S. Korea upheaval may have a ripple reaction in Hawaii

The political fallout of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law in his country, quick reversal and subsequent impeachment has sent ripples across the Pacific.

Yoon, who was facing dwindling approval ratings and a legislature dominated by the opposition part, shocked the world Dec. 3 when he tried to impose military rule, saying that the country’s National Assembly had “become a den of criminals.”

In a televised address he told South Koreans, “I am declaring a state of emergency martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threats of the North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the shameless pro-North anti-state forces that plunder the freedom and happiness of our people and to safeguard the free constitutional order.”

Soldiers in full combat gear stormed the capital. Martial law orders went out declaring that all legislative activities, public protests and political speech were to cease immediately. The order also said that all media organizations were to report to military authorities who would review anything they were to publish.

Thousands of Koreans immediately took to the streets, and lawmakers forced their way into the capital and voted to overturn martial law.

Within less than 24 hours Yoon rescinded martial law, and in the following days many senior leaders resigned and the ruling conservative People Power Party expelled Yoon as a member. Yoon has since been impeached, and many of his inner circle are now under criminal investigation.

Then less than two weeks after Yoon was stripped of his powers, South Korea’s parliament voted Friday to impeach Prime Minister and acting President Han Duck-soo after Han refused to fill three vacant seats in the Constitutional Court, which was set to make a formal decision on Yoon’s impeachment trial.

Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok is now acting president.

It’s an uncertain moment for South Korea, which boasts the world’s 10th- largest economy and has evolved into a major player on the world stage. The national crisis will have global repercussions.

The United States has sought to increase diplomatic and military coordination among Japan, the U.S. and South Korea. Service members from the three countries have frequently held meetings and trained together in Hawaii, notably during Exercise Rim of the Pacific, the world’s largest recurring naval warfare exercise.

The three have sought to work more closely together amid Pacific tensions with China, North Korea and Russia. Yoon has been a leading proponent of this push.

He came into power in 2022 when he defeated Moon Jae-in, a left-leaning leader who sought a more conciliatory approach to relations with North Korea. That year the North launched more missiles than it ever had. Yoon criticized Moon for being weak in the face of the North Korean actions and also asserted he was too hesitant to stand up to China.

But Yoon’s declaration of martial law, and the ongoing turmoil it has brought, calls the future of the effort into question. Rob York, director of regional affairs at Pacific Forum in Honolulu, said, “The trilateral push is going to fall on harder times.”

He noted that it “was probably going to face challenges anyway,” asserting that the incoming U.S. administration of Donald Trump “would probably invest less attention in it,” and that political infighting in Japan’s ruling coalition also could have complicated things.

York said that now in South Korea “if trends go the way that they have been, we’re going to see an election — an election that the progressives will almost certainly win — and they have traditionally desired greater independence from the United States, and also had more hostility toward Japan. So I would expect that the momentum of the last couple of years will certainly slow, if not halt.”

‘Their birthright is democracy’

In Hawaii the Korean diaspora has been watched closely. On Dec. 6 about 30 people braved pouring rain to protest outside of the South Korean Consulate in Nuuanu.

Among them was Christine Ahn, a controversial Korean American activist who was recently denied entry into South Korea in October when she was on her way from Honolulu to deliver a keynote at the International Youth Peace Forum in Gyeonggi province. Ahn made international headlines in 2015 when her Honolulu-based organization Women Cross DMZ rallied 30 women to cross the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

She has been an outspoken advocate of formally ending the Korean War, which was halted by an armistice in 1953 but never officially ended. Critics of Ahn’s activism charge her work aligns with the North Korean regime’s interests, and have accused her of working directly or indirectly on its behalf.

“To witness (Yoon’s) desecration of democracy in South Korea, in many ways, makes me feel like I’m not alone. Maybe I was, in some ways, a canary in the coal mine,” Ahn said. “I’m personally hopeful that I will be able to return back to South Korea, hopefully by sometime in 2025.”

Hawaii and Korea have intertwined histories. Koreans first arrived in Hawaii to work in the sugar plantations, but the islands soon became the birthplace of the Korean independence movement in the U.S. during Japanese colonization.

Syngman Rhee, an exiled Korean revolutionary who became a Honolulu entrepreneur, was among those who returned to Korea after World War II as American forces accepted the surrender of Japanese troops in 1945. Rhee became South Korea’s controversial first president in 1948. Following a rise to power and rule defined by ruthless tactics in dealing with political opponents, Rhee’s administration was overthrown in the 1960 April Revolution. Rhee returned to exile in Honolulu before his death in 1965.

In subsequent decades Korean politics continued to be dominated by a series of strongman leaders until a protest movement brought about the end of the country’s military-focused rule and in 1988 ushered in the inauguration of President Roh Tae-woo. Yoon’s martial law order brought back painful memories of the brutal days of authoritarian rule in a country that has taken deep pride in its turn to democracy and rise into an economic and cultural powerhouse.

“The Yoon Suk Yeol administration didn’t have wide support for the move that it attempted,” York said. “But we can’t say that Yoon arrived at this conclusion all by himself. And so there are remnants of this authoritarian nostalgia left over in conservative politics.”

South Korean prosecutors are investigating Yoon’s Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun and several military commanders for their roles, including the deployment of soldiers to the National Assembly. One of those commanders is ROK Army Chief of Staff Gen. Park An-su, whom Yoon appointed as “martial law commander.”

Both Yoon and Park visited Hawaii this summer for talks with senior U.S. military leaders. Yoon gave a speech at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command at Camp Smith on his way to the mainland to attend the NATO summit in Washington, and Park attended the Association of the U.S. Army’s Land Forces Pacific Symposium in Waikiki.

Among the troops dispatched to the National Assembly were apparently elite commandos trained for strikes deep into North Korea. Though they initially blocked lawmakers from entering, no shots were fired, no one was injured and troops ultimately chose not to attack lawmakers or citizens.

Chun In-bum, a retired ROK army general, told Germany’s DW News that “politicians dragged the military into this situation, and I am thankful that the soldiers’ hearts were not in it and it ended quickly. The tragedy is that the senior officers who should have shielded the rest of the military from the politicians failed to do that, and it seems that some of them participated in the planning of the declaration of martial law.”

York said, “The troops that were dispatched were given misleading messages about what kind of mission they were undertaking, what kind of operation they were undertaking, and seemed very confused when they were dispatched to the National Assembly … after (South Korea’s) democratization that led to additional scrutiny over the loyalty of military officers, and there may be now another opportunity to scrutinize the loyalties of officials.”

“It’s kind of remarkable that nobody was harmed and that they were able to flip it around so quickly,” Ahn said.

She speculated that young soldiers, who would have been taught in school about what happened under martial law, may have taken those lessons to heart and not wanted to repeat it. Ahn said, “Though this younger generation may not have experienced (martial law), their birthright is democracy.”

Flashpoints

With the upcoming return of Trump to the American presidency and likely major shifts in South Korea in 2025, the future is uncertain — and many in Hawaii are watching closely.

On Jan. 13, 2018, a false-alarm missile alert went out to cellphones across Hawaii, spreading panic. The alert came during tensions as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and then-U.S. President Donald Trump traded threats and insults, with Trump boasting he would unleash “fire and fury” on the Korean Peninsula.

But Trump later met face to face in a pair of historic summits with Kim and have since exchanged friendly correspondence.

“You have such a unpredictable president in Trump, who has vacillated from ‘fire and fury’ to totally destroy North Korea to love letters, and we just don’t know what his policy is going to be like,” Ahn said.

She said she’s cautiously optimistic that more dovish leadership in South Korea combined with Trump’s personal relationship with Kim could offer a path to peace. But York said that while South Korea’s progressives tend to pursue a softer touch with the North, changes usually aren’t immediate, and they tend to maintain a confrontational stance — at least until back-channel talks deescalate tensions.

York said he expects “that if a progressive takes office in 2025, the initial phase following that person’s election will probably not markedly change from what we have seen so far, and it’s really just a question of whether or not North Korea is open to the same kinds of back-channel negotiations that has been able to work things out with South Korea in the past.”

He cautioned that there’s no guarantee that will happen.

“One of the things that we noticed under the Moon Jae-in administration was that the North Koreans were really just using South Korea as a way to get to the United States,” York said. “Once talks broke down with the Trump administration in 2019, further gestures by Moon Jae-in’s administration really went nowhere. And so there might have been a fundamental break between the North Koreans and the South Koreans.”

However, York said he expects that depending on whom the progressives choose as the likely next leader of the country, Seoul will likely seek a “more balanced” approach to relations with China. Despite tensions, China is a close neighbor and remains a key trade partner for South Korea.

But leaders across Asia have become wary of Beijing’s efforts to impose control over disputed waters in the South China Sea — a critical waterway that a third of all international trade moves through. Chinese vessels also have encroached in South Korean waters in recent years.

South Korea has for dec­ades been building up its naval forces as well as selling warships to countries like the Philippines, which has been locked in bitter dispute with China.

In a 2022 interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Lim Sung-nam, who served as vice foreign minister under the Moon administration, said, “Whenever there is a discussion about the situation in the South China Sea, which is one of the flashpoints these days, we always emphasize that the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea should be completely respected. … A lot of the imports for Korea, including crude oil, come through the South China Sea.”

During an event at the East-West Center in Manoa hosted by the ROK’s Honolulu Consulate just after Yoon lifted martial law, former South Korean diplomat Chun Yungwoo got a question from the audience about how Koreans can avoid getting pushed into conflict by outside powers. Chun responded that though historically, outside powers have often imposed their interests on the Korean Peninsula, the world has fundamentally changed.

He argued that both North and South Korea are in their own respective ways more powerful than they’ve ever been. South Korea has one of the largest economies in the world with businesses operating globally, while North Korea — despite being one of the world’s most impoverished nations — developed a nuclear arsenal in defiance of world powers. And both have large militaries and have built their own weapons technology to be less reliant on foreign powers.

“So I think we have better means (than ever) to determine our own fate and against the wishes of major powers, which have strategic interests on the Korean Peninsula,” Chun said.