In politics, useful decisions are often painful. That is why such decisions are made less and less often. People may need a dentist, but politicians will prescribe a visit to a pastry shop instead. This is the populist stamp of our time.
That is why exceptions are all the more valuable. When a politician says that the state will not buy back unsold rice, he cannot raise the salaries of medical personnel and would not support striking employees in the industrial sector. And he cannot do any of this, because the solution to each of these problems would create three new ones.
This type of politician who refuses has the property of quickly losing power. Like Yun Suk-yeol, the president of South Korea.
Earlier this month, however, when he announced that he would impose martial law in the country, he gave his fellow citizens and the media a great opportunity to channel their accumulated negativity towards him. What has happened since then is well known: after the protests erupted and the lack of support for such a move even among his own cabinet and party, the state of emergency lasted only 6 hours, the parliament subsequently voted to impeach the president, whose fate now depends on the country's Constitutional Court (CC). To be permanently removed from power, at least six of the court's nine-member panel must vote in favor (the issue is that the current composition of the Constitutional Court consists of six members, since the parliament has not yet filled the three vacant seats, which means that all six sitting judges must support the decision to remove Yun Suk-yeol).
Regardless of what the Constitutional Court of South Korea, which in 2017 removed the then conservative President Park Geun-hye, decides, Yun Suk-yeol seems politically doomed. Even before that moment came, the South Korean head of state was already in an unenviable position. The ruling opposition (this is not an oxymoron in South Korea, since the coalition around the opposition Democratic Party has a large majority in Parliament) was firing the president's ministers and obstructing his budget policies; his own party, People Power, had still not recovered from a heavy defeat in the parliamentary elections earlier in the year, and Yun Suk-yeol himself had low support among his fellow citizens. The only vote of confidence he could count on at that point was that of his home parliament, made up of his wife, Kim Geun-hee, their six dogs, and five cats.
But Yun Suk-yeol’s plight did not necessarily correspond to a grim assessment of his term in office. In fact, he accomplished a lot in the short period he had. As president since 2022, he has contributed to strengthening South Korea’s security in its regional context. This happened through three basic vectors of foreign policy activity:
Easing relations with Japan and laying a foundation on which the two countries could develop their cooperation;
Further consolidation of relations with the United States;
Developing partnerships with third countries and regional formats in the Pacific.
Under Yun Suk-yeol's leadership, intelligence exchange between Seoul and Tokyo was resumed. The two capitals also restored their preferential trade status with each other. Steps were also initiated to resolve serious past traumas between the two countries (such as forced labor and sexual exploitation during the long-term occupation of the Korean peninsula by Imperial Japan). South Korea and Japan, together with the United States, conducted two trilateral military exercises this year in international waters between South Korea and Japan (the multi-profile "Freedom Edge" exercises, in which the American aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt also took part). Yun Suk-yeol's logic was the standard one for conservatives in the country: the only thing more unpleasant than the bad past with Japan is the bad future with the communist dictatorship in North Korea. Hence, rational partnership cooperation with Tokyo was perceived as a consolidating factor aimed at countering the danger from Pyongyang. It was North Korea's behavior in recent months and years - the opening of new uranium enrichment facilities, the resumption of intercontinental ballistic missile tests and the strengthening of military cooperation between it and Russia - that gave Yun Suk-yeol arguments to finally cross out the so-called. Sunshine policy and New North Policy (focusing on dialogue and economic relations with North Korea and Russia as a tool for de-escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula), characteristic of progressive administrations in South Korea from Kim Dae-chung to Moon Jae-in.
It was the easing of relations between South Korea and Japan that provided an additional impetus for the further consolidation of cooperation between Seoul and Washington. During the current term of Yoon Suk-yeol, the two countries increased the scope of their partnership in the field of security and defense ("Washington Declaration" from 2023). This led to the deployment of American nuclear-powered submarines (USS Michigan in 2023 and USS Vermont in 2024) on the South Korean coast and the participation of American nuclear bombers B-52 in joint combat exercises with the South Korean armed forces. This year, the new Strategic Command Center created by Seoul was launched, the main goal of which is actually to increase coordination and coherence in operational actions between South Korean conventional forces and US nuclear ones. In purely diplomatic terms, Seoul and Washington are experiencing a convergence of their positions towards North Korea, Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine. And if conservative administrations in Seoul are generally characterized by an emphasis on developing security cooperation with Washington, it was during Yun Suk-yeol's term that this reached new levels. The war in Ukraine, which exposed the deficiencies in the military-industrial complexes of the United States and Europe, however, gave a new perspective to the South Korean-American partnership: if Washington's strategic assets located in East Asia are generally perceived as a guarantor and donor of Seoul's security, then South Korea's booming arms industry has the capacity to redefine these relations, giving them a far less one-way nature.
However, the improvement of relations with Japan and the further development of those with the United States do not exhaust the balance of Yun Suk-yeol's active and effective diplomacy. During his current term, the South Korean president has emphasized his country's relations with both third countries and regional formats.
In terms of individual countries, he has upgraded South Korea's relations with Vietnam to a comprehensive strategic partnership, and those with the Philippines to a strategic partnership (among the memorandums of understanding signed between Seoul and Manila was one concerning the study of the possibility of resuming the Bataan nuclear power plant). Although Indonesia has reduced the volume of its investments in the South Korean KF-21 supersonic fighter project, Jakarta continues to be one of the main importers of products from the South Korean military-industrial sector, namely cooperation in defense and investment was the main focus of Yun Suk-yeol's visit to the Indonesian capital. In terms of regional formats, Seoul has upgraded its cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to a comprehensive strategic partnership and is discussing possible collaboration in the Second Pillar of AUKUS, concerning cooperation in the field of technology and artificial intelligence, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Of course, this diplomatic direction of movement of South Korea has its limit. It stems from the well-known in the relevant literature "Korean paradox", which expresses itself in the fact that its (economic) prosperity depends on China, and its security - on the United States. Two other considerations must be added to this assessment. First, just as South Korea once relied on the United States to contain Japan, so today Seoul expects China to "hit the brakes" on Pyongyang. Second, due to already hinted circumstances of a historical nature, Japan provides not only opportunities but also risks for South Korea. All of this helps us understand why it is more difficult for Seoul to find itself in the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, composed of the US, Australia, Japan and India) or the Squad (the quadrilateral "squad" of the US, Australia, Japan and the Philippines), each of which forums has an anti-China basis. However, in theory and in practice, South Korea shares the priorities of all the countries mentioned in ensuring free supply and communication lines and respecting the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in international and territorial waters.
When Yun Suk-yeol attempted to impose martial law in the country at the beginning of the month - citing the North Korean threat and the deconstructive behavior of the opposition - he caused an extraordinary uproar and met with a consolidated resistance. Resignations were flying around him, including a failed suicide attempt, and civil protests, the opposition and the media were buzzing in unison. "What does he think he is doing? "Well, he's a president, not an emperor," exclaimed a South Korean journalist on the night of the events in question. In fact, their feelings were shared - they didn't like Yun Suk-yeol, and Yun Suk-yeol didn't like the protests, the opposition, and the media. You don't have to be an emperor to do the latter.
But even though his political fate seemed sealed, Yun Suk-yeol raised South Korea's regional status and made it better prepared to face the challenges of tomorrow. Because, as the South Korean proverb goes, even if you behead a rooster, it will still rise. But before he ended up on the chopping block with his neck outstretched, Yun Suk-yeol made sure that his fellow citizens could greet the dawn more confidently.