Credit: Public domain.
On April 4, the Constitutional Court 헌법재판소 ordered the removal of Yoon Suk-yeol 윤석열 from the presidency, an ignominious end to a disgraceful chapter of history. It is tempting to move on with a sigh of relief - but first, it must be said that Washington DC’s foreign policy community failed to reckon with Yoon’s budding authoritarianism, with disastrous consequences.
Some analysts and commentators failed because they were on the payroll of the Yoon administration and the South Korean right; others, because they were true believers in the far-right president’s deranged fantasies; others, poisoned by the “but he’s our bastard” logic of the Cold War, were deceived by their own cynicism.
There was no mystery about what Yoon was. His authoritarian tendencies were well known and exhaustively reported even before December 3, 2024, when he declared martial law and sent the military to the legislature. As a former top prosecutor, Yoon rose to political stardom by selectively prosecuting his enemies, a pattern he continued during his presidency, most notably against Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung 이재명. After conducting more than 300 raids against Lee and those around him, the Yoon administration’s prosecutor brought five separate criminal indictments against Lee—who has been found not guilty in every case to date.
Yoon relentlessly attacked the press, sacking journalists from publicly owned television channels like KBS, suing news organizations for defamation and using the Korea Communications Commission to impose censorship of news coverage. His administration was shot through with corruption at scales grand and petty, most notably involving Yoon’s wife. But in contrast with their enthusiasm in prosecuting Yoon’s enemies, the administration’s prosecutors sat on their hands, and Yoon vetoed every bill the National Assembly 국회 passed calling for a special prosecutor investigation. South Korea fell in the rankings on every major index of democratic freedom over Yoon’s three years as president, most recently falling out of the “liberal democracy” category according to the V-Dem Democracy Report 2025.
None of this was a secret. Even mainstream international press outlets like the Washington Post and the Economist duly reported on the right-wing president’s autocratic behavior. It was in the paper for anyone to see - meaning that the average newspaper reader would have been better informed than anyone relying solely on the United States Department of State and Korea experts at Washington DC’s biggest think tanks, all of whom kept mum about what was happening to one of America’s most important allies in Asia.
During the Joe Biden administration, the State Department was focused firmly on the trilateral cooperation between the US, Japan and South Korea, and welcomed Yoon’s conciliatory stance toward Tokyo—and turned a blind eye toward his authoritarianism in exchange. Henry Haggard, a US diplomat stationed in Seoul until June 2024, said bluntly: “Korea chose Yoon so his foibles were relevant to South Korea, not to us.”
The expert community did not acquit itself any better. The Brookings Institution, remarkably, does not mention Yoon’s coup in a single article or publication on its website, despite having an Asia Policy Studies center with an endowed chair position for Korea Studies; its last post on South Korea was fawning coverage of Yoon’s overtures to Japan and 2023 state visit to the United States.
The Heritage Foundation has posted just one article since Yoon’s declaration of martial law, perhaps because it is busy reevaluating the decisions that led it to put up a 2022 post headlined “South Korea’s new president is welcome development for US policy on North Korea.” The Center for Strategic & International Studies has been more active in covering Yoon’s impeachment, possibly in a bid to make up for the lack of a single commentary on Yoon’s obvious authoritarianism before December 3, 2024. Better late than never.
Compare Washington’s behavior during the presidency of Moon Jae-in 문재인. Elected after the failed right-wing presidency of Park Geun-hye, Moon defused a potential nuclear war against North Korea, navigated through the first Donald Trump presidency and delivered a world-leading response against COVID-19, becoming the most popular president in South Korean history. Under Moon, South Korea enjoyed the highest scores ever in international indices of democratic freedom.
Yet in Washington foreign policy circles, Moon was portrayed as a would-be authoritarian, with his attempts to seek détente with North Korea seen as the work of a communist sympathizer. The red-baiting skepticism reached a fever pitch when the Moon administration prohibited civic groups from launching balloons toward North Korea, a propaganda tactic used by right-wing civic groups that posed an obvious danger of inviting a military reaction from Pyongyang.
The United States Congress held a hearing to criticize the Moon administration’s supposed human rights violation. The American Enterprise Institute held a panel decrying Moon’s “authoritarianism to the left.” Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) published a book claiming South Korea’s democratic decay “all took place under a government dominated by former pro-democracy activists,” and wondering whether “the election victory of opposition leader Yoon Suk-yeol [could] end this democratic erosion.”
This partisan double standard is a feature, not a bug. US foreign policy in Korea has historically focused exclusively on national security concerns involving North Korea, giving rise to a community of experts that is uniformly hawkish, tolerant of South Korea’s anti-communist right-wing as “our bastards,” and skeptical of South Korea’s liberals as socialist traitors bent on destroying the US-ROK alliance. Behind the hawkishness is a patronizing view of Seoul as merely a client state serving the goals of US grand strategy, rather than a top ten economy and key regional ally with significant and growing military and soft power.
Some in the Korea expert community go beyond enabling the corruption, to participate in it themselves. Sue Mi Terry, former director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center and senior Asia Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was indicted for taking bribes from the Yoon administration’s National Intelligence Service 국가정보원, South Korea’s spy agency. Gi-wook Shin, director of APARC at Stanford and author of the book alleging democratic decay under Moon, was investigated for laundering USD 2m of South Korean spy agency funds through his center during the Park Geun-hye administration.
And then there are the true believers. Like the South Korean far-right, these people live in a world in which millions of Chinese spies have infiltrated South Korea to commit election fraud and capture key government posts such as the National Election Commission and the Constitutional Court—the same fantasy that drove Yoon to end South Korean democracy. Here we might observe worrisome parallels between election deniers in the United States and South Korea.
This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference—the Nazi-saluting extravaganza held near Washington DC—hosted a delegation from the South Korean far-right who justified Yoon’s martial law as a necessary step to defend against Chinese election interference. Among the panelists was Steve Yates, Senior Research Fellow for China and National Security Policy at the Heritage Foundation. (See previous coverage, “The Global Brain Rot Community.”)
Truth Forum, a South Korean far-right group, held a seminar in Washington DC around the same time, featuring well-known quacks like Gordon Chang and Tara O peddling misinformation about supposed corruption in South Korea’s Constitutional Court. Panelists included leading North Korea human rights activist Suzanne Scholte, and AEI Chair of Political Economy Nicholas Eberstadt.
Except for Terry, who faces a criminal trial, none of these individuals has faced any consequence for taking dirty money and peddling conspiracy theories. They remain secure in their sinecure positions, where they will continue publishing articles in the mainstream media and offering consultations on policy proposals. Nor has the broader community of Korea experts offered any mea culpa or evinced any self-reflection after getting Yoon Suk-yeol so disastrously wrong.
This failure goes beyond an embarrassing lack of professionalism. It threatens the future of US-South Korea relations. Seoul is likely to elect another liberal leader in Lee Jae-myung 이재명 in the snap presidential election this June. If Washington’s community of Korea experts do not thoroughly clean house, the same old rot will creep back in and once again poison relations between the US and one of its most important allies.