In South Korea, it is considered to be a curse, rather than a blessing, to suggest to someone that their child could grow up to become president one day. To see why, just look at their track record. Rhee Syngman was forced into exile after a “color revolution,” Park Chung-Hee was assassinated, Yun Po-Sun and Choi Kyu-Hah were ousted in coups, Roh Moo-Hyun was impeached and later committed suicide, Chun Doo-Hwan, Roh Tae-Woo, Lee Myung-Bak, and Park Geun-Hye all ended up in prison, while Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae-Jung had both been incarcerated before they were elected to the presidency. Their most recent president, Moon Jae-In is no doubt nervously wondering about his own future.
Eight years ago this very week, on December 9, 2016, conservative President Park Geun-Hye, the daughter of former South Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee, was impeached following public outrage over a bizarre corruption scandal involving a cult leader known as the “Korean Rasputin.” A million Koreans took to the streets in protest, demanding her removal from office, a feat which was finally accomplished in March 2017. According to South Korean law, when the president is removed from office, a new election must be held within 60 days. That election, in May 2017, led to progressive leader Moon Jae-In taking the reins of power.
Park was a hawk when it came to dealing with North Korea, often speaking of the potential of a “unification jackpot” in which South Korean industry would win big from gaining access to the natural resources that are found in abundance in North Korea, including an estimated two-thirds of all rare earth minerals in the entire world!
By contrast, her replacement, Moon, was pro-engagement and sought peaceful coexistence with their compatriots to the North, creating a radically different geopolitical environment on the peninsula beginning in Spring 2017.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Donald Trump was elected president for the first time in November 2016, just a month before Park’s impeachment, and Moon’s rise to the presidency came just a few months after Trump took office.
Seeing himself as the ultimate dealmaker, Trump seized the opportunity provided by the presence of a pro-peace South Korean administration and became the first President to engage in direct talks with a sitting North Korean leader in 2018, and I was there as part of Dennis Rodman’s entourage.
While the summits Moon and Trump had with Chairman Kim Jong Un did not lead to any major substantive accomplishments, they were an important first step toward peace. Had it not been for the COVID-19 pandemic, things might have moved in a different trajectory, but with the DPRK hermetically sealed from 2020-2023, and Trump preoccupied with the pandemic in the last year of his first term, there was no chance to follow up on those first steps in a constructive manner.
The strange events of the past few days in Seoul may be lightning striking twice, as South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol may have just committed political suicide by suddenly declaring martial law at 11 PM on Tuesday night. By Wednesday, the opposition parties, which control the National Assembly by a wide margin, filed a motion to impeach Yoon, almost eight years to the day after Park Geun-Hye was impeached and exactly one month after Donald Trump was again elected President of the United States.
If Yoon were to be replaced in early 2025, rather than when his official term ends in 2027, it is probable that his replacement would be from the opposition party that favors engagement with the North and a ratcheting down of military tension on the peninsula. This could pave the way for Trump to engage with the North Koreans in a more favorable geopolitical situation than exists at the moment.
Of course, this is all speculation, but South Koreans certainly have put the ‘Z’ in “democraZy” over the past few decades, and there is no reason to believe they will be any more predictable this time around.
Imagine for a moment that when confronted with Congressional threats to shutdown the US government by failing to pass his requested budget in a timely manner (an annual tradition when Congress and the President are from different parties), an unpopular sitting American president declared martial law, sent the military to occupy Capitol Hill, to prevent Congress from working, banned all political activity, and put the press under military control. That would make January 6th seem like a tailgating party by comparison.
And yet, that is essentially what happened in Seoul on December 3rd, when South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol suddenly declared martial law, claiming to protect the nation by eradicating “shameless pro-North anti-state forces,” and “North Korean sympathizers,” presumably referring to members of the opposition party who control the National Assembly, and had blocked his recent budget requests repeatedly.
Before military troops could reach the National Assembly to shut down its activities, in accordance with the marital law decree, a quorum of members made it to the assembly, and voted 190 – 0 to rescind the martial law declaration, as permitted under South Korean law.
Given that even his own party voted unanimously against his decree, he was forced to lift martial law after only six hours. Since Wednesday morning, there have been widespread calls for his resignation, impeachment, and even imprisonment all over the country.
An increasingly unpopular president, Yoon-Suk-Yeol, has seen his popularity with the public plummet since he took office in 2022, to a low of 17% in November. He was already so unpopular at the time of elections for the National Assembly that his party only managed to take 108 of the 300 seats, giving the opposition the ability to block any proposed legislation – what Americans refer to as “gridlock,” forcing him to compromise with them to get anything done, something he has been unwilling to do, and which he tried to circumvent with his declaration of martial law on Tuesday night.
Why was he so unpopular? On foreign policy, his hawkish policies on North Korea, his unpopular efforts to tighten a military alliance with their former colonial master, Japan, and his eagerness to send weapons systems to Ukraine to counter North Korean support to Russia were extremely unpopular.
On the domestic front, while Western countries have been toying with the idea of a four-day work week, he tried to raise the maximum work week from 52 to 69 hours, as a “family-friendly” policy. He almost doubled the number of students being accepted to medical school, leading to mass resignations and strikes by doctors. Adding fuel to the fire have been significant complaints about how his government handled the 2022 Halloween stampede that led to 159 untimely deaths in Itaewon, all as Yoon and his wife are fighting scandals related to corruption and influence-peddling.
Yoon has also been accused of undermining Korean democracy and flirting with authoritarianism. And Tuesday night, that flirtation finally went all the way with the declaration of martial law, in what seems to have been an emotional last-ditch effort to save his floundering presidency which seems to have backfired spectacularly.
Just hours before the proverbial shit hit the fan in Seoul, an Op-Ed I wrote about the potential for Trump to restart dialog with Kim Jong Un appeared on this very website. Despite the optimism in that article, my biggest worries were that Yoon’s administration would try to block any substantive moves toward engagement until his term ended in 2027, and that a negotiated lasting peace in Ukraine was a prerequisite for meaningful change.
In terms of North Korea policy, Yoon Suk-Yeol’s presidency marked a return to the confrontational policies that existed prior to 2017, under the Park Geun-Hye regime. While US-ROK Joint military exercises were suspended during the Trump/Moon era, in August 2022, they restarted with “the biggest military drills in years.” His military chief then declared that the military posture of the South would focus on “sending a fatal blow to the enemy” using their KMPR (Korean Massive Punishment and Retaliation) strategy, which includes personally targeting and eliminating the leaders of the DPRK. He further declared that the DPRK was the principal enemy of the ROK, and that unification would be pursued with the goal of a unified, free, and democratic “Republic of Korea”, (통일대한민국). His use of the official South Korean name for the country makes no bones of the fact that he wants unification by absorption.
The move from the peaceful engagement strategy of Moon to Yoon’s focus on decapitation of the leadership and absorption of the North within the ROK precipitated dramatic changes in North Korean policy, leading Kim Jong Un to declare that as of January 2024, the DPRK was no longer interested in unification with the South (in other words, he said the quiet part out loud.).
In a speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly on January 16, 2024, he said, “Today, the Supreme People’s Assembly put an end to the nearly 80-year history of North-South relations, and newly codified our Republic’s policy toward the South on the basis of recognizing the two countries coexisting on the Korean Peninsula… the final conclusion given by the bitter history of North-South relations is that we cannot walk the path to national revival and reunification with the people of the Republic of Korea who dream of ‘collapse of the regime’ and ‘unification through absorption’ while pursuing an all-out confrontation with our republic as a national policy.”
He added, “If you take a hard look at the special environment where our biggest enemy, the so-called Republic of Korea is our nearest neighbor, and the reality that the local situation is increasingly unstable due to the intensified military tensions under leadership of the Americans, the risk of war as a result of the escalation of a physical conflict has increased to a dangerous level.”
While Western media took this to be a highly aggressive change of policy by Kim Jong-Un, it was reactive (and almost equal and opposite) to the aggressive moves the Yoon administration had taken toward inter-Korean relations. Obviously, the DPRK does not wish to be absorbed into South Korea any more than the ROK wants to become controlled by Pyongyang.
Even beyond the peninsula, the geopolitical landscape is much different than it was in 2017, as the alliance between the DPRK and Russia has developed to a whole new level, with DPRK soldiers deployed to the Kursk region of the Russian Federation potentially to engage in conflict alongside the Russians as they try to reclaim occupied territories in the region from Ukrainian control. Until the Ukraine war ends with a negotiated and lasting settlement, it is hard to see how much progress can be made.
In the past, Russia tried to help catalyze US – DPRK negotiations, but in the current environment, it seems unlikely that will be the case, as Russia knows the US would likely pressure the DPRK to break its newly solidified alliance with the Russians in any such negotiations. On the other hand, China would probably pick up some of the slack as while they have little influence over the DPRK, they would prefer to diffuse tensions on the Korean peninsula, and they fully realize some sort of détente with the US is key to getting there.
Donald Trump, however, repeatedly claims that he will be able to end the Ukraine war in the first 24 hours of his second term. Assuming he somehow manages to build peace in Ukraine even within the first six months of his term (granting him some poetic license), that would help open the door for constructive re-engagement with Kim Jong Un.
It is an ironic twist of fate, that exactly eight years after Park Geun-Hye’s impeachment paved the way for the Trump-Kim bromance of 2018 and 2019, that there is a possibility for history to repeat itself, just as Trump is preparing to return to office for a second time. For Trump, this would be equivalent to lightning striking twice, giving him a second chance at peacebuilding with a potentially cooperative South Korean counterpart. Let’s hope Trump will seize the moment and take advantage of this serendipity to get back to his unfinished business with renewed vigor!
Joseph D. Terwilliger is Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where his research focuses on natural experiments in human genetic epidemiology. He is also active in science and sports diplomacy, having taught genetics at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, and accompanied Dennis Rodman on six “basketball diplomacy” trips to Asia since 2013.
