As South Korea grapples with the political turmoil of impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol’s arrest following his failed declaration of martial law, lawmakers from Yoon’s conservative People Power Party (PPP) are turning to U.S. President Donald Trump in a desperate cry for help. After a mob of evangelical far-right supporters of Yoon stormed the Seoul Western District Court building on Jan. 19 in a violent riot against his arrest—drawing alarming parallels to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol—conservative politicians are spinning Yoon’s authoritarian gamble as a brave geopolitical move against Chinese interference and toward a stronger alliance with the United States.
As lawmakers from the PPP and the opposition Democratic Party gathered at Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., to make diplomatic overtures amid the executive vacuum, Yoon’s allies turned to the newly returned U.S. president to intervene in their domestic crisis.
“We will deliver an accurate account of the unprecedented state of affairs, detailing how the opposition party incited a rebellion to impeach the president and, thereafter, the acting president,” Na Kyung-won, a lawmaker from the PPP, wrote on Facebook the day before she left for Washington. Na, a longtime conservative stalwart, flaunted her friendship with first lady Melania Trump, supposedly blossoming from a joint campaign in 2017 to promote girls’ sports in schools in the run-up to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
“We will articulate to the United States how the opposition party denigrated liberal democratic diplomacy and espoused a totalitarian, anti-liberal worldview through its impeachment efforts,” she wrote, echoing Yoon’s vilification of his political enemies as patrons of “communist totalitarianism.”
Heading to D.C., she was accompanied by a flurry of flushed conservative lawmakers who each flexed their own tenuous ties to the Trump administration and flashed high hopes for the U.S. president’s admiration for authoritarians around the world.
Na, along with most other PPP lawmakers, voted against Yoon’s impeachment at the National Assembly last month and braved the frozen streets outside the presidential compound in Yongsan, Seoul, earlier this month to rally against Yoon’s arrest over insurrection charges.
She was joined by far-right supporters of Yoon, mostly older, evangelical Christian nationalists harboring staunch anti-communist sentiments, who weathered the chilling dawn with their MAGA-inspired red baseball caps and held up banners emblazoned with the phrase “Stop the Steal,” a slogan borrowed from conspiratorial Trump supporters. They call themselves the “national-flag brigade,” a nod to their trademark combined South Korea-U.S. flags broadcasting a transnational alt-right alliance.
As every pillar of Yoon’s power toppled—his martial law troops, his conservative party, his presidential fortress—his followers have clung to the hope, fervently preached on alt-right conspiracy forums, that Trump would swoop to their rescue. They proclaim that Trump would somehow investigate their claims of voter fraud in the last parliamentary elections following the opposition party’s landslide victories—fictional narratives propagated by an army of alt-right Youtubers and championed by Yoon himself. Ultimately, they avow with evangelical fervor, Trump would defeat the Constitutional Court’s impeachment of Yoon.
To be clear, the U.S. president has no power to overturn South Korean democracy. But in a desperate attempt to salvage his botched autogolpe, Yoon has embarked on a new political maneuver. He has reframed his bid for autocracy as a triumphant defense against Chinese infiltration into domestic politics, evoking memories of Washington’s intervention in the Korean War as a democratic savior against communist subversion.
In a televised address before his impeachment, Yoon pointed to national security threats posed by China as grounds for declaring martial law, alleging that Chinese espionage was targeting the military alliance between South Korea and the United States. He also warned that “Chinese solar power facilities would destroy forests across South Korea,” appealing to deep-seated anxieties among conservatives over Chinese industrial power.
A long-standing strain of Sinophobia plagues South Korean politics, stemming from Cold War legacies; historical disputes over territorial identity and most recently, China’s economic retaliation against South Korea’s deployment of a U.S. missile defense system.
Building on this lineage of Sinophobic sentiments, Yoon has been spinning lies that China is a secret mastermind behind his domestic defeats, including the parliamentary elections held last April. After his impeachment, Yoon posted a transcript and a photo of a six-page handwritten letter on Facebook, claiming that “the rigged election system was architected by an international alliance and cooperation of political forces,” even going as far as to accuse China and the Democratic Party of electoral collusion.
Yoon’s supporters took his fringe rhetoric as a cue to flock to Trump, the chief crusader against China and champion of electoral conspiracy theories. They argued, taking to the streets of Seoul and flooding online forums, that Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung—Yoon’s principal political rival, poised to be the front-runner in the next presidential election—was backed by “Chinese communists.” Borrowing the language of evangelical Christianity that many of them espouse, they declared that Trump has a messianic mission to dismantle China.
After raiding the Seoul Western District Court building on Sunday, rioters flooded a website called “New Man Power,” an online bastion of alt-right conspiracy theories, with messages that they still had a “strong card to play—Trump.”
To redeem Yoon’s authoritarian gambit, the PPP has been amplifying the conspiracy narrative propagated by his supporters.
“Everywhere you go, the Chinese are rallying for Yoon’s impeachment,” said Kim Min-jeon, a close ally to Yoon and former political science professor who made her name as an avid liberal political commentator before diving into politics and gradually switching allegiances to the far right. “The crux of Yoon’s impeachment is about whether South Korea becomes a liberal democracy like the United States or turns into China, North Korea, or Russia,” she said, fueling geopolitical anxieties over the trilateral partnership.
A far-right firebrand, Kim didn’t shy away from breathing air into fringe nationalist movements to galvanize conservatives. Earlier this month, Kim held a press conference featuring an anti-communist youth league nicknamed the “White Skull Corps” after the plainclothes police officers in white helmets who violently cracked down on democratic protesters fighting against military dictatorships in the 1980s and 1990s.
After all, the mob raid on the district court may have been a “tragedy foretold by the [PPP’s] glorification of the White Skull Corps,” said Lee Jun-seok, a leader of the conservative New Reform Party who was once a close confidant to Yoon and now his most vocal critic.
“Justifying Yoon’s martial law declaration to a discerning South Korean public is a challenging feat,” said Kim Heung-kyu, a professor of political science at Ajou University and the director of the U.S.-China Policy Institute. “Far-right supporters of Yoon are reframing their resistance against Yoon’s impeachment as a power battle between the United States and China to make a more persuasive appeal to the public and turn around the political crisis in favor of Yoon,” he added. “This pivot helps them build an alliance with Trump, who advocates a staunch anti-China platform, and send a strong signal to Washington to support Yoon.”
But the Democratic Party paints a different narrative of the bilateral alliance that has long served as a bedrock of South Korean diplomacy. “The United States firmly supports the people of South Korea. We have reaffirmed our shared commitment to the rule of law,” said Lee Jae-myung, the Democratic Party leader, in a Supreme Council meeting at the National Assembly before Trump’s inauguration, casting South Korea’s most formidable ally on the Democratic Party’s side.
To shed his undeserved caricature as a China sympathizer, Lee refined his diplomatic posture, one promoting a pragmatic partnership with China centered on trade, by affirming his alignment with Washington.
“The South Korea-U.S. alliance, which has fostered prosperity in South Korea and peace in Northeast Asia, assumed a critical role in resolving the national calamity,” Lee said. “Through the democratic crisis, our alliance will only grow stronger.”
A likely successor to Yoon, Lee is positioning himself as an adaptable leader poised to navigate Trump’s mercurial statecraft. In a meeting with acting U.S. Ambassador Joseph Yun following Trump’s inauguration, Lee promised “to keep pace with the new foreign policy to be executed by the new United States administration.” When Trump controversially called North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un “a nuclear power” after taking office—a sharp departure from the long-standing agreement between Washington and Seoul not to recognize North Korea’s nuclear status—Lee welcomed the diplomatic overture. “We welcome President Trump’s willingness to resume the stalled dialogues between North Korea and the United States,” he said.
South Korea’s liberals, whose political heritage is rooted in the democratization movement in the late 1900s, are regarded as more independent from U.S. hegemony, less hawkish on North Korea, and open to a strategic cooperation with China. While honoring the diplomatic values that he inherited, Lee has also branded himself as a pragmatist closer to Trump, prioritizing national interests over partisan doctrines, in sharp contrast to Yoon’s demagogic diplomacy.
PPP lawmakers are pushing back to stymie the brewing power shift to the left. “The Democratic Party has been made conscious of its pro-China and anti-U.S. agenda and concocted an impromptu resolution supporting the South Korea-U.S. alliance,” wrote Na, the PPP lawmaker, on the morning of Lee’s meeting with the acting U.S. Ambassador. Lee countered, in a Supreme Council meeting held just before the diplomatic talks, that it was time for South Korea to transcend ideologies and factions and embark on a pragmatist foreign policy.
Despite the PPP’s rallying outcries, Trump seems disinterested in coming to their rescue. In the fallout of Yoon’s self-immolation, Trump chaffed, “Everyone calls me chaotic, but look at South Korea.” He joked about meeting with Yoon “if they ever stop impeaching him,” but did not suggest, to the dismay of the conservative lawmakers who flew over to attend his inauguration, that he would intervene in the domestic conflict.
Meddling in South Korea’s factional war would incur irreparable geopolitical costs. An avowed champion of American interests driven by “principled realism,” a brazenly transactional approach to foreign affairs that brushes aside values and alliances, Trump is likely to view South Korea’s political crisis with a transactional eye focused on keeping South Korea as the linchpin of the U.S.-led alliance across Northeast Asia, unmoved by ideological concerns.
“Trump will not want to side with Yoon to instigate further chaos and conflict and create a critically crippled South Korea, which would empower China, Russia, and North Korea to take charge of Northeast Asia,” said Kim Heung-kyu. To the chagrin of South Korea’s conservatives, indictments of an encroaching totalitarian, anti-liberal worldview will not move Trump.
Given his exasperation with liberal internationalism, coupled with his blithe indifference to democratic values, Trump will probably stay out of the affair altogether. If anything, driven by his distaste for political losers, “he will more likely bide his time to deal with a new South Korean administration bestowed with political legitimacy,” Kim said.
After all, the better diplomatic ally for Trump may turn out to be Lee, not Yoon. It’s possible that dueling realists, harboring starkly different political values, may end up forging a surprising geostrategic partnership.
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