Seoul Brothers: Donald Trump and South Korea’s Wannabe Dictator
Late on Tuesday night, Korea Standard Time, Yook Suk Yeol placed one of the world’s most vibrant democracies under martial law. Within six hours, South Korea’s president found his scheme foiled, his political career probably doomed, and his future home not the Yongsan Presidential Building in Seoul but quite possibly a prison cell. Americans can learn from this episode, which provides a playbook on how our next president might try to seize dictatorial powers—and how we can stop him.
Americans think of military coups the same way we think of malaria, as one of the misfortunes afflicting people who reside near the Equator. Nations with a history of military intervention in politics (I’ve lived in a few) don’t always feel like a Costa Gravas movie. Life is often pretty normal. If you’ve ever vacationed in Thailand, there’s a good chance you enjoyed a delightful holiday in such a regime. South Korea was itself under military rule (direct or with a civilian façade) for the first four decades of its existence. But since the late 1980s, it has been a genuine as-good-as-any-out-there democracy. On The Economist’s authoritative Democracy Index, the nation ranks seven spots above the United States.
The South Korean ruler is a right-of-center political neophyte, an anti-woke crusader, and a temperamental loudmouth who likes to encircle himself with corrupt cronies and incompetent sycophants. Frustrated by a legislature that kept impeaching his appointees and bolstered by an accomplice he’d recently appointed as Defense Minister, Yoon decided to bypass politics and grant himself near-imperial powers. When Trump watched this play out on Fox News, he must have viewed it as a how-to guide.
We can, too. In his first term, Trump demanded that his Defense Secretary have soldiers open fire on peaceful protesters, and he’ll never be held accountable for delaying the deployment of troops to control the January 6 insurrection. Since his election last month, Trump’s choice of unqualified retainers to head the Pentagon, Justice Department, and FBI shows that he intends to treat all of America’s security services as his militia. He constantly threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act, an expansively drafted 1792 measure that might permit him to deploy the Army against American citizens. South Korea provides three key lessons for those who don’t want this to happen.
Plan ahead. Yoon failed because he didn’t do his homework. Plotting a coup requires some degree of plotting. It needs specific missions carried out by specific military units. Yoon sent the wrong type of troops (Special Forces) at the wrong time (long after legislators were already in the Assembly building). Countries with experience know how to do it right. In Pakistan, for example, you don’t even think of starting a coup without lining up most Corps commanders; in Indonesia, you need to have the Kostrad (Strategic Reserve) on your side. In the U.S., the most plausible scenario for such a power grab would rely not on SEAL Team VI or the 82nd Airborne Division but on the Washington D.C., Virginia, or Maryland National Guard. Indeed, it was Guard units that (after four hours of still-unexplained delay) eventually ended Trump’s previous coup attempt.
Fortunately, even in the new administration, Democrats can block obvious Trump henchmen from assuming command of key units. Promotion of all flag-rank officers requires Senate confirmation, which is extremely difficult to push through on a partisan basis; last year, a single Republican senator, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, held up 450 promotions directly (and more than 6,000 indirectly) for ten months, solely to protest the Pentagon’s policy on abortion. Trump has already threatened to politicize promotions and purge officers he deems insufficiently subservient. Democrats should not let him do it. They should block all unqualified military assignments (assuming a new command typically requires a promotion). They should pay particular attention to which officers Trump tries to appoint to the National Guard’s chain of command in the District of Columbia and its surrounding states.
Demand courage from legislators. After Yoon declared martial law, 190 members of the National Assembly risked arrest (or far worse) to vote the measure null and void unanimously. This tally included all 18 members of Yoon’s party in attendance. A lesson for Americans: Stop giving one of our parties a free pass on cowardice. The press and the public treat it as natural that Republican lawmakers will rubber-stamp any Trump action. But that’s a description rather than an excuse. Yes, opposing Trump would have electoral consequences—that’s true for every tough political decision. Mavericks like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger should be the norm, not the rare exception. For firefighters and police, courage is a job requirement; why should we expect less from the highest officials in the nation? South Korean legislators, to buy time for the vote rescinding martial law, barricaded themselves into the Assembly Hall with chairs and desks; they used fire extinguishers to hold off elite troops wielding assault rifles and stun grenades. Surely, we can ask our elected officials to risk an election and make do with life as a cable pontificator or six-figure lobbyist.
Take some risk ourselves. South Korea is no stranger to street protests—they’ve been a well-established part of politics from the 1980s to the present. Their political impact is at least partly tied to their involving real risk: Protests are often met with tear gas, batons, and water cannons. If Yoon had not repealed his martial law declaration by dawn, the next day would have seen massive protests nationwide in Seoul and other cities. And these demonstrations would have been met with extreme force: The only way martial law could have been upheld (as earlier in South Korea’s history) would have been through violence.
In America, we’re used to safe, no-risk demonstrations. We gather to wave placards, shout slogans, and wear pussy-hats, but we seem to accept that only the enemies of democracy are ready to rumble. When Republicans tried to attribute January 6 to Antifa, did anyone believe them? (Certainly, nobody who’s ever attended a real-life leftie protest). If those of us who claim to support a free society aren’t willing to take any risk to defend it, then we don’t care as much as those trying to take it away.
The people of South Korea and the elected representatives from both major parties care very deeply about their democracy. They’re proud of it, and they should be. Over the past few days, they showed how much they value it and that they’ve been willing to stand up for it over the past few decades. Americans talk a good game on democracy. If we want to back up our pretty words with concrete action, the people of South Korea have shown us the way.
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