President Yoon warned of North Korean supporters in the opposition in his statement announcing and justifying martial law. He’s right. A sizable chunk of South Korea’s Democratic Party and leftist political world is pro-North Korea and also pro-China. And they are also anti-American and want to remove US troops and end the US-South Korea alliance.
Washington, D.C.: South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol could use some help from American President Donald Trump.
And if there’s one Asian leader President Trump has something in common with its President Yoon. Some even call Yoon “the Donald Trump of Asia.”
Since Yoon’s election in May 2022, the leftist opposition Democratic Party (DP) has done everything possible to obstruct and destroy him including via its commanding majority in the National Assembly—a majority that was also quite possibly achieved via election fraud.
They’ve blocked his policies at every turn, slashed or zeroed out his budgets, and tried to impeach Yoon or his officials—including the Ministers of Justice and Interior—at least 22 times since he took office.
Even Yoon’s wife is being targeted on corruption charges.
This goes well beyond South Korea’s normal sharp-elbowed politics.
Yoon described it as a “legislative dictatorship.”
Believing that consensual democracy was in danger of being snuffed out, Yoon declared martial law on 4 December 2024—as allowed by the Constitution.
He apparently saw it as the best way to beat back opposition that had made South Korea ungovernable—and also to investigate election fraud allegations.
Yoon rescinded the decree in accordance with law after a matter of hours.
He was arrested six weeks later and charged with “insurrection” and has just been ordered released after five weeks in prison while South Korea’s constitutional court decides his fate.
The make-up of the constitutional court is akin to a Republican being tried in either the overwhelmingly Democrat District of Columbia or New York—and predictably the court has hampered Yoon’s defense.
President Trump will understand.
SOUTH KOREA’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY: NOT REGULAR ‘LEFTISTS’
President Yoon warned of North Korean supporters in the opposition in his statement announcing and justifying martial law.
He’s right.
A sizable chunk of South Korea’s Democratic Party and leftist political world is pro-North Korea and also pro-China.
And they are also anti-American and want to remove US troops and end the US-South Korea alliance. Imagine if unreformed, Marxist/Maoist 60s-era radicals in the United States took power in the United States. Some might say they did a couple of times in recent decades, but that’s another story.
In South Korea the unreformed student radicals are from the 1980s—and are known as Jusapa.
President Moon Jae-in (Yoon’s predecessor who served from 2017-2022) was supportive and surrounded by Jusapa.
Moon was also preternaturally sympathetic to both North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.
And he had no love for the United States. In his autobiography he tells of his euphoria on hearing the Americans were defeated in Vietnam.
Moon had hard core radicals working in his administration and at high positions.
Take Lee In-young, the Unification Minister appointed in July 2020. Read the transcript of his confirmation hearing in the National Assembly.
Lee is biting his tongue but didn’t seem to have changed much since his days as the #2 person in the Anti-American Youth Association, which was the underground organization providing leadership to Jeondaehyup, the violent, radical 1980s student organization based upon North Korea’s Juche ideology.
The Democratic Party has not changed its stripes over the last five years.
The initial DP-drafted impeachment charges against President Yoon accused him of diplomacy that was “…antagonizing North Korea, China, and Russian, and instead focusing on Japan.”
The DP’s current leader, Lee Jae-myung, has called American forces in Korea “occupying forces”. And he is accommodating towards North Korea and the PRC, to include Beijing’s position on bringing Taiwan under its grip.
If the constitutional court removes Moon from office, Lee Jae-myung is the odds-on favorite to be South Korea’s new president.
CUI BONO?
Who benefits from the degradation and tearing apart—“entropic warfare”—that’s been roiling South Korea for at least the last eight years—and has exploded recently?
The People’s Republic of China.
And they are stoking it.
THE END GAME
South Korean leftists have long wanted a one-party state that they control. They have also sought to dominate the levers of power beyond the government, including labour unions, academia, the media, the military, and big business—to include Samsung.
But it was Moon Jae-in’s election in 2017 and the subsequent National Assembly elections in 2020 and 2024 (that gave the leftists overwhelming control of the National Assembly) that put this goal in reach.
The National Assembly is arguably a more attractive target than even the presidency in South Korea.
In the South Korean system the National Assembly can make life near impossible for a president, whereas in the United States a president has considerable power even if the opposition holds both Houses of Congress.
ELECTION FRAUD TO TAKE THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
There is considerable and credible evidence of election fraud in the April 2020 National Assembly elections as well as the most recent 2024 National Assembly elections. This includes electronic manipulation of the National Election Commission (NEC) network, including the counting machines.
An NEC official was asked about Chinese Huawei components in the electoral network. His answer: “Irrelevant”. Maybe not.
In October 2023, after the North Korean Lazarus Group hacked into the NEC network at least six times over the previous couple years, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service “tested” the NEC network. They ran wild and concluded outside actors could have their way with South Korea’s electoral network systems.
And there was also old-fashioned “hard copy” fraud—with pristine ballots, improperly printed ballots, dubious voter rolls, hard-to-ignore allegations of fraud in “early voting” and “mail in” votes, and polling stations with voters improbably (and possibly impossibly) casting ballots every 4.7 seconds.
The government and courts were uninterested in investigating. The mainstream media declared it all “debunked”. And citizens who tried to present evidence were cancelled and persecuted and sometimes prosecuted.
Similar claims were made following the 2022 presidential election that saw Yoon elected by a hair’s breadth—despite huge leads in the polls. Astonishingly, the opposition DP declined to request a recount. Maybe the first party on earth to do so.
And none of these claims and evidence has been properly investigated.
Mr Trump might find all this familiar.
ALLIANCE UNRAVELLING?
The US-South Korea alliance won’t end tomorrow.
Most South Korean citizens don’t want to be ruled by North Korea—or a North Korean-like system, and they also support the US-South Korea alliance.
But that doesn’t matter much when a coterie of hardcore radicals (Marxist or otherwise) are able to take over a government and move a country where most people don’t want it to go.
We’ve seen it before.
Take Venezuela. It was a longstanding US ally and Latin America’s oldest democracy. But Hugo Chavez won an election and gradually tightened control over enough levers of power to the point that neither elections nor opposition political parties mattered much. Freedom was snuffed out and the US declared an enemy.
Don’t think it can’t happen in South Korea—despite a 70-plus-year alliance “forged in the blood of the Korean War”.
Washington is counting on South Korea cooperating with Japan to consolidate free-world defenses in Northeast Asia and acting as bulwark for a free, open and prosperous Indo-Pacific—something Beijing would like to torpedo. The US also wants help with rebuilding American shipbuilding.
A leftist administration puts all this in jeopardy.
WHAT’S NEEDED?
Pro-freedom South Koreans in the hundreds of thousands have been on the streets protesting President Yoon’s arrest and imprisonment and calling for his restoration to office.
But in this sort of fight, the more ruthless side that also controls most levers of power has the advantage.
A properly worded statement or two from Washington, and from President Trump himself, in support of consensual, honest government and individual liberty in South Korea—to include fair, honest elections as much in South Korea as in the United States—would be helpful.
This would encourage South Korean citizens who are defending their democracy and also let the other side know they are being watched. Sometimes this alone is an effective deterrent.
The US government has never taken seriously the threat posed by South Korean leftists to the alliance.
It can no longer stand by with eyes primly averted while hard core leftists backed by the PRC and North Korea throttle South Korea’s hard-won freedoms and move the nation into the un-free world’s camp.
The vast majority of the people of South Korea want to pull their weight in the fight for freedom. President Trump, a word of support from you would go a long way towards keeping the fires of freedom burning.
* Grant Newsham is a retired U.S. Marine officer and former U.S. diplomat. He was the first Marine liaison officer to the Japan Self Defense Force, and is a fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. He is the author of the book, “When China Attacks: A Warning To America.