South Korea’s warning to Washington

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A right-wing would-be authoritarian president – a leader who attacks the press, who is accused of abusing power for personal gain, who uses his power to block investigations into his family’s possible corruption, who hopes to stay in office to become one To avoid prison time and who only appears to have plans for a plan to deal with inflation and public health in his country – declared martial law today.

This is not a dystopian fever dream of what might soon happen in the United States, but a rapidly unfolding crisis in South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol is threatening his country with a hastily carried out, surprise takeover of power under the pretext of a non More detailed situation shocked military threat from North Korea and enemies within. Late Tuesday night in Seoul, Yoon released a statement calling the country’s National Assembly a “den of criminals” and claiming it was undermining governance. Martial law was necessary, Yoon claimed, to “stop the anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people.”

Within hours, protests erupted around the assembly building, and lawmakers there voted unanimously to lift Yoon’s declaration of martial law. Clashes between protesters and law enforcement have continued since the announcement, and demonstrations demanding Yoon’s resignation are likely to continue to grow.

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“I think Yoon is done,” Karl Friedhoff, a Korea expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told me. “In his mind he may have imagined this as a power grab, but this was more about pure incompetence.”

Korea’s civil society is strong and mass protests have long been a characteristic element of its political culture. “If you were in Korea and didn’t see a protest, you weren’t really in Korea,” Friedhoff quipped.

Since South Korea’s April 2024 general election, in which his party suffered devastating losses, Yoon has essentially been a lame-duck leader. Like many established companies, Yoon faced the global headwinds of high inflation. Still, much of his unpopularity was his own fault. One of Yoon’s top power brokers was allegedly paid to ensure that a specific candidate would be selected for his party’s nomination for a parliamentary seat; That scandal also linked the first lady to allegations of election interference and has dominated headlines in recent weeks as potentially suspicious audio recordings of Yoon’s phone conversations were leaked. Yoon has used his power to block investigations into his family’s alleged scandals. Together with the perceived mismanagement of public services and the economy, these scandals have destroyed Yoon’s popularity; A recent poll showed his approval rating at just 19 percent.

South Korea is the world’s 12th largest economy and, alongside Japan, the most important democracy in East Asia. But it is also a comparatively young democracy, emerging from authoritarian rule only in the summer of 1987 following the popular uprising known as the June Democratic Struggle. This is important because martial law is not an abstract concept for older Koreans, but rather a vivid reminder of the country’s not-long dictatorial past. The last South Korean coup took place in 1980, after a general declared an expanded version of martial law and became president. At that time, the popular backlash was suppressed. Authoritarianism continued for another eight years. (Many Korea experts and political science indices did not count the Republic of Korea as a fully consolidated democracy until 2002.)

Since then, South Korea’s democracy has made significant progress and is hailed as one of the greatest anti-authoritarian success stories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, it is still fragile and the country’s institutions have been showing signs of stress for some time. The stressors may seem familiar to Americans despite a very different context. Gi-Wook Shin, a professor of contemporary Korea at Stanford University, wrote in 2020 that the country is facing a “democratic depression” in which “opponents are demonized, democratic norms are eroded, and political life is becoming increasingly polarized.” Instead of trying to ease tensions, politicians instead appealed to “chauvinistic nationalism.” (Unlike in the United States, however, two of South Korea’s living former presidents who broke the law actually served time in prison before being pardoned.)

Yoon’s takeover is likely to fail. But declaring martial law – even for just a few hours – does lasting damage to democratic norms. One of the basic principles of democratic governance is civilian rule, which stipulates that the military provides security but plays no role in political governance. Democracies collapse when this barrier is removed, for example when a coup takes place. But even failed coups or failed attempts to declare martial law can break the civil-military barrier. They remind everyone within the political system that one person – a power-hungry politician or a self-interested general – can destroy decades of progress in an instant. Establishing the norm that the military is outside of politics requires years of good behavior, both from those in military uniform and those in suits. All it takes to destroy it is a single wrong decision.

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The recent unrest in South Korea also illustrates what the late political scientist Juan Linz called the “dangers of presidentialism.” Linz argued that democratic experiments tend to fail when they allow executive power to rest with a president rather than a prime minister under parliamentary coercion. Linz warned in 1990: “Relying heavily on the personal qualities of a political leader – on the virtue of a statesman, if you will – is a risky path, because you never know whether such a man can be found to fill the presidency .” Office.” At the time, Linz pointed out one conspicuous exception: the USA.

President Yoon’s seemingly failed attempt to consolidate power under martial law is a cautionary tale for Washington on the eve of a second Trump administration. Sometimes incompetent authoritarians botch plans to seize power. They are still damaging democratic institutions and norms. And sometimes the seizure of power succeeds – because presidential democracy is not protected by constitutions written with magic ink. Rather, it can overcome its moments of greatest danger through the actions of courageous people who value ideals over power. As Linz warned, such people are not always available in sufficient numbers.