Foreign Policy Matters: Yoon’s Martial Law Miscalculation
How South Korea’s Aspiring Autocrat Became a DC Darling
Impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol's short-lived declaration of martial law sparked alarm both at home and abroad, but it wasn’t his first major misstep. The embattled leader was already deeply unpopular domestically, due in part to his approach to repairing relations with Japan.
“Yoon’s own policymaking, even before the martial law disaster, was the cause of the reaction against his foreign policy moves,” Karl Friedhoff, the Council’s Marshall M. Bouton Fellow for Asia Studies, writes in Foreign Policy. “His inability and outright refusal to coalition build or consider criticism—the very things he was lauded for in Washington—made a considerable reorientation of Korea-Japan relations inevitable.”
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The Data Dimension
What do Americans think of Yoon? A Council survey conducted prior to the martial law declaration found more than half the US public (60%) says it has a favorable view of the South Korean leader, a similar favorability level to those reported for Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio (65%) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (63%).
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