The South Korean coup is a perfect coda to the Biden presidency

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/04/south-korea-yoon-
suk-yeol-biden

Jean Baudrillard’s 1986 travel diary of his time in Reagan’s America – 
“the only remaining primitive society on earth”, in his words – describes 
a paradox about the nature of late-century American hegemony. “American 
power does not seem inspired by any spirit or genius of its own,” wrote 
Baudrillard, “but it is, in a sense, uncontested and incontestable.” 
American “genius” appeared to suffer “from the weakening of all the forces 
that previously opposed it” – the incoherence of American strategic 
thinking, to Baudrillard, was thus a measure of its success.

Today, there are American adversaries everywhere – not least in what is 
now called the Indo-Pacific. But no such “spirit or genius” seemed to 
underpin the Biden administration’s response to the Tuesday coup in South 
Korea, much less South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempted 
overthrow of democratic rule. The Biden administration’s response has 
been, to say the least, limp. At the time of writing, the state department 
has said little beyond an assurance that its alliance with South Korea is 
“ironclad” and that the United States will “stand by Korea in its time of 
uncertainty”.

Nor does Yoon himself display any sort of strategic rationale, let alone 
“genius”. Unlike its historical antecedents, the coup did not represent an 
intra-elite clash for control of the South Korean state. The animating 
force of South Korea’s political crisis is, instead, the Dior handbag 
accepted by Yoon’s wife. Not even Yoon’s own party backed the self-coup; 
support appeared limited to the military, which nonetheless hesitated to 
see it fully through.

As such, the coup was improvised, chaotic and seemingly dependent on the 
gamble that South Korean civil society would fail to mobilize at the time 
of Yoon’s unannounced press conference banning political activity two 
hours past midnight. Having failed to secure a single parliamentary vote 
in favor of martial law, Yoon reversed his declaration by 5am Seoul time. 
His political future almost certainly involves impeachment and removal 
from office.

The risk is that, in light of the coup’s short-lived nature, Tuesday’s 
events will be read as simply an erratic right-populist’s spasms – and 
left from history altogether. The three-hour national crisis is certain to 
transform South Korean politics. Yet it is also a fitting final convulsion 
of Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy of pursuing detente against China at 
all costs – including embracing Yoon, whose anti-democratic affect has 
always been clear, as a liberal-democratic ally and an anchor of US policy 
in Asia.

The Biden administration’s crowning achievement in the Indo-Pacific has 
been the American-Japanese-Korean trilateral pact (Jarokus), a US-led 
collective security agreement intended to counter China. In August 2023, 
the US president hosted Yoon and the Japanese prime minister at a high-
profile Camp David summit, proclaiming a “a new era of trilateral 
partnership” – a summit made possible by Yoon’s unprecedented willingness 
to end the South Korean request for reparations from Japan for its abuses 
during the second world war in favor of an alliance against China.

Yoon’s eager participation in American efforts to consolidate an anti-
China bloc in the Indo-Pacific earned him the Biden administration’s tight 
embrace. In February, the deputy secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, 
suggested Yoon deserved the Nobel peace prize. And at a state dinner in 
April, Yoon serenaded his guests with a rendition of American Pie, and was 
then gifted a guitar signed by Don McLean himself; the White House’s 
social media team edited the episode into a charming social media video.

This was all despite Yoon’s readily apparent contempt for South Korean 
democracy. The accusations of North Korean sympathies and the “anti-state” 
slur leveled at his opposition in Tuesday’s announcement of martial law 
had been favorite phrases of Yoon’s since 2022. But the story told by the 
Bidenites about an ascendant China and a senescent America makes holding 
close the likes of Yoon not only a forgivable sin but a strategic 
necessity.

Revisionism, the historian Adam Tooze argues, is the logic of both Biden 
and Trump’s foreign policy. Both have sought to overturn the existing 
world order in an effort to reverse the American decline supposedly 
brought on by permissiveness toward China. Trump’s anti-Chinese policy 
requires little recapitulation. But, when it comes to China, the Bidenites 
have discarded the same rules they deplored Trump for attacking.

Biden, who campaigned upon rolling back Trump’s aggressive protectionism, 
has clashed with the WTO over steel tariffs. And against the wishes of 
some American allies, the Biden administration has spearheaded a global 
push to prevent Chinese electric vehicles from “flooding” foreign markets. 
This has led Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s first-term US trade 
representative, to profess himself “pleasantly surprised” by the 
administration. The geoeconomics of the Biden administration are every bit 
as radical as those of Trump.

Under the Trump and Biden presidencies, a new normative standard for 
American allies has solidified. Alignment with American revisionism is the 
United States’s first priority. Whether one complies with the rules-based 
order is a distant second. As with Israel, whose efforts to uproot Iran’s 
network of influence are quietly favored by the state department (even as 
it is well aware of Israeli war crimes), Yoon’s anti-democratic tendencies 
were always permissible to the Biden administration. Even Russia itself 
briefly met this standard – and was welcomed into detente against China in 
2021.

These spasms – in the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, and elsewhere – are 
to be expected under the bipartisan foreign policy of revisionism. And 
this century’s first coup in a democratic country with a major economy is 
a fitting coda to the Biden era.


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
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The disease known as Kamala Harris has been effectively treated and 
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Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden 
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Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
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