Since September the rumor had been circulating that President Yoon intended to declare martial law in December. No evidence was provided, and the notion that he would quietly plan months in advance for something that could be justified only as a last-ditch response to a national crisis struck most people as implausible. Needless to say, the rumor turned out to be correct. This leaves us to wonder what on earth Yoon was thinking, and why something that had been in the works for so long should have been handled so ineptly.
Like another careerist and intellectually lazy ex-prosecutor I can think of, Yoon has no firm political principles. We can discount the possibility that a man who served as the pro-North left’s attack dog for years, showing special prejudice toward defense and intelligence officials, is now seriously worried about “North-obeying” forces bringing down the state.
Nevertheless, I have a hard time believing that the defense minister was the driving force behind the fiasco. A former military man himself (unlike the president), Kim Yong-hyun would have known that the average ROK soldier, who in the old days was a hardbitten, class-resentful son of the proletariat or peasantry, is now a university student or graduate trained from childhood to oppose military intervention in politics. This is the last army one could have expected to help impose martial law even if circumstances had called for it, which they didn’t.
In any case the final decision was Yoon’s to make. He is a known drinker, but picking a date well in the future for an irrational action without bothering to prepare for it is behavior suggestive of his other reputed pastime: the consultation, either directly or through his wife, of practitioners of folk religion. If true this would make it the second disastrous decision he has made on such advice, the first having been his refusal to move into the Blue House, the only true republican symbol here that appealed to right and left alike.
It was obvious from the start that a high-functioning Boris Yeltsin in billowing trousers, a directionless man whose idea of centrism was to oscillate between angering the left and angering the right, would have a hard time serving out his term in a country that had recently impeached a much better president. “What demographic,” I asked in 2022, “does he expect to prop up his poll numbers when the candlelight theatrics take off?” The protests will get well and truly underway now, but I can’t talk of theatrics when the case for impeachment is as strong as it is this time.
There will still be plenty of cant to feel nauseated by. Much of it will come from Western journalists who, having spent the past few months calling for more restrictions on online speech (and ignoring Britain and Germany’s slide into soft authoritarianism), will now applaud South Korean democracy for passing “its biggest test” — as the WSJ has already put it.
