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Foreign Affairs What South Korea’s Turmoil Means for U.S. Interests The Washington-Seoul-Tokyo entente is growing weaker by the day. South Koreans have in the past week and a half gotten the answers to several questions they never wanted to ask.  What happens when a president who isn’t popular with the military declares martial law? A half-hearted military deployment to the national legislature, theoretically designed to halt political activity, but which mostly serves as an opportunity for photo ops by opposition politicians who defy its orders.  What happens when a president thoroughly discredits himself, but his party fears the consequences of impeachment, which include new elections they will almost certainly lose? A bizarre can-kicking exercise in which the party refuses to vote on impeachment, then makes a public declaration effectively sidelining the president from important decision-making (never mind the constitutional validity of such a move).  If the military has repudiated the president but the legislature fails to impeach him, who is actually in command of the armed forces in the event of a crisis? Theoretically it’s still the president, but, in practice, who knows?  On the night of December 3, the conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, claiming that an “anti-state” cadre was, under direction from North Korea, seeking to undermine his government through impeachment inquiries and by blocking his legislative agenda. South Korea has a more recent history of such declarations than many people appreciate, with military coups displacing civilian governments in 1961 and 1979, using a daunting security environment as an excuse to break domestic gridlock or solve a lack of leadership.  Nevertheless, these operations were led by actual military men, namely Major General Park Chung Hee in May 1961 and Major General Chun Doo Hwan in December 1979 (who was consolidated by a martial law declaration the following May) with credibility among the conscripts in a country with little experience with democracy bordered by a North Korea considered a credible conventional threat to South Korea’s armed forces. None of that is true now—Yoon is a career prosecutor who was exempted from mandatory military duty due to poor eyesight, the country has not only had regular elections for 40 years but developed a vigorous protest culture against potential infringements on their democracy, and North Korea’s military decay means it relies on nuclear brinksmanship to stay alive. Consequently, Yoon’s declaration, being short on specifics, inspired no deference from the armed forces or the public, the latter of whom want Yoon gone sooner rather than later.  For conservatives, all of this is a painful reminder of 2016, when a scandal surrounding then-President Park Geun-hye—Park Chung Hee’s daughter—resulted in mass protests eventually leading to conservative defections and a successful impeachment effort. When the courts upheld her impeachment, a special election brought the progressive opposition to power. The conservatives fractured, sought to rebrand, but mostly watched from the sidelines as the Moon Jae-in administration shook hands with the hated Kim family.  Something similar will happen if they agree to impeach Yoon—their party was already unpopular, based on the results of the April National Assembly elections, and Yoon’s catastrophic miscalculation will likely sink their reputation further. Unless he can somehow be persuaded to step aside, Lee Jae-myung, leader of the progressive Democratic Party, will almost certainly prevail in an election to succeed Yoon. Lee, who shares progressive skepticism toward Japan, as well as interest in closer relations with North Korea and China, would then proceed undo the broad policy alignment between Seoul and Washington, as well as Tokyo, in the years to come. Plus, the investigations that Yoon has thus far been able to ward off with his veto power come to fruition, and members of his administration may join Park Geun-hye in acquiring criminal records. The party will then be forced to rebrand—I have avoided using their name, “People Power Party,” which has only been in circulation since 2020 and will almost certainly be out of currency by this time next year—and hope a new conservative prophet will emerge to lead them out of the wilderness.  This may help to explain why the conservatives refused to stay for a vote on impeachment this past Saturday, denying the progressives the two-thirds majority needed. It also helps explain why the prime minister—who would temporarily replace Yoon as a caretaker in the event of impeachment or resignation—and leader of the conservative party went public with a confusing plan to sideline Yoon from important decisions and prepare the way for his eventual, but undetermined, date of departure. Whatever the intent of this move, neither of these men were elected by the public to make executive-level decisions (in South Korea the prime minister is appointed by the president and functions more like a chief of staff than head of state). Naturally, there is no constitutional provision for the president to hand his duties to someone else so that he may avoid the embarrassment of impeachment and attendant legal consequences.  Nevertheless, their hesitation is only delaying the inevitable. Failure to impeach Yoon will only threaten more domestic protests hampering economic activity and building public resentment for the conservative politicians and causes. At some point voters will have their say, and Yoon’s party will pay a steep price.  They should make way for this inevitability so that public attention can turn to scrutinizing Yoon’s successor—especially if it is Lee Jae-myung. Yoon was a deeply flawed, gaffe-prone candidate in 2022, yet nonetheless managed to defeat Lee, who has himself been plagued by scandal and who is popular with few people outside of Western media outlets, which have somehow been convinced that he’s a Korean version of Bernie Sanders. Lee would likely be plagued by poor approval ratings and give ethics watchdogs much to focus on from the start of his term.   They should also not cry over the spilt milk of trilateralism, as the mounting weaknesses in both Korea’s and Japan’s current ruling coalitions will likely not encourage the new Trump administration to invest much time in them. The focus now, from both South Korea and the U.S., should be on transitioning to a South Korea that takes the lead in deterring the North, while the US forces there prioritize deterring China. Trilateralism will have its day again, probably once the public tires of Lee and his party. If there’s any consolation in the events of the past week, it’s that South Korea probably won’t have to answer the question of who will command the armed forces in responding to North Korea during a crisis. Pyongyang did not seek to capitalize on the Park impeachment in 2016, and probably won’t in this case, either. Pyongyang is probably far more concerned about the loss of its partner in Damascus, and what the impotence of Russia’s response there means for their burgeoning partnership.  The post What South Korea’s Turmoil Means for U.S. Interests appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Trump’s Syrian Opportunity The president-elect has the chance to end American entanglement in the Middle East. With the shock overthrow of the Assad dynastic dictatorship that ruled Syria since 1971, new diplomatic opportunities are opening for the incoming administration. If President-elect Donald Trump is serious about his “ending forever wars” rhetoric, Syria offers him a chance to grab a low-hanging fruit. Encouragingly, Trump himself seems to realize that. Commenting on Syria, he suggested that the events unfolding there are “not our fight”. He said that the “U.S. should have nothing to do with it (the situation in Syria). Let it play out. Do not get involved”.  The Vice-President-elect JD Vance echoed this sentiment. When the neoconservative Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin categorically declared that in Syria “Freedom won[;] Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Assad lost,” Vance admitted that such comments “made him nervous because the last time this guy was celebrating events in Syria, we saw the mass slaughter of Christians and a refugee crisis that destabilized Europe”.  Trump-Vance’s prudence, as opposed to the wildly optimistic hawkish takes, is well advised. As Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford warned, “the track record of Arab Spring revolutions suggests a healthy amount of caution is warranted on where this is headed”.  That certainly applies to Syria. Assad’s regime was an odious tyranny even by Middle Eastern standards, and its collapse is unlamented. The leader of the Islamist terrorist opposition Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—formerly associated with Al-Qaeda—and the de facto new ruler of Syria is Ahmed al-Sharaa, more widely known as Mohammed al-Jolani, who is considered a terrorist by the U.S. and has a bounty of $10 million on his head. Since seizing power, he has embarked on a charm offensive promising an inclusive governance respectful of Syria’s ethnic and confessional diversity. Yet gruesome details of the extrajudicial executions of former regime officials and members of the Alawite religious group (to which the Assad clan happens to belong) are already emerging. While it is likely that these acts are carried out by disparate terrorists and common criminals, rather than centrally planned by the HTS leadership in Damascus, it is a disturbing harbinger of what may come—not some kind of an orderly transition to a new government, but militia violence and sectarian bloodshed. Meanwhile, relations between the self-styled “jihadist-nationalist” HTS, the pro-Turkish Syrian National Army (SNA), and the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are not settled and hold much potential for future violence. Taking advantage of the state collapse in Syria, Turkey and Israel are grabbing more Syrian land. In the middle of this violent chaos are some 900 American troops still deployed in Syria, ostensibly to fight ISIS. Channeling his prudence into actions, Trump should extricate these troops from Syria as soon as possible. He already attempted to do so during his first term, but was sabotaged by his own officials. This should never happen again, and there is a good chance that Trump will indeed try to finally fulfil his intention to leave Syria.  This would also help Trump to avoid an entanglement with Iran—something the hawks have been pushing for time out of mind. As Jon Hoffman notes in his paper for the Cato Institute, quoting the former U.S. ambassador in Damascus, Robert Ford, the U.S. forces in Syria are in reality deployed there to serve as a tripwire for a future war with Iran, not to fight ISIS.  No doubt, the hawks in Washington and Jerusalem will argue to Trump that the collapse of the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” made Iran more vulnerable than ever and now is the time to deliver a decisive blow to the Islamic Republic. That may certainly sound rational from an Israeli point of view, but not for the U.S. Iran’s current weakness should represent an incentive for Washington to seek a deal with Tehran from a position of strength rather than go for a regime change or military intervention, both explicitly rejected by Trump and Vance. And for a good reason. An expert on regional affairs, closely familiar with the thinking in Tehran, told me that, if the Iranian leadership perceives that it has entered an “existential phase” of the fight for its survival—as it undoubtedly would if faced with a prospect of a direct U.S./Israeli attack—it may throw at its enemies all the remaining assets it has.  Even in its weakened form, Iran still has a formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones, as well as dependable allies and proxies throughout the Middle East and the Gulf. Tehran has also intensified its military-technical cooperation with Moscow and is accelerating its nuclear program. It would pose an immediate threat to the American troops and military bases deployed throughout the region. The last thing Trump needs is an entanglement in another war in the Middle East. There are signs that Trump’s team understands the stakes. For one thing, it is notable how Brian Hook, a key Iran hawk in the first Trump administration who was initially placed in charge of the transition at the State Department, has largely disappeared from the public eye. As some well-informed Washington insiders told me, Trump’s team was dissatisfied with Hook’s remarks that the incoming administration would resume the maximum pressure campaign against Iran as, apparently, they were delivered without a proper assessment of the policy options.  On the other hand, such figures as Michael Boulos, Trump’s Lebanese-origin son-in-law and his point man on the Middle East, and his father, Massad Boulos, who helped Trump to court the Arab-American vote during the presidential elections this year, are reportedly gaining more influence. As Ali Rizk explained in The American Conservative, the Boulos family is close to Suleiman Frangieh, the Christian Maronite presidential candidate in Lebanon who is supported by none other than the Iran-aligned Hezbollah. While allegiances may change, this connection alone suggests an access to forces whose cooperation would be indispensable for Trump to draw the line on the American wars in the Middle East. Upon assuming the office, in order to appease the Iran hawks, Trump may feel compelled to announce some new measures against Iran. However, those should be not too drastic, keeping open a political space where Tehran need not overreact in response. Channels of conversation should exist to avoid mutual misunderstandings and overbearing, and one would assume both sides are busy establishing them. Once the political space is secured in Washington and Tehran, both sides need to move to some sort of a framework agreement that would at least avoid a direct, immediate clash, and then work out a more detailed deal.  Given Tehran’s weakness, the pragmatic government currently in charge there should be amenable to a deal with Trump. And for Trump, this would deliver on his “peace through strength” formula. The upheaval in Syria presented Trump with an unexpected opportunity. He should go for it. The post Trump’s Syrian Opportunity appeared first on The American Conservative.