South Korea’s turmoil is the latest threat to a three-way Pacific alliance

TOKYO — When President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea visited the White House last year, he charmed the Washington establishment by singing Don McLean’s “American Pie.” When he flew to Tokyo to usher in a new era of conciliation with Japan, it was a genial visit, with the prime minister treating Yoon to “omurice,” a Japanese dish the South Korean leader likes.

But that mood was gone Wednesday, a day after Yoon imposed — and then rescinded — martial law in South Korea. Officials in the United States and Japan were scrambling to understand why the leader they’d both embraced had made such a shocking authoritarian move.

Now, the domestic political chaos unleashed by Yoon could imperil the countries’ three-way alliance in the Pacific, where they had been fortifying their relationships to confront an increasingly assertive China and North Korea.

The disorder in South Korea — where Cabinet members Wednesday were offering to resign and opposition lawmakers were moving to impeach Yoon — comes on top of political uncertainty in the United States and Japan. Last month, former President Donald Trump, a notoriously mercurial leader who tried to undermine American alliances while in power, was elected to a second term.

And in October, Japanese voters delivered a resounding blow to the longtime governing party and the new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, denying them a majority in parliament.

“Many in the world were counting on Japan and South Korea, along with Australia and others, to keep the flag flying and keep the head of good governance and democracy above water in the face of this incredible pressure from North Korea, China and Iran and Russia,” said Daniel Russel, a vice president at the Asia Society who was assistant secretary of state for Asia under President Barack Obama.

Before Tuesday, most international policy experts had been far more concerned about unpredictability in Washington. During Trump’s first term as president, he often accused South Korea and Japan of siphoning off American military resources, even threatening to pull troops out of South Korea. And at pomp-filled summits in Singapore and Hanoi,Vietnam, Trump engaged North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in direct personal diplomacy, trying and failing to reach a deal on reducing the North’s nuclear arsenal.

With Trump’s return to the White House just weeks away, the next political turnover could happen in Seoul if the motion passes to impeach Yoon. Analysts predict he would be succeeded by his main rival, Lee Jae-myung, leader of the liberal Democratic Party, which could shift South Korea’s foreign policy stance. Lee’s party has typically shied away from close relations with the United States and with Japan, with which South Korea has long-running tensions stemming from Japan’s colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula.

A government under Democratic Party leadership would be “more likely to want to hedge between China and the U.S. and downplay the importance of trilateral security cooperation with Tokyo and Washington,” Lauren Richardson, a lecturer in international relations at Australian National University, wrote in an email.

In many ways, the relationship between Japan and South Korea is the most important link of the three-way alliance, said Ji-Young Lee, a professor of international relations and Korean studies at American University in Washington, who credited Yoon with pushing for the rapprochement with Japan despite some public opposition.

The stronger trilateral relationship was made possible in the first place because of improved relations between Japan and South Korea, Lee said. “It was primarily the work of Yoon Suk Yeol and his desire to improve relations with Japan, and if you take that out of the picture, then you are really talking about a great deal of uncertainty for the future of Japan-Korean relations.”

Despite the developments in Seoul, uncertainty in Washington could still be the bigger risk, analysts say. “The biggest elephant is the United States,” said Nobukatsu Kanehara, a professor of political science at Doshisha University in Kyoto. The trilateral partnership consists of “a whale plus two dolphins,” he added.

Kanehara said he feared that Trump, who prefers “strong men,” might regard both Yoon, if he lasts until Trump’s inauguration, and Ishiba of Japan as weak leaders.

Some analysts said Trump’s return was not the only issue for American policy in Asia. By not forcefully condemning Yoon’s declaration of martial law, the Biden administration showed “the gap between our rhetoric and the reality of our actions,” said David C. Kang, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a research group in Washington.

“We’re willing to say we love rule of law and democracy and everything else, but we will just blatantly ignore this kind of behavior because the guy is on our side,” Kang said. “But the rest of the world is not stupid. They see this, and they are very skeptical of the U.S. administration.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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