The Corner
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol answers a reporter’s question during a press conference at the Presidential Office in Seoul, South Korea, November 7, 2024. (Kim Hong-Ji/Pool/Reuters)
Last week I wrote a brief column about the abortive auto-coup in South Korea by President Yoon Suk Yeol, the main thrust of which was, “I have no idea what the hell just happened here and nobody else seems to either.” I remember getting some criticism from readers for having written a piece that “didn’t add to our knowledge of breaking events,” which is exactly why professional opinion writers quickly learn to ignore the desires of their readership. Because as it turns out, nobody could have known just how convoluted and outright insane this story was going to get, or how close we all came to World War III over the past several months. I was well within my rights to write with complete mystification last week because a failed coup in an important allied nation isn’t the sort of thing that should go without comment.
But now, in the aftermath of the coup’s failure, we know much more, and the details will genuinely shock you. This might be the most insane story of 2024 — a year in which, just to remind people, America’s incumbent president suddenly dropped out of his reelection race because of his revealed senility, while his opponent got shot in the head by an attempted assassin, and the Middle East collapsed into regional chaos.
As you will recall, on December 3, Yoon — the leader of South Korea’s right-wing People Power Party (PPP) — attempted an auto-coup, outlawing all political activities by the opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and seizing authoritarian control, with the proffered excuse that this was a necessary emergency act done to protect the country from “North Korean communist forces” and “anti-state forces.” After military police failed to take over the parliament building and arrest the opposition leaders in time to prevent them from forming a quorum and voting the coup down, Yoon simply . . . backed away, said “I’m sorry for the attempted coup, let’s all go to bed,” and the aftermath began to unfold: arrests of complicit high-ranking government ministers, a failed impeachment attempt against Yoon (blocked by his minority party in the parliament), and an inquisition into what happened by the National Assembly’s Defense Committee.
According to testimony from generals and high-ranking officials, Yoon’s preliminary plans for declaring martial law were drawn up as far back as July 2023. This was a year after Yoon took power in an election he won by less than 1 percent and before the PPP got shellacked in the 2024 parliamentary elections (leading to a DPK majority).
And in what can only be described as one of the stupidest and most obscenely irresponsible plans ever dreamed up by a sentient human being, Yoon’s minister of defense Kim Yong-hyun’s big idea was to provoke an attack from North Korea as a pretext for the coup. Yes, you read that right: The South Korean president and his administration sought to kind of, sort of restart the Korean War for political advantage. In October of this year, the South Korean army, acting under Kim’s orders, sent a barrage of drones to infiltrate North Korean airspace, dropping propaganda leaflets over Pyongyang with — again, this sounds so insane that I can barely comprehend it — the idea that North Korea would respond by starting a “limited war” that could be used as a pretext for seizing power.
The reason that this column isn’t a discussion of how World War III began is because Kim Jong-un was too smart to take the bait. (He may be one of the worst human beings on earth, but apparently he is reasonably well advised.) And in the absence of proper external provocation, Yoon and Kim moved on their own — and failed because of incompetent execution as much as anything else.
In response to these revelations, Defense Minister Kim had what I consider to be an eminently sensible reaction: He tried to kill himself in prison yesterday. His attempted suicide was as successful as his attempted coup; that is to say, he remains alive. And South Korea remains stuck with Yoon as its president — his impeachment having been foiled by his own loyalists in parliament, he cannot be removed from office — and to resign would be to forfeit the legal immunities he enjoys while in office. Yoon has proposed to cede all effective power to his prime minister, a solution both unprecedented and completely unconstitutional in South Korean law and one unlikely to be accepted by the opposition in any event. South Korea remains rocked by political chaos the like of which it has not seen since the year before I was born, and normality is nowhere in sight.
Jeffrey Blehar is a National Review staff writer living in Chicago. He is also the co-host of National Review’s Political Beats podcast, which explores the great music of the modern era with guests from the political world happy to find something non-political to talk about. @EsotericCD