South Korea’s Warning for Washington
5 min read
A right-wing wannabe authoritarian president—a leader who attacks the press, is accused of abusing power for personal gain, uses his power to block investigations into his family’s potential corruption, hopes to stay in office to avoid heading to prison, and only seems to have concepts of a plan to address his nation’s inflation and health care—declared martial law earlier today.
This is not a dystopian fever dream for what may soon come to pass in the United States, but instead a rapidly unfolding crisis in South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol shocked his nation with a hastily executed surprise power grab under the pretext of an unspecified military threat from North Korea and enemies within. Late Tuesday evening in Seoul, Yoon issued a statement calling the country’s National Assembly a “den of criminals” and claiming that it was undermining governance. Martial law was needed, Yoon claimed, to stop the “anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people.”
Within hours, protests broke out around the assembly building, and the lawmakers within it unanimously voted to overturn Yoon’s martial-law declaration. Clashes between protesters and law enforcement have continued since the announcement, and the demonstrations are likely to keep growing, demanding Yoon’s resignation.
“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 sheer incompetence.”
Korea’s civil society is strong, and mass protests have long been a signature element of its political culture. “If you’ve been to Korea and haven’t seen a protest, you haven’t really been to Korea,” Friedhoff quipped.
Yoon essentially has been a lame-duck leader since South Korea’s April 2024 legislative elections, in which his party suffered devastating losses. Like many incumbents, Yoon faced the global headwind of high inflation. Yet much of his unpopularity was of his own making. One of Yoon’s top power brokers was allegedly paid to ensure that a certain candidate would be selected for their party’s nomination to a legislative seat; this scandal also linked the first lady to allegations of election interference and dominated headlines in recent weeks as potentially implicating audio from Yoon’s phone calls leaked to the public. Yoon has used his power to block investigations into his family’s alleged scandals. Along with perceived mismanagement of public services and the economy, these scandals have devastated Yoon’s popularity; a recent poll found his approval at just 19 percent.
South Korea is the 12th-largest economy in the world and, aside from Japan, the most important democracy in East Asia. But it is also a comparatively young democracy, having emerged from authoritarian rule only in the summer of 1987, after the popular uprising known as the “June Democratic Struggle.” This matters because martial law is not an abstract concept to older Koreans, so much as it evokes a vivid memory of the country’s not-so-distant dictatorial past. The last South Korean coup d’état took place in 1980, after a general declared an expanded version of martial law and became president. That time, the popular backlash was crushed. Authoritarianism persisted for another eight years. (Many Korea experts and political-science indexes don’t count the Republic of Korea as a fully consolidated democracy until 2002.)
Since then, South Korea’s democracy has made significant progress and been hailed as one of the biggest antiauthoritarian success stories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It’s still fragile, however, and the country’s institutions have been showing signs of stress for some time. The stressors may sound 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 was facing a “democratic depression,” in which “opponents are demonized, democratic norms are eroded, and political life grows ever more polarized.” Politicians, rather than trying to cool tensions, have 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 they were pardoned.)
Yoon’s power grab seems likely to fail. But invoking martial law—even for a few hours—does lasting damage to democratic norms. One of the core principles of democratic governance is civilian rule, which stipulates that the military provides security but has no role in political governance. Democracies collapse when that barrier is removed, such as when a coup d’état takes place. But even failed coups or failed attempts to execute martial law can crack the civil-military barrier. They remind everyone within the political system that one person—a power-hungry politician or a self-serving general—could destroy decades of progress in an instant. Establishing the norm that the military is outside the scope of politics takes years of good behavior, from those in military fatigues as well as those in suits. Wrecking it can take as little as one misguided decision.
South Korea’s recent turmoil also illustrates what the late political scientist Juan Linz called the “perils of presidentialism.” Linz argued that democratic experiments tend to fail when they allow executive power to reside in a president rather than in a prime minister under parliamentary constraint. Writing in 1990, Linz warned, “Heavy reliance on the personal qualities of a political leader—on the virtue of a statesman, if you will—is a risky course, for one never knows if such a man can be found to fill the presidential office.” At the time, Linz pointed to one conspicuous exception: the United States.
President Yoon’s seemingly failed bid to consolidate power under martial law is a cautionary tale for Washington on the eve of a second Trump administration. Sometimes, incompetent authoritarians botch plots to seize power. They still damage democratic institutions and norms in the process. And sometimes, the power grabs succeed—because presidential democracy is not protected by constitutions written with magical ink. Rather, it can survive its moments of greatest peril through the actions of brave people who cherish ideals more than power. As Linz warned, such people are not always in plentiful supply.
