was perfectly positioned to get along with Trump. Conservative guy, he speaks English, you might remember he did this state visit. And at the White House he actually sang American Pie in English. He's a likable guy. And I've been talking a lot with the Korean government about saying, "Look, Donald Trump, I'm going to be your best friend. You had this terrible progressive guy, Moon Jae-in last time. Now you've got a strong conservative leader. I'm going to stand shoulder to shoulder with you and we can do great things together."

I think Yoon Suk Yeol could have done that. And now you either have him stumbling across the finish line and I don't think people are going to want to touch him with a ten-foot pole. Or you're going to get a progressive coming in who's going to want to reverse all of this stuff that Yoon has done. The result I think, is that you probably have a real push by Trump to rethink whether we should pull troops off the peninsula again, which I think the South Korean government had thought about a lot and probably would've been able to forestall. I think it's back on the table now.

Is the South Korean military strong enough to defend the country itself?

ZC: Look, the South Koreans have a very capable military. So we should acknowledge that right off the top. The reality though is that the North Koreans have all of Seoul within artillery range, which means a huge portion of the South Korean population is undefendable. There's something like six or 7,000 North Korean artillery tubes within range of Seoul, and we're not going to take all of those out immediately. So if a war starts South Korea's capital and a huge portion of this population is at great risk.

If the main threat to South Korea is artillery pointed at the capitol, could an Iron Done system or preemptively destroying some of those launchers protect the country?

ZC: So the Koreans have been really interested in that idea. Could you go almost immediately go after the missile launchers and the artillery sites and combine that with missile defense? The reality is I don't think they're anywhere close to being able to do that now, even though they'd like to be able to do that in the future. So I think that vulnerability stays, but here's the bigger concern that I have. So we have North Korea doing a pretty rapid nuclear buildup. We've got the Chinese doing a very rapid nuclear buildup. We've got the Russians making nuclear threats. The only South Korean response to that is the strength of the US-South Korea Alliance and the extended deterrent that the US provides, which relies on our tripwire forces. Now, maybe we don't need 28,500 troops in Korea to reassure the South Koreans of that tripwire. I don't know what the number is that we would need, but I think that's where the first question is, how many troops do we need to have a reliable tripwire to convince the South Koreans that we're going to be there and convince the North Koreans not to mess with us?

And then second, are the South Koreans capable of fighting primarily a conventional battle on their own? And I am not sure of the answer to that last question. I think they may not be yet.

What would a breakdown of U.S.-Japanese-Korean relations mean for Chinese ambitions in the region?

ZC: I think it's just a disaster from this perspective as well. So the short version is, look, the US has been making real progress. I think this is true under both Biden and Trump, with a bunch of countries in Asia that the Chinese have pushed too hard, and Korea is one of them. So with South Korea, with Japan, with the Philippines, with Australia, with India, there's been a lot of progress recently, but now this seems to be fracturing a little bit. We've got the mess in South Korea. We haven't even talked about this. In the Philippines, the vice president has publicly threatened to kill the president and is now on the verge of prosecution. So that's not great. And so I think you're starting to see some of our long-standing treaty alliances fracture a little bit under these domestic political pressures. And the worry I have is that we're going to end up with really weakened sets of alliances and this coming together of Korea, Japan, for example. I think that's going to go backwards immediately. Why? Because the progressives want to undo everything that Yoon did, and arguably the biggest and best thing he did was the Japan relationship.

What does this mean for the kind of world Donald Trump is stepping into?

ZC: Donald Trump is emerging at basically a time when the United States is completely unchallenged in terms of leadership of the democratic world. Despite all the talk about how somebody else was going to step up. French and the Germans barely have governments. Korea, Japan are in the same spot. Canada, Australia have governments that look like they're going to lose elections soon. Donald Trump is basically the only guy with a stable political situation among the advanced industrial democracies. It's pretty shocking.

How can we get our allies to do more and rely less on the American security umbrella?

ZC: I completely agree that our allies, most of them should be doing more. I guess the question, and this may get tested, is how to get them to do more and whether when you pull away a bit of the security blanket, whether they step up or they step back, and I think some of them may actually step back. My concern with the Korean progressives is that if the US steps back a little bit, they may say, we never like the US anyways. Let's go make friends with the Chinese and the North Koreans and see if we can realign ourselves. So I'm not saying that's going to happen, but I do think that's the risk. So I think that'll be the big debate now in not just Korea obviously, but some parts of Europe too.

What is the future of the conservative movement in South Korea?

ZC: Five years from now, the right will be strong again, because Korean public is never supportive of one party for more than one administration. So the progressives will get their chance to screw stuff up, and then people will hate them and the conservatives will win next time. But I think in the meantime, the danger is that Donald Trump hated the last progressive Korean President Moon Jae-in. He's going to also hate the next Korean progressive. And in fact, I think Trump felt like it was easier to deal with Kim Jong Un than it was to deal with Moon Jae-in, and I think we may be back there in a place where the US is trying to negotiate with the North Koreans having a harder time dealing with the South Koreans than they are dealing with the North. That's the picture here, which I think should make us all pretty worried.

What is the performance of North Korean troops in Russia telling us about the quality of the North Korean army?

ZC: I don't think we know yet the quality of the North Korean troops, but I suspect it doesn't matter because they're going to die either way on the battlefield. The loss rate, as you guys know better than I do, in Ukraine is just terrible. And the reality is that I don't think the North Koreans are really trying to be able to fight South Korea or the US in terms of quality.

Their threat is that they can destroy Seoul with artillery, and now they've got nuclear weapons and they can use those. And oh, by the way, now, because of the new deal they've got with the Russians, maybe the Russians would even come help North Korea if they were in a fight with the South. So I think, for North Korea, they're not trying to really make a lot of progress in Kursk. This is just about getting the Russians on the hook to do whatever North Korea needs when the balloon goes up.

Reportedly there are South Koreans trying to observe pretty carefully how the North Koreans are fighting in Kursk, which I think would be wise for us to do as well. But my guess is they're going to have a pretty hard time on the battlefield, and the Russians are just going to use their bodies to throw them against the Ukrainians for the next couple of months.

What would happen if the U.S. pulled its troops from South Korea?

ZC: I'll give you one potential future. I don't think we're going from 28,500 to zero. I think we're talking about pulling a couple of brigades out, probably, if Trump gets his way this time, which I would think he will. I think the debate in South Korea will be about whether South Korea needs its own nuclear capability, or at least to have four deployed US nuclear weapons permanently stationed on the peninsula, perhaps with some nuclear sharing arrangement with South Korea. So the decrease in the conventional capabilities of the US on the Peninsula could lead the South Koreans maybe to do what Marc is saying and spend a bit more on their military, but also to think about nuclear options in a new way because they just live in a bad world. They're surrounded by the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans all using nuclear options more than they have in the past. And so I think that's one of the first things that folks in Seoul will be thinking about.

Should South Korea develop nuclear missiles?

ZC: I think it is, in some ways, unnatural for South Korea not to have nuclear weapons when the North and the Chinese and the Russians have them if they don't feel confident in the US relationship. And so I think if Donald Trump gets an offer from the South Koreans that is basically asking the US to stay in and Trump pulls forces off and the South Koreans say, "Fine. Well, we'll build nuclear weapons." I think that might be a deal that Trump makes.

What does this mean for nuclear proliferation in Asia?

ZC: I have a project on this next year looking at basically what South Korea, Japan, and maybe even Australia, Dany, might do on the nuclear front. And I think the danger is that you get a proliferation chain. The South Koreans go first because the relationship with Trump will be bad. The Japanese will want to keep up with the South Koreans, and they'll also be worried about the US commitment. The Aussies won't want to be the third leg after South Korea and Japan in terms of their own nuclear assurances. So I'm not saying it's going to happen, but I think this is something we should be talking about a lot more because I think you're right. If the feeling is that the US is a less reliable protector than the logic of getting their own nuclear weapons in a world where other countries are already proliferating and building up their stockpiles, I think it's just the logical next question to ask.

Are we taking adequate advantage of our withdrawal form the INF treaty?

ZC: I think you're exactly right that INF was outdated and constraining us in the Pacific in ways that were really damaging. There has been some progress in trying to forward deploy some of these types of capabilities, but the reality is it's taking a while for them to come online. So I think where we should be focused is conventional capabilities that would have violated the INF Treaty that give us longer range ability, especially to hit China. Now the question is, where do those go? Are they Army or Marine Corps units? There's a lot of issues that still need to be worked through. So I wish I could say that I thought we were making progress as fast as we should be but, to be honest, I think it's been far too slow. And so hopefully when the Trump team comes in, this is one thing that they could come in and say, "Look, we started down this pathway and now we're going to finish it."

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

South Korean president declares martial law; parliament votes it down (Washington Post, Live Updates: December 3, 2024)

South Korea troops try to storm parliament after martial law declared (Reuters, December 3, 2024)

South Korea martial law: Latest updates and live video (Reuters, Live Updates: December 3, 2024)

South Korea Votes to End Martial Law, Hours After President Had Declared the Move (Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2024)

President Yoon’s Speech Declaring Martial Law (New York Times, December 3, 2024)

Why South Korea's president suddenly declared martial law (BBC, December 3, 2024)

South Korea's president denies wrongdoing in growing scandal around him and his wife (NBC News, November 8, 2024)