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By Bon-young Lee | November 19, 2025 | Originally published in Hankyoreh US President Donald Trump shakes hands with President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea at a welcome ceremony held at the Gyeongju National Museum on Oct. 29, 2025, ahead of their bilateral summit. (courtesy of the presidential office) This past Monday, Nov. 17, marked the 120th anniversary of the signing of what’s known in Korea as the Eulsa Treaty, which made Korea a protectorate of Japan and set the stage for its colonization. On that day in 1905, the nobles of the Korean Empire who had vowed to protect their country tucked their tails between their legs, one by one, under coercion and in the face of obstinance and placation from Hirobumi Ito.  Thus, the most notorious treaty in all of Korean history was drawn up and signed, marking the beginning of the fall of Korea. Four months earlier, the Japanese received tacit approval to govern Korea in the confidential Taft-Katsura agreement.  In the sexagenary cycle used by many cultures in East Asia, 2025 is an “Eulsa Year” — the Year of the Wood Snake, in zodiac terms — just as 1905 was. On Nov. 14, after a rocky negotiation cycle, the South Korean administration signed a memorandum of understanding on its tariff negotiations with the US. The National Assembly is still in a heated debate over whether the MOU about South Korea investing US$350 billion in the US requires the National Assembly’s ratification.  The People Power Party and the rest of the opposition argue that since the treaty “will burden the state or people with an important financial obligation,” it requires the National Assembly’s ratification, as stipulated in the Constitution.  The Lee Jae Myung administration and the ruling Democratic Party argue that MOUs are not legally binding and therefore do not require the legislature’s ratification. The administration also argues that ratifying the MOU would make it an official treaty, thereby shackling the administration to terms that would prevent it from renegotiating and maneuvering.  If the agreement does evolve into an official treaty, either in name or form, it’s liable to be belittled as the “New Eulsa Treaty.”  This is another reason for the government to avoid the term “treaty” at all costs. In the first phase of tariff negotiations, the US demanded the authority to decide when and where the US$350 billion went. Some within the administration reportedly reacted to it by calling it a second Eulsa Treaty. The original Eulsa Treaty, sometimes referred to in English as the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1905, made the Korean Empire a protectorate under Imperial Japan, so the trade MOU is indeed different in nature.  Japan, 120 years ago, was in the midst of swallowing up its neighboring countries. Korean Empire nobles beat their chests in the morning about protecting their country, and in the evening stuck their tails between their legs. This time around, the Lee administration worked around the clock to ensure that Korea would not have to cave to the absurd demands of the US. Many assess the deal as one in which the Lee administration put up a good defense and at least avoided the worst-case scenario.  But no matter how you spin it, Korea got the short end of the stick. Our economic sovereignty has been damaged. It’s difficult to think of any modern case of one country plundering another country this way. The methods used boggle the mind. Whatever happened to “give and take” being the basic principle of negotiations and deals? US President Donald Trump refers to himself as a dealmaker, but what he’s offering us is not fair compensation.  With a big stick in one hand and a small stick in the other, he says he’ll only hit us with the small stick if we offer something in return. Now that he’s secured a deal, he’s taking a finger instead of the arm and leg that he threatened to cut off. After imposing 25% tariffs for the first time, he secured a massive payment in exchange for the kindness of lowering the tariff rate to 15%. Mobsters running protection rackets and robbers are no doubt taking notes.  South Korea’s civil code refers to acts that defy common sense and are contrary to good morals or sound ethical appraisals — in other words, acts that contradict social norms — as “juristic acts contrary to social order,” and thereby declares them null and void. The code also refers to any unjust acts of exploiting someone’s economically deprived status as “unfair juristic behavior.”  Referring to the domestic civil code in response to a situation in international relations is pointless. However, considering the severity of the circumstances, it’s not enough to simply console ourselves by saying, “We did the best we could.” We must face the facts.  The Lee administration claims that it secured a more favorable agreement than Japan. Yet within the global tariff war that Trump started, the only countries that the US has arm-twisted into pledging direct cash investments from the government are South Korea and Japan. If Japan’s terms are more unfavorable than South Korea’s, Japan is in last place and South Korea is next to last. In a disaster, you cannot console yourself by saying someone else has it worse than you; it doesn’t change the fact that you’re miserable.  Looking back, the Eulsa Year of 1965, the one that fell between 1905 and 2025, was another year of trials and tribulations for Korea. The process of the Park Chung-hee regime normalizing relations with Japan put South Korean society through the wringer. That’s the year when South Korea began sending troops to fight in the Vietnam War. Only after thousands of young men were killed were we able to escape from the jungle.  1905, 1965, 2025 — all three years have been messy and involved the US and Japan. South Korea has always been the victim.  While we need to be realistic, we cannot simply resign ourselves to a c’est la vie attitude. That clouds our understanding of the real problem.  “In negotiations that we did not ask for, our sole strength is the ability to endure.” These words from President Lee Jae Myung in the press conference about the MOU sounded more like a sigh than a statement. We must harness our rage now so that our posterity does not suffer a bitter fate in the next Eulsa Year.  Bon-young Lee is a senior economics writer at The Hankyoreh.

By Léopold Lambert  | November 9, 2025 | Originally published in The Funambulist Korea after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. / Map by Léopold Lambert (2025). The 1945 defeat of Japan was meant to signify Korean liberation. In Manchuria, anticolonial and communist Korean guerillas were joined by the Soviet Union and Mongolian armies in August 1945, and proceeded to oust the Japanese from Korea. The US, however, imposed a partition of the peninsula following the 38th parallel, which was crystallized by the “bombing holocaust” of the Korean War starting 1950. In this conversation, Christine Hong provides useful historical context to understand the significance for Korea of the few weeks/years that followed the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LÉOPOLD LAMBERT : When I visited the Nagasaki memorial in 2024, I was struck by the sole presence of the Republic of Korea flag, a state that “represents” only the southern half of the country, and that did not exist in 1945 for the colonized Korean laborers in Japan killed by the nuclear bombings. How were the weeks that followed crucial for the way Japan-occupied Korea gave birth to the two militarized regimes we know today? CHRISTINE HONG : The historian Gar Alperovitz once stated that the atomic bombings of Japan represented not just World War II’s last act, but also the Cold War’s opening salvo. Few people would dispute that the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the closing punctuation point to World War II, but Alperovitz’s revisionist account compels us to consider their proleptic Cold War significance. By use of the atomic bomb, the United States sought to secure for itself a position of regional domination, if not global supremacy. Even though there was a two-front, US-Soviet Allied strategy for Japan’s defeat, the atomic bombings were a unilateral act, a spectacular showcase of US annihilatory power. The goal was to gain the upper hand in shaping the postwar world order. And let’s be clear: contrary to the retroactive propaganda tale spun by Truman’s secretary of state Henry Stimson that were it not for the bomb, over a million US soldiers would have been killed in the Pacific Theater, Japan had been negotiating surrender for about a year. Stimson’s postwar insistence on the bomb’s military necessity thus obscures the political implications of the US decision to use the bomb. By putting the Soviet Union, its wartime ally, on notice, the United States launched the Cold War. Yet the nuclear bombings granted broad geostrategic latitude to the United States in ways that go unrecognized. Over the years, I’ve thought about how Alperovitz’s insight might be understood relative to Korea. If the atomic bombs birthed the Cold War, the division of and ensuing hot war in Korea were seized to consolidate a nuclearized Cold War world order. On August 10, 1945, a day after the US bombing of Nagasaki and five days before Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to formally announce Japan’s surrender, Korea’s fate was sealed behind closed doors. Armed with a National Geographic map of Korea, two US military officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, adjourned to a side room and divided the Korean peninsula. In so doing, they created a Cold War blueprint for hot wars to come in Asia where the United States created or backed politically partitioned geographies, such as Taiwan and South Vietnam, and repeatedly intervened in peoples’ decolonizing struggles for national liberation and self-determination. By dividing the peninsula, the United States imposed on Korea, a colony of Imperial Japan, the fate visited on Germany, an enemy nation, after its defeat. Yet why was Korea—not Japan—severed in two? Korea, after all, was a victim of Japan’s imperialist aggression and settler colonial expansion. As Rusk recounted, he and Bonesteel chose the 38th parallel in order to keep Seoul in the US occupation zone. To achieve this goal, they heedlessly bisected Kaesong and other Korean towns and villages, devastating numerous communities and families. Did they consult with any Korean? Not remotely. Did they consider the anti-colonial struggle Koreans had been waging? Not at all. Neither gave a damn about the Korean situation in its material particulars. What this meant was that Korea’s liberation occurred in the same historic window as its tragic division. Both were consequent to the US atomic bombings in Japan. In Dictée (1982), Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha describes Korea’s division in language that captures the equivocal nature of US intervention: Korea was severed in two by an enemy clad in liberator’s garb. With foreseeable tragic consequences, the act of partition triggered a brutal war of national reunification in which the United States aggressively intervened, ruling the skies, contemplating using atomic bombs to create a “zone of cobalt” between Korea and China where no life could be sustained for a hundred years, and perpetrating what historian Bruce Cumings calls a “bombing holocaust.” Especially ruinous for the north, which the United States indiscriminately targeted as a “red region,” US bombing also devastated the south. Across the peninsula, an estimated 4 million Koreans were killed. This death toll is inexact because Korean lives, and therefore deaths, did not matter. Some Chinese statistics indicate that North Korea, which has never disclosed numbers, lost upwards of 30% of its population. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command, casually later remarked that the air force killed off 20% of the total Korean population. He conceded that had the United States lost—to be clear, it did not win—he would have been tried as a war criminal. LL : The five years following the two nuclear bombings led to another particularly devastating war—usually called the “Korean War.” Could you talk to us about it? CH : Many people in the United States think the Korean War was just one of many small wars the United States has waged in far-off places around the world. They don’t grasp the seismic transformation of the world order it facilitated. The official US line on the war, as expressed on the plaque at the Korean Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC, is that the United States sacrificed its own sons and daughters to save Koreans—the implication is from global communism. Yet this message contradicts Secretary of State Acheson’s statement in 1954: “Korea came along and saved us.” So which of these claims is true? Did the United States altruistically enter the war to save a benighted people in a distant country, or did the Korean War somehow save the United States? And why would the United States, recently victorious in World War II, need saving? Only if we take stock of the fact that the United States was transformed into a total war state during World War II can we understand that the Korean War was a godsend, rehabilitating a US economy geared toward total war. By authorizing a sweeping infrastructure of violence, the war’s implications exceed Korea itself. The war consolidated the US national security state. It legitimated the expansion of the US empire of bases and fortified the military-industrial complex. It placed the United States on permanent war footing, giving rise to a post-World War II pattern of US forever wars. The Korean War also hardened the division of the Korean peninsula by supplanting the 38th parallel with the demilitarized zone. Yet what actually is the nature of the US-South Korea alliance, its touted bonds forged in blood? We understand this to be a “strategic partnership” between unequal parties, with South Korea, in the first instance an anticommunist US creation, serving as a host site for a US garrison state that encircles the globe. What is less evident, given this rhetoric of friendship, is how South Korea figures as collateral damage in US war plans. Geography is key. The US division of Korea at the 38th parallel means North and South Korea’s capitals are in theory a relatively short car ride away from each other. There is therefore no nuclear targeting of North Korea that would leave the south unscathed. US apocalyptic designs toward Pyongyang cannot but encode the deaths of millions of South Koreans who are not formally US enemies. This returns us to what it means that the United States liberated Koreans, first from Imperial Japan and shortly thereafter from the forces of global communism. What does it mean that Koreans were “liberated” by means of the atomic bomb in 1945 and through a bombing holocaust less than half a decade later? For Koreans, an estimated 5.4 million of whom had been conscripted into Japan’s war effort as forced labor, the US atomic bombings meant freedom from the fetters of colonial rule. But there was a dark side to the day of freedom people in South Korea celebrate as Gwangbokjeol, or the day that light returned: namely, the deaths of tens of thousands of enslaved Korean laborers at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Korean mass death was thus built into Korea’s liberation in ways that blur the distinction between friend and enemy and that inform US policy toward the divided peninsula to this day. LL : The Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were created in a context of nuclear imperialism, the United States having demonstrated the mass murderous effects of their bombs, and the Soviet Union using their first warheads in Kazakh Indigenous lands in August 1949. Eight decades later, is nuclearism still a productive framework to think of Korea’s current political conditions? CH : Although not welcomed into the nuclear club, North Korea unquestionably is and has been a nuclear power for over a dozen years. By acknowledging North Korea as such on his return to office, Trump rhetorically marked a stark departure from his predecessors. Crafted with the goal of preventing North Korea from advancing down the nuclear road, post-Cold War US policy has aimed at “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization.” This objective notwithstanding, US policy toward North Korea over the last three decades has been anything but consistent. In contrast to North Korea, the US side of things has been characterized by regime shifts—first Clinton, then Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. Each US leader has gained political mileage by initially getting tough on North Korea and seeking to reverse their predecessors’ negotiating gains. Only late in the game—perhaps eyeing the Nobel Peace Prize, with the exception of Obama who was prematurely awarded it—have these presidents gotten vision by moving toward engagement. In practice, this has meant a remarkable succession of US nuclear threats against North Korea. In the early 1990s, Colin Powell, formerly Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush, threatened to turn North Korea into a charcoal briquette. Less than a decade later, George W. Bush yoked North Korea into a tripartite “axis of evil,” and Donald Rumsfeld argued the viability of a two-front war strategy in the Middle East and North Korea. Obama wielded a nuclear-armed North Korea as a bogeyman for remilitarizing Asia and the Pacific and announced the use of stealth bombers in the annual war exercises the United States conducts in and around Korea. And during his first term, Trump threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea, placing “all options on the table.” For North Korea, such threats do not come in a vacuum. More than virtually any other country, it intimately knows what it means to be in the US war machine’s crosshairs. In sheer tonnage, the United States dropped more bombs on North Korea, a country the size of Kentucky, than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. It dropped over 420,000 bombs on Pyongyang, which had 400,000 residents in 1950. This is the definition of overkill. As early as 1951, international delegations to North Korea remarked there was nothing left to bomb. Tellingly, North Koreans learned during this time to live underground. Schools, factories, dwellings, everything moved underground. Farmers ventured above ground at night to till their fields. For North Koreans as targeted life, night became day, day became night, and underground became home. Let’s also recall that until the early 1990s, the United States, in blatant violation of the armistice agreement, deployed nuclear weapons systems to South Korea. It continues to deploy nuclear aircraft carriers—essentially mobile military bases and launchpads—as part of its trilateral war exercises with South Korea and Japan that simulate North Korea’s nuclear decimation. This is to underscore that North Korea not only experienced apocalypse at the hands of the United States, but thereafter, has faced the prospect of total annihilation. This is critical context for North Korea taking to the nuclear path. The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) imposes a twofold obligation: non-nuclear states must not nuclearize, and nuclear powers must reduce and eventually eliminate their stockpiles. Yet the NPT has been wielded principally to crush the defense strategies of states that view the nuclear path as critical to their survival. While demanding that North Korea denuclearize, the United States has never taken measures to reduce its own nuclear stockpile. We should remember that during the “axis of evil” era, North Korea was urged by the United States to follow the “Libyan model” of nuclear dismantlement in order to have normalized relations with the West. North Korea watched US-engineered regime change in Libya with an eagle eye, understanding it to be an object lesson of what happens when countries consent to the eradication of their nuclear programs. Yet North Korea’s commitment to the nuclear path has tragically meant that it has transformed itself into a target to ensure its own defense. In contrast to the United States, which tested “the gadget” in Indigenous lands in New Mexico, and the Soviet Union, which conducted nuclear tests on Kazakh lands, North Korea has tested its devices underground in its own northeast. Aerial views of US Army Garrison Humphreys, the largest US military base outside of the United States. It is located near the Korean city of Pyeongtaek. / Photos by USAG- Humphreys (October 2015). LL : We were put in touch by Lisa Yoneyama, who mentioned the documentary, Village of Widows , about Korean hibakusha in Hiroshima in her contribution. I think that you teach this film in your class called “The Nuclear Pacific,” right? CH: Yes, that’s correct. There’s a scene from that documentary, the same one Lisa describes in her essay, that lingers with me. The film follows a delegation of Sahtu Dene elders and tribal members as they travel in 1998 to Hiroshima where they visit Korean hibakusha hospitalized with radiation sickness. Addressing the Koreans, a tribal elder movingly states, “We share your suffering. I am part of you.” How do we explain this encounter between peoples who are differently situated and ambivalently implicated within a nuclearized kill-chain? Mobilized by the Canadian settler state to extract uranium from their tribal lands for the Manhattan Project, Sahtu Dene miners and their families have suffered the mutagenic effects of radiation exposure across generations. Like Korean hibakusha, they have long campaigned for redress and justice. What does it mean when colonized peoples who belong to what Lou Cornum calls the “irradiated International” claim each other as relation? When the perpetrator nation refuses accountability, why do Indigenous people from Port Radium, themselves victims of nuclear imperialism, atone for the devastating effects of the US atomic bombing on Korean hibakusha in Hiroshima? By exceeding the limits of the perpetrator-victim binary, this criss-crossing of the nodes of the nuclear Pacific allows something unexpected yet powerful to emerge. Here, I am reminded of the fact that many of the enslaved Korean workers who were mobilized by the Japanese Imperial Army to labor in coal mines, factories, and other militarized industries came from Jeju Island. Seized as a launching pad for Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland, Jeju was a stopover in the Imperial Army’s infamous march to Nanjing in 1937. In the 1930s, Jeju people were conscripted to build Altteureu Airfield, a key refueling site for Japanese forces. Some died in the process. Yet even as they too were victims, Jeju islanders have repeatedly apologized to the people of Nanjing for their role in facilitating Imperial Japan’s atrocities. LL : Any vision of Korean reunification that would repair the effects of 35 years of Japanese colonialism and subsequent decades of militarism, clearly could not involve the absorption of one regime by another, but rather the inventive creation of new political conditions. Are there people working towards this vision? CH : Many people note that reunification is a moribund discourse that casts back to the time of US-backed military dictatorships in the south when “Tong-il” (통일) was the left’s rallying cry in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Following the inauguration of the hardline South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, who more recently was impeached after stunningly attempting to declare martial law, North Korea abandoned peaceful reunification and identified South Korea as a hostile state. In a 2023 constitutional amendment, it affirmed its nuclear status, clarifying that given continued US provocations, including combined-force war exercises that rehearse its invasion, regime collapse, and occupation, nuclearization ensures its right to existence. Yet if “Tong-il” is a dated term in the south, it’s also crucial to acknowledge that South Korea remains militarily occupied by the United States but generally speaking has an impoverished vocabulary for grappling with US imperialism. For Koreans, whether north or south, “Ilje-sidae” (일제시대) serves a common term of reference for the era of Japanese colonial rule. Yet if you mention “Mije-sidae” (미제시대), or the era of US imperial rule, to South Koreans whose sons are conscripted into mandatory military service, whose territory is occupied by the US military, and whose separation from family in the north is a consequence of the Korean War’s irresolution, you’ll likely draw a blank stare. There is little critical education, certainly not in formal spaces of learning, that enables people to grasp their own material conditions under US imperialism and to understand the Korean War not as an event, but as a durable structure that persists to this day. It is within a landscape conditioned by a fog of war that normalizes Korea’s division that groups like the South Korean civil-society organization, Solidarity for Peace and Reunification in Korea (SPARK) do urgent work. Emerging from the anti-imperialist wing of the democracy movement, SPARK formed during the first early 1990s’ North Korean nuclear crisis and thereafter organized delegations to NPT review conferences. In recent years, it has focused on overdue recognition of and justice for Korean A-bomb victims whose suffering has been minimized in even progressive, US-Japan no-nukes organizing efforts. The challenge remains not only US disavowal of its war crimes accountability but also the illegibility of Korean victims as colonized hibakusha. Since 2019, Korean hibakusha, supported by SPARK and an alliance of organizations, researchers, and activists in South Korea, the United States, and Japan, have taken part in many events, including three fora in Seoul, Hapcheon, and Hiroshima, in preparation for a major international people’s tribunal, focused on Korean A-bomb victims that will take place in New York next year. This past March, Korean hibakusha testified in Chicago about the world-shattering aftermath of the bomb, including its mutagenic effects. In calling for a nuclear-free world, they have focused on the United States, their supposed liberator from imperial rule, describing the 1945 US atomic bombings as “the original sin.” Although not foremost in their vocabulary, is “reunification” still a structuring freedom dream? I would say, Yes.  Christine Hong is a professor of ethnic studies and literature at UC Santa Cruz where she directs the Center for Racial Justice. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational organization, and is a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific , was published in 2020.

By Michael Hudson | September 11, 2025 | Originally published in Michael Hudson: On finance, real estate and the powers of neoliberalism Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash Most discussion of the past week’s SCO and BRICS meetings understandably have focused on the rising strength of their multilateral alternative to America’s attempt to impose its unipolar world control under its own rules calling for other countries’ subordination to U.S. demands to concentrate all the gains from trade and international investment in its own hands. China, Russia and India have established their ability to create an alternative to this control. But that has by no means diminished the basic U.S. ideal of control. It simply has led U.S. strategists to be realistic enough to narrow the scope of this control to focus on subjecting its own allies in Europe, Korea, Japan and Australia. Trump’s over-reaching attempt to control India’s economy quickly drove that nation out of the orbit of U.S. diplomatic dominance. (There is still substantial neoliberal support for India to join in the Atlanticist dream.) The question now is whether such demands will have a similar effect on driving other allies out of this U.S. orbit. And the subsidiary question is whether U.S. success in enforcing this control will have the effect of economically weakening its European, East Asian and English-speaking allies to the point where their ability to remain viable contributors is fatally crippled and will lead to a nationalist reaction to de-dollarize their own economies. The most obvious basket case is Europe, especially the most pro-U.S. members Germany, France and Britain whose public opinion polls show their populations strongly rejecting their current pro-U.S. puppet leaders. The most immediate breaking point is the EU’s open-ended submission to U.S. demands considerably beyond what was expected in the abject surrender by EU policy head van der Lehen to Trump’s tariff threats. She had explained her surrender as being worth it for Europe because at least it provided an environment of certainty. But there can be no uncertainty where Trump’s diplomacy is concerned. He has pulled a fast trick out of his hat by sharply raising tariffs above the promised 15% base, by dissolving that promise into his broader 50% tariff rates on imported steel and aluminum. These tariffs were to promote U.S. employment (and hence labor union support) in these two basic materials inputs despite raising costs for all U.S. manufacturers using these metals in their own products. That in itself was a crazy reversal of the basic principle of tariff policy: import low-priced raw materials to provide a cost subsidy for the high value-added products of industry. Trump put narrow political symbolism over national self-interest. What nobody anticipated was that the Commerce Department would apply these 50% steel and aluminum tariffs to European and other foreign industrial imports of motors, tools and agricultural and construction equipment. The Wall Street Journal quotes the head of Germany’s Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA), Bertram Kawlath, as warning that machinery accounts for some 30% of Germany’s exports to the  United States, creating so serious an “existential crisis” for its industrialists that European Parliament may not approve Trump’s July tariff dictates. A company producing agricultural harvesting machinery, the Krone Group, laid off a hundred employees and is reported to be redirecting its exports already being shipped to the United States. The German affiliate of the John Deere has been similarly affected, as 20% of its exports are reported as being sold in the United States. The Germans are said to be insisting on the same 15% U.S. tariff limit that Trump extended to pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and lumber imports. The effect has been to promote nationalist parties gaining support to replace the pro-U.S. Atlanticist parties committed to participating in America’s war against Russia and China, and even picking up the costs of fighting in Ukraine, the Baltic Sea and other areas bordering on Russia as well as extending “Atlantic” protection to mischief making in the China Sea. U.S. foreign policy has also imposed strains on Korea and Japan. Having demanded that Korea’s automobile company Hyundai shift production to the United States by investing in a $30 billion factory in Georgia, the immigration service descended on the plant under construction and deported some 475 employes (of whom 300 were reported to be Korean) who had been hired to provide the specialized labor. Hyundai explained that the workers were highly trained and under the direction of contractors that the company had used in Korea in order to complete the construction speedily and indeed to avoid the problem of having to deal with the lack of vocational education in the United States to supply such labor – not to mention the price differential from using Korean labor familiar with work on such projects. An official at the Korea International Trade Association accused U.S. policy of imposing an “impossible position” by sending such labor back to Korea by denying it the kind of working-visa arrangement that was granted to Australia. For many years Korea had sought to get equal treatment with such white immigrants and with Singapore, but was consistently turned down, although the immigration was permitted informally – until September 5, in what turned out to be a long-planned attack by armed ICE troops arresting the immigrants in other manacles. Hyundai and other foreign firms have discovered that investments they make in the United States provides America First administrations to use them as hostages, setting and changing the terms of their investment at will, knowing that the foreign investors are hardly prepared to simply walk away and lose their costly investments. But countries are being browbeat to make such investments as part of the financial shakedown policy that Trump has adopted: To avoid having U.S. tariffs raised against Korea’s automotive imports from 15% to 25%, Korea had to spend tens of billions of dollars to shift production to the United States. The threat was to crash Korean export income (and hence employment and earnings) if it did not surrender to Trump’s terms – with no military conflict being necessary to impose this trade-peace treaty. Trump used a similar bait-and-switch shakedown policy against Japan, threatening to create commercial chaos in its economy by imposing steep tariffs on its trade with the United States if it did not pay $550 billion in protection money for Trump to invest in projects of his own choice, keeping 90% of the profits for himself after Japan was reimbursed for its capital advance. The Japanese version of the original agreement indicated that the profits would be split 50/50, but the U.S. drafted a final version saying that that split would only govern the initial reimbursement of investment by Japan, not the profits. Such was Japan’s desperation – and abject surrender to U.S. demands, German-style – that it accepted Trump’s tariff deal of “only” charging Japanese esports 15% instead of 25% – the same deal that he had made with Korea. Japan was given only 45 days to pay up. The resulting slush fund was a political godsend to Trump, who is now able to use it as bait for his leading campaign contributors and supporters, while using the more than half a trillion dollars to help finance his budget’s tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. Trump also demanded a kickback on Japanese investment in U.S. steel production by Nippon Steel’s $15 billion purchase of U.S. Steel. The U.S. Government received a free golden share of the company’s stock to ensure U.S. control over the company’s operations. In the wake of the recent SCO and BRICS meetings, it seems unlikely that countries not already closely allied with U.S. control would make any such deals as Germany, Korea and Japan have done so far in 2025. These deals serve as object lessons highlighting the contrast between the U.S.-allied West and the rest of the world. Alaister Crooke on Monday, September 8, described how “The default psychological mode of the West will be  defensively antagonistic . … To acknowledge China, Russia or India as having ‘detached’ from the ‘Rules-based Order’ and constructed a separated non-western sphere clearly implies accepting the end of western global hegemony. And it means accepting too, that the hegemonic era as a whole is over. The U.S. and European ruling strata are categorically not in the mood for this.” It obviously is not over for America’s relationship with its NATO and other new Cold War allies. But it is limited to them, and Trump is seeking to extend the U.S. sphere of control to the Western Hemisphere as a whole – not only Latin America and Canada, but Greenland as well. The effort needed to lock in their dependency and withstand what one would expect to be nationalistic reactions against such subservience seems to have led U.S. policy to turn away from the conflict with its declared enemies Russia, China and Iran at least for the time being. The great question is whether these abused allies will at some point seek to choose a different set of alliances. Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (Editions 1968, 2003, 2021), ‘and forgive them their debts’ (2018), J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host  (2015),  The Bubble and Beyond (2012), T rade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.

By Dean Baker | September 11, 2025 | Originally published in Center for Economic and Policy Research Donald Trump has been boasting about his trade deals with Japan and Korea, where in exchange for buying down the taxes on their imports from 25 percent to 15 percent, they will give him $550 billion and $350 billion, respectively, to invest as he pleases. The nature of these commitments is not yet clear, but if they are anywhere close to the way Trump describes them, the countries would be ungodly stupid to take the deal. A little arithmetic makes this point clear. Last year Japan exported $148 billion of goods to the United States. Let’s say the 15 percent tax reduces its exports by 5 percent; that brings its exports down to roughly $140 billion, or 3.5 percent of Japan’s GDP. (Standard calculations of the response of imports to tariffs on a country’s exports are not very useful since Trump is simultaneously imposing tariffs on most imports.)  Suppose the additional 10 percentage point tax reduces Japan’s exports to the US by another 10 percent. This would be a reduction of $14 billion. or a bit more than 0.3 percent of Japan’s GDP.  In effect, Trump is asking Japan to hand him $550 billion to protect $14 billion in annual exports. That doesn’t sound like an especially good deal.  But wait, it gets worse. Trump does not feel bound by any of his deals. He can easily come back and demand more money from Japan next year, the year after, or at some point in his third time. As his business associates have learned the hard way, deals mean nothing to Donald Trump. Doing the same math for South Korea, it exported $132 billion of goods to the United States last year, approximately 7.3 percent of its GDP. If the 15 percent tax reduces its exports by 5 percent, it would bring them down to $125 billion. A further 10 percent reduction from Trump’s 25 percent tax would be $12.5 billion, or 0.7 percent of its GDP. To protect, this $12.5 billion in exports Trump is demanding that South Korea pay him $350 billion. It’s difficult to understand why any country would ever enter into this sort of deal with anyone, especially Donald Trump. They can take one-twentieth the sums being demanded by Trump and use the money to support workers and businesses hurt by the lost exports and come out way ahead. They also would not have to worry about Trump getting upset over some idiocy he thinks up or a right-wing influencer suggests to him. There is an argument that they may look to strike a deal to maintain military support from the United States against China. This would be an even more foolish strategy. These countries’ leaders would have to be crazy to count on Trump to protect them against military action from China. Is there something about “America First” they don’t understand? There is an argument that European nations could be looking this way with the idea they could buy some time. Their collective GDP is more than five times as large as Russia’s. With a little time, surely they could build up and coordinate their militaries to ensure they can amply protect themselves against Russia. The same is not true with South Korea and Japan. Even combined with Taiwan, their economies are less than one-third the size of China’s. Furthermore, China’s economy is growing far more rapidly. They cannot plausibly hope to match the power of China’s military. Given that reality, there is not much of a buying time story for these countries. They will likely have to reach some accommodation with China, since they can’t match its military and certainly cannot count on the United States for its support. In short, the question the leaders of these countries face is whether they feel like handing Donald Trump hundreds of billions of dollars for nothing. They may think this makes sense, but it is hard to see how. Dean Baker co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare, and European labor markets. His blog, Beat the Press , provides commentary on economic reporting. His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the Financial Times (London), and the New York Daily News .

By Dae-Han Song | August 23, 2025 | This article was produced by Globetrotter APEC 2025 is happening at a pivotal global moment mired in Trump’s tariff extortion amidst seismic shifts towards a multipolar world. APEC economies meet on digital policy cooperation in July 2025. Photo: APEC secretariat/X If you look at the news, the media treats the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum more like a gala than a policy forum about regional economic policies. Despite high level meetings having occurred between the government and business interests (i.e., the APEC Business Advisory Committee), despite two senior official meetings having taken place, the media has done a negligible job of bringing the agenda and discussions in these meetings to public consciousness or debate. Instead, it has mostly focused on who will be there – K-pop megastar G-Dragon was named APEC Ambassador – or whether the accommodations and infrastructure are adequate . Little is mentioned about the specifics of the mostly closed-door discussions and decisions in the meetings and gatherings that will continue to take place between government ministers, experts, and corporations all the way up to the Leaders’ Summit on October 30 to November 1 in Gyeongju. Yet, as an economic forum liberalizing the center of gravity of the world’s economy, APEC gatherings are significant. They establish common expectations, norms, and values around corporate-driven growth . APEC 2025, in particular, is happening at a pivotal global moment mired in Trump’s tariff extortion amidst the new Cold War and the seismic shifts towards a multipolar world. All this is happening within the backdrop of climate change that is rapidly coming into the forefront of global affairs. And while APEC will discuss and grapple with all these issues, the general public has little say in or access to these discussions. As a response, civil society in South Korea is preparing an international task force to respond to APEC. As a convener of such a body, the International Strategy Center is researching the background, dynamics, and actors within APEC. To educate ourselves and the public, we are starting an article series exploring the emergence of APEC, our current global context, and people-centered alternatives to APEC’s corporate-centered approach. APEC in a nutshell APEC involves 21 economies from the Asia-Pacific region. Its members are referred to as economies, as a compromise with the People’s Republic of China for including Hong Kong and Taiwan. In contrast to the closed regionalism of NAFTA or the EU that gives preferential tariff treatment to its members, APEC promotes an open regionalism compatible and in concert with larger globalization efforts. APEC’s measures are unilateral (economies decide when and how to carry them out), voluntarist (economies can choose not to), and arrived at through consensus. Despite lacking an enforcement mechanism, APEC is significant as a body because of the great scope of its long-term vision, which is to establish free trade at the center of the global economy: APEC contains 37% of the global population; 61% of its GDP; 50% of global export in goods; 50% of global imports in goods. APEC’s measures facilitate trade and global value chains for multinational corporations. Such policies involve deregulation, which contravene society’s ability for democratic governance of the economy. This is reflected in APEC’s closed door discussions and negotiations with APEC Business Advisory Council playing a central role representing corporate interests. In contrast, civil society groups representing the broader public such as peasants, workers, consumers, and environmentalists have no such body or access. Origins  Oftentimes, understanding the context and actors involved in the creation and trajectory of an institution reveals much about its function and nature. This is also the case with APEC’s origins in the 1960s from multinational corporations’ engagement with governments in the region. While Australia was often the figurehead, in reality, much of this regional integration was led by a Japan working behind the scenes given the regional enmity towards its previous imperialist domination. That Japan was the regional leader is a natural consequence of its emergence as Asia’s largest and the world’s second largest economy in the 1960s. This was in concert with US plans to turn Japan into the regional economic leader and bulwark against Communism. Japan’s initial impetus came from the close regionalism emerging in the 1950s and 60s with the European Economic Community and the US-Canada FTA that would expand into NAFTA. This would intensify after the 1985 Plaza Accord, leading to the creation of APEC. Japan promoted this regional economic integration through its Flying Geese Theory of development: as the leading goose, when Japan matured out of an industry (e.g., textiles), it would pass it on to the next geese (e.g., South Korea, Taiwan), which would, in time, do the same to the next geese (e.g., Malaysia, Indonesia). In effect, it was creating a global value chain in the region centered around Japan. Trajectory These discussions for regional integration between multinational corporations, experts, and governments began ad-hoc in 1968 when Japan proposed a Free Trade Area of Asia-Pacific. In 1980, they evolved into the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council’s (PECC) annual informal meetings. The drive for regional integration intensified with Japan’s need for regional cheap labor (as a result of the 1985 Plaza Accord’s appreciation of the Japanese yen). Japan’s FDI between 1986 and 1989 equaled all the previous post-World War II FDI. In 1989, the informal government participation at the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council was formalized with the establishment of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum. Today, the PECC remains a second track diplomatic channel. The APEC Forum was further elevated in 1993 by US President Bill Cinton, who proposed an annual Leaders’ Summit in an attempt to propel the process towards a Free Trade Area of Asia Pacific. The following year, the Bogor Goals set the goal of establishing a Free Trade Area of Asia Pacific, eliminating tariffs for industrialized economies by 2010 and for industrializing economies by 2020. The 1995 Osaka Plan of Action, shaped by a wary ASEAN and a Japan anxious about protecting its agriculture, institutionalized the voluntarist and consensus driven approach to realizing the FTAAP. Having failed to achieve an FTAAP, in 2020, the Putrajaya vision once again set its sights for an FTAAP by 2040. Today Despite Japan’s importance as a steward of APEC, the US has always exerted a greater influence in APEC’s trajectory. Now, with China’s rise, China now also exerts great influence. For the US, its vision of a free trade area of Asia-Pacific evolved from the US-centered legalistic approach as embodied in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement with APEC members, which Trump pulled out of in 2017, to Biden’s Indo Pacific Economic Framework, and now to Trump’s tariff extortionism today. True to its role as APEC steward, Japan salvaged the TPPA agreement and facilitated the creation of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. In contrast, the China-centered Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, reflecting China’s own economy, allows greater state economic intervention. The approaches of both the US and China shape and guide APEC’s move goal of achieving a free trade area for the Asia-Pacific region. Yet, neither approach provides a path forward in resolving the climate change and war crises facing the world today. APEC 2025’s slogan – “Building a Sustainable Tomorrow: Connect, Innovate, Prosper” – contains all of the right buzzwords. Yet, with the planet and people’s welfare at stake, APEC’s closed-door, opaque meetings centered on multinational corporations are unacceptable. After all, the “economic” in APEC is not simply made up of corporations. Workers, farmers, consumers, all people make up the economy. Thus, the general public must be a part of these conversations. That is why we are creating the Global Civil Society Task Force on APEC. And the first step of this process is learning exactly what APEC is, how we got here, and where we must go. Dae-Han Song is a part of the International Strategy Center and the No Cold War collective and is an associate at the Korea Policy Institute . This article was produced by  Globetrotter   and the International Strategy Centre (Seoul, South Korea).

By Dae-Han Song and Vijay Prashad | July 9, 2025 | This article was produced by  Globetrotter  and  No Cold War Image credit: KCNA The atomic bomb has been humanity’s most dangerous creation; that the United States government used the atom bomb twice against Japan’s civilians in August 1945 can neither be forgiven nor forgotten. It is fitting that one of the first acts of the United Nations in January 1946 was establishing a commission to deal with the “Problems Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy”. Yet, the resolution did not ban atomic weapons but simply sought to study its “problems”. Even after the grotesque demonstration in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States government was reluctant to permit the abolition of nuclear bombs. Having opened the doorway to Hell, there was no real desire to close it. Creating the first major United Nations treaty to tackle atomic weapons took two decades. More importantly, the treaty did not ban nuclear weapons. While preventing further proliferation, it, nonetheless, allowed the then-nuclear powers – the United States (1945), the Soviet Union (1949), the United Kingdom (1952), France (1960), and China (1964) – to keep their nuclear arsenal. When the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) came into force in 1968, Israel likely had nuclear weapons ( 1967 ). Thereafter, despite the NPT, India (1974), Pakistan (1998), and North Korea (2006) developed and tested nuclear weapons. Of all these countries, only North Korea has been pressured to de-nuclearize by the United States and its allies. If it has refused, it is because denuclearizing would lead to its annihilation . These facts and dynamics confirm that there are only two possible paths: the universal abolition of nuclear weapons and the threat of annihilation of countries by imperialism or the inevitable proliferation of nuclear weapons across the globe. The attack on Iran by Israel and the United States The Israeli and US attack on Iran’s nuclear energy facilities this June was illegal; it had neither a UN Security Council resolution nor approval from the US Congress. These two allies conducted their attack in the name of nuclear non-proliferation. They pummelled Iran’s nuclear energy enrichment sites and its research facilities to set back Iran’s nuclear energy program. In fact, the attack will have the opposite effect. From Iran’s point of view, the attacks by Israel and the US make the acquisition of nuclear weapons a rational and urgent choice. There has been no verifiable evidence that Iran has been developing a nuclear weapon. It has been a member of the NPT since the day the treaty was opened for signatures on July 1, 1968. In 1996, Iran signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty, another indication of its lack of interest in the development of nuclear weapons. Despite the pressure campaign on Iran, it has cooperated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – according to international law and norms – to have its nuclear energy sites inspected on a regular basis. There has been no report by an international agency that confirmed Iran having a nuclear weapons program. At most, in 2015, the IAEA suggested that Iran had shown some interest in nuclear weapons before 2003 but “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities”. Yet, despite the lack of evidence, Iran was illegally attacked without UN Security Council approval. After the Israeli attack on Iran, the Iranian Parliament voted to suspend all cooperation with the IAEA. Large crowds gathered across Iran to call upon their government to reject the pressure on Iran and to develop a nuclear bomb to protect the country from such wars of aggression. In other words, the tempo has begun to build up in Iran for the country to hastily develop a bomb and test it openly as immunity from a regime change war. Logic of proliferation Mainstream media portrays countries pursuing nuclear weapons as rogue states that threaten global stability. In this narrative, authoritarian leaders pursue nuclear weapons out of an inscrutable empty obsession for self-aggrandizement as a nuclear weapon state. Yet, recent history and the US war drive make a clear case that acquiring nuclear weapons is the most rational choice for states seeking any autonomy from US domination. This is illustrated by how Libya’s denuclearization was followed by its destruction while North Korea’s nuclearization has allowed its preservation. In 2003, the Libyan government announced that it would no longer proceed with its nuclear weapons program. The Libyan government negotiated with Western powers to no longer be treated as a “rogue state”. Between 2004 and 2006, the IAEA came to Libya and dismantled its nuclear weapons project. But despite giving up its nuclear shield, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi continued speaking out. In 2009, he went to the United Nations and spoke openly about a private conversation in which the IAEA chief Mohamed el-Baradei had told him that the IAEA could not inspect the “super-powers”. “So, is the IAEA only inspecting us?” Gaddafi asked . “If so, it does not qualify as an international organization since it is selective, just like the Security Council and the International Court of Justice”. Two years later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) exceeded the UN Security Council mandate from resolution 1973 (2011) to create a “no-fly zone” over Libya and destroyed the Libyan state. The lesson was clear: if you give up your nuclear weapons program, you can be annihilated. In 2006, after the US illegal war that overthrew the government of Iraq, the government of North Korea tested a nuclear weapon – the only government to do so in the 21st century. Since then, despite immense pressure, there has been reticence to openly overthrow the government in Pyongyang. For any rational person, the example of Libya and North Korea sends a very clear message: developing nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them are the most effective deterrent. In fact, each stage in the development of North Korea’s nuclear program was precipitated by the US stalling in the peace process or failing to carry out its promises for peace and security made to North Korea. In effect, North Korea’s two-track process allowed it to pursue its security through the diplomatic path when possible and through nuclear deterrence when necessary. Faced with existential crises, the world needs to shift its focus from war and destruction to healing the planet and taking care of its people. It cannot be dragged into an arms race. Thus, denuclearization is key. Yet, without the conditions for peace and disarmament, for some states, nuclear proliferation may be a matter of survival. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research . He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations . His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism , and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power . Dae-Han Song is a part of the International Strategy Center and the No Cold War collective, and is an associate at the Korea Policy Institute . This article was produced by  Globetrotter   and  No Cold War .

By Ji-Yeon Yuh | July 1, 2025 | Originally published in The National Interest Image Credit: Shutterstock/Yeongsik Im. Lee Jae-myung faces an emboldened, nuclear North Korea and an uncooperative US; to succeed, Seoul must shift from denuclearization demands toward arms control and independent, multilateral diplomacy. Editor’s Note: This article is part of the symposium “President Lee and North Korea.” The full symposium can be found  here . The US strike on Iran is driving North Korea deeper into its renewed alliances with Russia and China, strengthening its conviction that nuclear weapons are a necessity for its self-defense, and decreasing the already faint possibilities for peace in northeast Asia. In this hostile milieu, can Lee Jae-myung’s South Korea stake out its path for peace in the region?  South Korea’s Foreign Policy Has Been Defined By the United States Much depends on his administration’s grasp of the new realities and willingness to move independently of the United States. North Korea is no longer an isolated nation-state seeking Western friends by dangling the prospect of its denuclearization, even as it sought nuclear weapons for self-defense.  That version of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) disappeared after the disastrous 2019 Hanoi Summit . Instead, the DPRK is the newest nuclear power on the globe and has been strikingly bold in its foreign policy actions. In January 2024, the DPRK loudly renounced reunification as a goal, destroying the Reunification Arch to demonstrate its resolve, and named South Korea an enemy state. Perhaps most alarmingly, it sent troops into battle for the first time since 1953, aiding Russia in its war against Ukraine and signalling a newfound aggressiveness.   This is essentially the poisoned fruit of failed US policies since 1945, with a war that never officially ended and a US nuclear umbrella over South Korea since 1958.    Yet, North Korea also spent some three decades using its nuclear weapons development program as bait. But again and again, the door would open and then shut; it opened the widest with the 1994 Agreed Framework, closed under Bush in 2002, and slammed shut in 2019 when the US delegation stalked out of the Hanoi summit.  Since then, the DPRK has shown little interest in talking with the United States. Soon after, South Korea chose the anti-communist rightwinger Yoon Seok-yeol as its president and the US announced its strengthened US-Japan-ROK military solidarity, the DPRK renounced reunification and named the ROK its enemy. In doing so, it was mirroring the stance of the US and the ROK’s stance toward North Korea from its inception in 1948.  President Lee Starts a New Age of Inter-Korean Relations The recently elected Lee Jae-myung is now sending friendly signals to the north and appointing a familiar old guard committed to engagement. But with the US embroiled in a new conflict with Iran, can the ROK turn around its volatile relationship with the North?  Unfortunately, neither the US nor the ROK seems ready to do what is necessary for peace with the DPRK. The recent US strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities is merely the latest demonstration, as far as the north is concerned, that the US, and by extension, South Korea, cannot be trusted. The chances are slim that Lee Jae-myung’s engagement approach can succeed without US cooperation.    The North Korea policy that seems to be coalescing for South Korea is a return to the playbooks of previous progressive administrations, offering economic engagement, liaison offices, canceling war games, loosening sanctions, and the like, likely paired with the United States’ equally old demands for denuclearization. That approach would ignore the new reality.  Additionally, Kim Jong-un has to be coaxed into rejoining the negotiating table. Back-channel overtures have failed, and the most recent one, where Trump reportedly sent a letter to Kim via the DPRK delegation at the UN, has yet to bear any fruit. Perhaps that letter included an apology for the epic smackdown that Trump delivered to Kim by walking out of the Hanoi summit. Kim likely requires guarantees that nothing similar will happen again before he considers talking to the US.  The new Lee administration must be prepared to move forward independently to succeed in the present circumstances, given the erratic Trump administration in the US, which is unlikely to offer much assistance. This means understanding that the time for an arms control approach, not a denuclearization approach, has arrived. It means making overtures to North Korea independently and adopting a multilateral foreign policy that strengthens relationships with key nations, such as China.  What Will President Lee Do to Improve Relations with North Korea? Lee Jae-myung’s decision to stop broadcasts at the DMZ was precisely the kind of independent move that these times demand, and it garnered a swift response: North Korea also dropped its propaganda broadcasts, and the US registered its displeasure at its junior ally’s lack of prior consultation. Lee continued the momentum by naming pro-engagement figures such as Lee Jong-seok as espionage chief and Wi Sung-lac as national security advisor.  It also signaled a shift to multilateralism by naming former UN envoy Cho Hyun as foreign minister. Will Lee Jae-myung’s ROK continue to implement bold ideas on its own, even if they are small steps like cancelling propaganda broadcasts, and build trust with the DPRK? Or will it succumb to US pressures?  If history is any guide, US pressures are likely to win out. However, South Korean leaders, such as Kim Dae-jung, made bold moves with the Sunshine Policy, which steered the two Koreas toward cooperation. It can happen again with clear-eyed leadership focused on peace.  With the US at war in the Middle East, North Korean troops in Ukraine, and numerous other war zones across the globe, the need for peace in northeast Asia is greater now than ever before.  Ji-Yeon Yuh teaches Asian diasporas, war and empire, and Asian American history at Northwestern University. Her book Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America was the first substantive work to examine the consequences of US militarism for Korean migration and diaspora. Her opinion pieces and interviews on the legacies of the ongoing Korean War have appeared in numerous publications and broadcasts. She currently serves as the board chair for Women Cross DMZ.

By Dae-Han Song | June 17, 2025 | This article was produced by Globetrotter Lee’s pragmatic foreign policy must disengage from the US-led NATO expansion into Asia that destabilizes the Indo-Pacific. President of the Republic of Korea Lee Jae-Myung. Photo: wiki commons In his inaugural speech, South Korea’s recently elected President Lee Jae-myung declared that “no peace is too expensive; it is always better than war”. The words capture an idealism packaged in Lee’s pragmatism. Indeed, at a time when the US Cold War against China is turning Asia into a tinderbox, when global temperatures have exceeded a 1.5°C increase, and South Korea’s economy and society are reeling from martial law, peace is the only pragmatic way forward. As such, Lee’s hesitancy in attending the June NATO Summit was a welcome contrast to former President Yoon Suk-yeol’s enthusiastic participation. The opposite of pragmatism, Yoon was driven by a deep idealism to turn South Korea into a “ global pivotal state ” for the US, regardless of the damage to inter-Korean stability or to South Korea’s relationship with China, a strategic trading partner. Amidst the backdrop of the chorus of editorial voices (including the conservative Chosun newspaper ) from Korea’s leading media pressuring him to attend, Lee has stated that he will likely attend the NATO Summit. Yet, attending NATO exacerbates the crises facing South Korea, the region, and the world. Lee’s pragmatic foreign policy must disengage from the US-led NATO expansion into Asia that enables the US to escalate military tensions and destabilize the Indo-Pacific (the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and the Korean Peninsula). An Atlantic offensive in the Pacific Contrary to its original mandate , NATO has neither been about “collective defense” nor about the “North Atlantic area”. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union (its ostensible justification for being), NATO has continued to exist, invading and waging war in Eastern Europe and West Asia to maintain its (especially that of the United States’) dominance under the rhetoric of “a rules-based order”. Then, starting in 2021, under the continuous urging of the US , overriding concerns about hurting “ political and economic cooperation with Beijing ”, NATO began framing China as presenting “ systemic challenges to the rules-based international order ”. Or to put it more directly, NATO feared that China challenged its “ transatlantic values and interests ” around the world. The heads of state of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea (collectively the Indo-Pacific 4) started attending the NATO summits in 2022. While NATO’s clause ten prevents non-European countries from joining its alliance, NATO’s expanded cooperation with these four US Indo-Pacific allies (on interoperability, joint war exercises, and “ technological cooperation and pooling of R&D ”) frees the US to intensify its Cold War against China. Furthermore, when NATO militaries make port calls and carry out exercises in the Indo-Pacific, they expand the US military footprint in the region while practicing future concerted responses to a military contingency. Given the importance of military posture during peace in determining the outcome of conflicts, the entry of Atlantic elements into the Pacific is, in itself, aggressive. Ultimately, even if NATO does not intervene in a regional conflict, it can still do everything else to contribute to the US Cold War and arms race against China. Rebalancing a lopsided foreign policy As Lee enters office, he must extricate South Korea from former President Yoon Suk-yeol’s headlong rush into the US’s cold war against China. Not only did the Yoon administration enthusiastically participate in the NATO Summits starting in 2022, but it also rushed to support US efforts to maintain its hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region in the Taiwan Strait, not least by entering into a trilateral security cooperation agreement with Japan and the United States. It’s not yet clear how the Lee Administration will deal with Trump’s pressure to join its containment of China: after Lee won the election, the Trump administration acknowledged the elections as free and fair and then expressed concerns about Chinese influence, with little care to substantiate such claims. Within a Korean context, these claims are a nod to the far-right conspiracy theory that the 2020 National Assembly Elections involved Chinese interference, which Yoon used to justify calling martial law. The remarks were the diplomatic equivalent of warning shots from a gunboat against Lee’s intention to rebalance South Korea’s foreign policy by improving relations with China. The Lee administration faces many challenges. If Lee Jae-myung won with 49% of the vote, the pro-martial law conservative candidate nonetheless gained 41% of the vote. Thus, despite the great political mobilizations of the 2016 Candlelight Revolution and the 2024 Revolution of Lights, South Korea still struggles to break free from a Cold War framework that limits democracy to a contest between conservative parties. South Korea’s inability to shake off this Cold War framework is partly due to the legacy of the Korean War (far-right conservative support is highest among those past 60 ), but it is also buttressed by the ongoing US military presence and Korea’s lack of wartime operational control of its own military. Established under US military occupation and developed under the US economic aegis, South Korea is constrained in its ability to chart an independent foreign policy based on its own national interests, such as achieving peace with North Korea. This constrains Lee’s ability to backtrack from many of Yoon’s commitments to the United States, such as the JAKUS trilateral security cooperation, intentionally designed to survive changes in administration . Given the increasing pressure to attend NATO’s meeting, it’s likely Lee will attend. Lee’s initial reasoning that now is the time to focus on the recovery of Korea’s economy rather than on attending the NATO summit is pragmatic for Koreans. As a way of stepping out of the US-led war drive in the region, when we should be diffusing rather than exacerbating the world’s crises, it is also pragmatic for the world. Dae-Han Song is a part of the International Strategy Center and the No Cold War collective and is an associate at the Korea Policy Institute . This article was produced by Globetrott er.

By Simone Chun | June 6, 2025 | Originally published in Counterpunch A sea of people waving flags and light sticks stands before the National Assembly in Seoul’s Yeouido on Dec. 14, 2024, when lawmakers passed a motion to impeach President Yoon Suk-yeol for his declaration of martial law on Dec. 3. (Kim Hye-yun/Hankyoreh) One of the most consequential missteps in US Korea policy under the Biden administration was the failure to engage with South Korea’s domestic political realities, particularly the widespread public opposition to President Yoon Suk-yeol’s increasingly authoritarian rule. By relentlessly propping up Yoon to serve Washington’s geopolitical agenda and its escalating Cold War posture toward China, the Biden administration not only ignored Korean public sentiment but also fueled domestic unrest. Domestic outrage against Yoon’s regime came to a head with his attempted imposition of martial law on December 3, 2024—a move that exposed the fragility of his position and deeply damaged Washington’s credibility in the region. Backing unpopular authoritarian leaders for strategic gain is hardly new in terms of US foreign policy, but as Korea’s experience shows, subordinating democratic values to geopolitical priorities carries real costs. Moving forward, US policymakers–and Western media–must begin by acknowledging the historic democratic uprising that put an end to Yoon’s martial law and led to the election of Lee Jae-myung on June 3. His presidency reflects a clear popular mandate that Washington can hardly afford to ignore. The historic disconnect between US policymakers and Korean popular democratic sentiment was made painfully clear during last week’s White House press briefing, when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked whether the administration had a response to South Korea’s historic election. “Yes, we do!” Then, flipping through her notes, she hesitated and admitted, “Um, we do not… but I will get you one.” That pause said it all: the United States had no prepared remarks on one of the most significant democratic movements in East Asia in decades. When a response finally arrived, it fell short of the moment. And the White House briefly called the election “ fair ” before pivoting to vague claims of Chinese interference in democracies worldwide. There was no mention of Yoon’s illegal martial law declaration, of the tanks in the streets, or the millions who stood unarmed to defend their democracy.  Rather than honoring Korea’s democratic achievement, the official statement simply reaffirmed the US-ROK “ironclad alliance,” emphasized trilateral military ties with Japan, and invoked boilerplate references to “shared democratic values.” For many Koreans, this rang hollow—especially given the Biden administration’s quiet backing of a regime that had nearly dismantled those very principles. Across the Pacific, Korea’s Revolution of Light was met not with solidarity, but with strategic discomfort, silence, and at times, what felt like dismissal or even contempt. While millions of Koreans rose to defend and reclaim their democracy, Washington remained entangled in the rhetoric of power politics—issuing statements that conveyed, at best, indifference, and at worst, implicit threats. Veteran journalist Tim Shorrock , who has covered Korea for over 30 years and helped expose US complicity in the suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising, went so far as to brand the White House response to Lee’s election “a vicious slander of South Korea’s hard-won democracy.”  Resisting Dictatorship, Defending Sovereignty  On June 3, Koreans elected Lee Jae-myung , the candidate of the Democratic Party of Korea, as the nation’s 21st president, delivering not just a victory at the ballot box but a powerful mandate for democracy, justice, and popular sovereignty. This was not just an election. It was a revolution, albeit a peaceful and democratic one. The extraordinary snap presidential election triggered by the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol turned out voters in record numbers. Of 44.39 million eligible voters, 35.24 million cast their ballots, representing a staggering 79.4% turnout, the highest in nearly three decades. Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party won 49.42% of the vote—the highest share in any presidential race since South Korea’s democratization in 1987—and became the first Korean president to receive over 17 million votes. His far-right opponent, Kim Moon-soo of the People Power Party, trailed with 41.15%. But the numbers tell only part of the story. This election was a national reckoning—a referendum on Yoon’s unconstitutional seizure of power, the people’s unyielding determination to reclaim their democracy, and above all, their sovereignty.  While former president Yoon and his collaborators continued to sow instability and chaos, the Korean people responded with extraordinary discipline, reaffirming their refusal to return to Korea’s authoritarian past. Despite a deeply entrenched conservative base—about 30% of the electorate that reliably supports right-wing candidates regardless of who runs—and Washington’s consistent favoritism toward conservative leadership, voters ultimately propelled opposition liberal candidate Lee Jae-myung to victory.  A Movement, Not Just a Mandate What happened in the wake of Yoon’s illegal martial law declaration was one of the most disciplined, rational, and nonviolent democratic uprisings in modern history.  Millions of Koreans—students, workers, women, and the elderly—resisted not with weapons but with law, protest, and truth. Several dynamics shaped the unprecedented electoral outcome that followed: Broad-Based Support: Despite a last-minute conservative surge, centrist and pro g ressive voters overwhelmingly backed Lee. Exit polls showed nearly 60% of voters supported candidates who endorsed Yoon’s impeachment. The result was a clear mandate to dismantle the remnants of Yoon’s autocratic and insurrection regime. Regional Breakthroughs: Lee achieved historic gains in traditionally conservative strongholds such as the southern province of Busan and the central Chungcheong region, outperforming all previous liberal candidates. His success signals a shift among moderate voters and points to a potential realignment of the electorate and a critical juncture in South Korea’s electoral history. Progressive Unity: For the first time in years, Korea’s democratic-progressive parties stood united. With the exception of the Labor Party, progressive parties, mindful of the fateful 2022 election, when Yoon was elected by a razor-thin margin of 0.7%, chose not to field their own presidential candidates to minimize vote-splitting among minor progressive candidates. Civil society and grassroots organizations mobilized, and millions rallied behind Lee Jae-myung as the only viable path to end the insurrection and restore constitutional order. Amid mass mobilization and a strong democratic resolve, and after three years of incompetent, chaotic, and failed leadership under Yoon, Koreans made a clear choice based on competence and leadership rather than ideology. Koreans Voted for Responsibility in Leadership Lee Jae-myung trajectory is one of both personal triumph and political transformation. Born into poverty, the former child laborer rose to become a human rights attorney, a reformist mayor, and the governor of Gyeonggi Province. After narrowly losing the 2022 presidential race, he faced unprecedented repression under Yoon’s “republic of prosecutors”, with 250 elite prosecutors assigned to investigate him and over 350 raids conducted on his offices. Undeterred, Lee continued to challenge Yoon’s autocratic rule by unifying his party under progressive leadership and systematically confronting the regime’s abuses. His leadership reached its defining moment on the night of December 3, during the martial law crisis. In a contemporaneous YouTube live broadcast from the National Assembly, Lee directly appealed to the public, urging them to gather there to demand the withdrawal of martial law. His calm, resolute handling of this critical moment in the face of personal danger exemplified the highest standard of public service and leadership, deeply resonating with voters.  In a pre-election poll, 35.3% of voters cited “experience and competence” as their top priority. Having campaigned as a policy expert, a public servant, and a survivor of Korea’s harshest inequalities, Lee embodied these qualities. “If anybody is up to the job, he is… He is a pragmatist with a track record of getting things done. He would hit the ground running,” observed Kyung-wha Kang , President and CEO of Asia Society. Lee wasted no time after winning the election. With no transition committee in place, he assumed official responsibilities immediately on June 4, stepping into a presidential office stripped bare by the outgoing regime, and lacking computers, documents, and even pens. Lee compared the presidential office to a tomb , an image that speaks volumes about the Yoon administration’s legacy of corruption, incompetence, and institutional neglect. Lee inherits a nation still reeling from institutional sabotage. The judiciary remains opaque. Political prosecutors continue to stall investigations. Collaborators from Yoon’s failed coup still hold office. And the national security apparatus remains tethered to the US-Japan military order relentlessly pushed by Biden and eagerly embraced by Yoon. Rebuilding Korea’s democracy will take more than a new president. It demands sustained civic engagement and deep structural reform against a persistent insurrectionist bloc that is actively regrouping. Lee cannot govern alone, and the people who brought him to power must remain vigilant. This urgent call for accountability extends beyond Korea’s borders.  A Reckoning for Washington and Western Media Lee’s victory also forces hard questions on Washington and the role of Western media in shaping the narrative around Korea’s democracy.  For three years under the Biden administration, the US propped up Yoon as a loyal ally while escalating tensions with North Korea, expanding trilateral military drills with Japan, and subordinating Korean sovereignty to US goals. Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law was not a rogue act, but rather the culmination of a broader authoritarian drift, fueled by powerful far-right forces and quietly enabled by the Biden administration, which offered Yoon uncritical support, despite mounting warnings about his systematic erosion of civil liberties. To claim that the Biden administration, with its extensive influence over Korea’s domestic and foreign affairs, was unaware of Yoon’s martial law plot is not only implausible, but disingenuous. Yoon’s failed coup revealed not only his own desperation but also the Biden administration’s deeper anxiety over safeguarding its top strategic objective: advancing a new Cold War posture against China through the Korea-US-Japan alliance.  Throughout the crisis, Biden officials focused on the preservation of this alliance, a cornerstone of US military dominance in the region, rather than supporting Korea’s democracy and sovereignty.   This posture was made clear in a U.S. Congressional Research Service report released shortly after Yoon’s impeachment in December 2024. The report criticized Lee for warning against the risks of abandoning Korea’s balanced foreign policy between the U.S. and China. At the same time, the report praised Yoon’s foreign policy record during the martial law crisis, framing Lee’s position as opposition to Yoon’s staunchly pro-American, pro-Japanese, and anti-North Korea and China stance. This alignment-focused approach was further underscored by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Seoul in early January, even as impeachment proceedings against Yoon were still unfolding. Rather than expressing solidarity with Korea’s democratic movement, Blinken’s presence reinforced Washington’s fixation on military alliance over democratic legitimacy.   After Yoon’s impeachment and Kishida’s resignation, the Biden administration’s priority remained fixed on reinforcing the “ Axis of War ” represented by the US-Japan-South Korea alliance rather than safeguarding Korea’s democracy. Just ten days after Blinken’s visit, as millions of Koreans were braving freezing temperatures to resist Yoon’s insurrection, the US staged joint aerial military exercises in Korean airspace, turning the skies above the democratic uprising into a theater for US-led military force. Then, on January 16, the Biden administration formally objected to an opposition-led investigation into the national security risks posed by Yoon’s aggressive promotion of the US-Japan-South Korea alliance. In Korea, this alliance has been widely perceived as escalating regional tensions and compromising national sovereignty. Biden officials questioned why diplomatic “achievements” like the trilateral pact were cited in the articles of impeachment against Yoon and pressured Korean lawmakers to forgo investigating Yoon for heightening the potential of future conflict with North Korea and China via his involvement of Korea in Washington’s trilateral military pact. In short, the Biden administration succeeded in curtailing the process of holding Yoon accountable for his insurrection in order to serve its own ends. These events revealed the sobering truth that the gravest threat to Korean democracy may no longer come from within the country, but from a Washington security establishment increasingly disconnected from the political realities on the ground, and driven by a foreign policy shaped by a flawed and misguided vision. Seen in this light, Yoon’s failed coup represents not only the collapse of an authoritarian leader’s ambitions but also the failure of the Biden administration’s Korea policy, which was heavily influenced by pro-Japanese security advisors and anti-China hawks like Kurt Campbell . Yoon Suk-yeol’s collapse highlights a simple truth: any US policy in Korea that ignores Korean public opinion is bound to fail. The Trump administration has the opportunity to reset US-South Korea relations  by acknowledging Korean interests and realities. A unique asset that President Trump brings is his past outreach to North Korea, which, while ultimately unsuccessful, was widely supported by Koreans and broke with Washington orthodoxy. More than 80% of Koreans supported Trump’s engagement with North Korea during his first term, viewing it as a bold step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula. A 2025 poll by the American Friends Service Committee shows continuing strong public support in the US as well, with 70% favoring renewed talks and 75% backing cooperation to repatriate Korean War remains. These figures suggest strong backing for diplomacy over escalation, and for a policy that aligns with both American and Korean hopes for peace . The “Revolution of Light” Western media outlets have continued to echo hollow narratives about Korea’s democratic uprising and the ensuing election, with major news organizations such as The New York Times , BBC, and CNN failing to highlight the real threat: tanks deployed by an authoritarian faction backed by the United States. Even after Lee Jae-myung’s decisive victory, much of the coverage framed him not as the embodiment of Korea’s democratic will, but as a potential risk to the US alliance. This framing is both condescending and irresponsible. It reduces Korea’s democratic choice to a footnote in the American strategic calculus and erases the deeper meaning of a grassroots movement led by ordinary citizens whose rallying cries were democracy and sovereignty rather than US military priorities. But the so-called  “Revolution of Light” that brought Lee Jae-myung to the presidency transcends the dismissive portrayals offered by foreign media. For 124 days, from December 3, 2024, to April 4, 2025, millions of Korean people stood unwavering. More than ten million marched to defend the National Assembly, facing down soldiers and tanks. They resisted authoritarianism and oppression, and above all, they voted. One protester said it best: “Even when soldiers forced their way in, we followed legal procedures, removed the leader, and elected a new one. This is democracy.” Lee’s election marks not just an end to authoritarianism, but also the dawn of Korea’s democratic revolution . The future of Korea belongs to its people, and as Washington charts a new path with Korea’s incoming president, it should be guided by the words of John Adams, who centuries ago keenly observed that “ the right of a nation to govern itself is the most sacred of all political rights.”   Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She currently serves on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors and the advisory board for CODEPINK. She has over 20 years of teaching and research experience in the United States and has been a central contributor to the creation of a number of interdisciplinary Asian and Korean Studies degree programs. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, an associate-in-research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute, and a lecturer at Northeastern University. Follow her on Twitter at @simonechun .

By Dae-Han Song | May 1, 2025 | This article was produced by Globetrotter Photograph Source: 기여자 – CC0 On 4 April, 122 days after martial law was declared in South Korea, the constitutional court upheld the National Assembly’s impeachment motion and dismissed the former president Yoon Suk Yeol. Now, the country is readying for the 3 June snap presidential election. While toppling a president involved Herculean efforts, the greater challenge will be changing social conditions to prevent the rise of another Yoon. After all, eight years ago, then-President Park Geun-hye was also impeached. The failure of President Moon Jae-in and the Democratic Party to fulfill the mandate for social change and reform demanded by the candlelight uprising led to widespread disappointment and discontent, ultimately paving the path for Yoon’s election. With the clear frontrunner Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party declaring himself a ‘ centre conservative ’, the election has become a contest between conservatives. And while a Lee victory might be necessary to root out those that directly supported and defended Yoon’s self-coup (when he tried to overcome his political impasse with the National Assembly by declaring martial law), it also requires laying the foundations to break the vice grip on power held by the liberal and conservative parties that brought Korean society to this point. To do so, the people need the power to recall elected officials and directly propose their own laws. Déjà Vu Eight years ago, riding high on the exuberance of the candlelight uprising, the Democratic Party’s Moon Jae-in was given a mandate for reform. With two years left in his term, his party was even handed a supermajority (180 out of 300 seats) in the following National Assembly. Yet, despite his campaign promises, Moon failed to make Korean society more equal (i.e.,  substantially increase  the minimum wage,  control housing prices ), safer (i.e., a  full investigation  of the Sewol Ferry Tragedy to prevent its recurrence,  criminal accountability  for industrial accidents), and free from discrimination (i.e., the  comprehensive anti-discrimination bill ). Now, with the Democratic Party’s Lee Jae-myung the clear frontrunner in opinion polls, the Democratic Party is likely to win the presidency again. If the conservative People Power Party proudly carries the legacy of dictatorship, the liberal Democratic Party, whose ranks swelled with democratisation activists from the 1980s, has long been captured by the economic elite. If Lee wins, he would be in a strong position to implement reforms: the Democratic Party will maintain their supermajority in the National Assembly (achieved in 2020 and 2024) for at least the first three years of the next presidency. Yet, looking at Lee’s track record as the Democratic Party leader since 2022 and his campaign rhetoric, it’s unclear whether his administration would offer policy solutions to ordinary people’s most pressing problems: inflation, growing inequality, housing prices, and discrimination. After all, during Lee’s leadership, the Democratic Party used their supermajority mostly to play the blame game with the Yoon administration. And, rather than addressing inequality by redistributing wealth through taxation, they  abolished  the financial investment tax and are now talking about  increasing  the portion of inheritances exempt from taxation. Unsurprisingly, before Yoon’s self-coup, the Democratic Party was  nearly as unpopular  as the People Power Party. Even now, a vote for Lee has simply become a vote for the lesser evil. And while choosing the lesser evil is necessary to root out the elements of Yoon’s self-coup, breaking out of this impeachment-elections-impeachment cycle requires structural changes. Break the Cycle Today, all parties agree on amending the 1987 constitution, which established the current formal democracy. Even the disgraced conservative People Power Party is calling for constitutional amendments to shorten the next presidential term, given their likely defeat. The Democratic Party is proposing to amend the constitution to redistribute power from the executive to the legislative branch. Yet, neither is addressing the limitations of the 1987 constitution: a formal democracy that limits democratic participation to voting during elections. Impeaching President Yoon created an extraordinary opening for ordinary people (among them,  young women and members of the LGBTQ+ community ) to rise up as democratic actors. Without expanding participation, formal democracy’s response to their efforts, growth, and exuberance amounts to: ‘Thank you for defending democracy. Please make sure to vote’. Korea’s democracy must accommodate the democratic space for these actors to shape their lives and future beyond choosing between two parties. That’s why a progressive current is forming around the need to expand participatory democracy. More specifically, the  People Power Direct Action (established to organise ordinary people to impeach Yoon and expand direct democracy) is proposing to root out the self-coup elements. It wants to do this by empowering people with the right to  recall  elected officials and  propose their own laws. With such expanded powers, voters could remove leaders who have lost their democratic mandate. Before declaring martial law, Yoon’s actions and policies had already turned him into a lame duck president with  20%  approval ratings. Yet, without the recall referendum, voters could do nothing but wait for him to complete the second half of his term. Furthermore, even after Yoon carried out martial law and was impeached by the National Assembly, the public had to anxiously wait for the Constitutional Court to uphold the impeachment. Secondly, the power to propose laws would break the vice grip held by elite interests. If the conservative party proudly carries the legacy of dictatorship, the liberal party, whose ranks swelled with democratisation activists from the 1980s, has long been captured by the elite. After all, in one of the issues most important to young people – housing – (conservative and liberal) National Assembly members are aligned with the elite. The average real estate assets for National Assembly members stand at  KRW 1.9 billion   (about $1.3 million), nearly  five times  the national average. Among the top ten wealthiest,  four  are from the Democratic Party; the  other six , from the People Power Party. In fact, the largest real estate assets –  KRW 41 billion   (roughly $30 million) – are held by a Democratic Party assembly member. Most importantly,  54.7%  of the members of the three permanent committees connected to real estate have significant land holdings themselves. If the National Assembly fails to propose bills that control housing prices, it’s because it hurts their interests. The same argument applies to controlling financial speculation and  stock ownership . And if this is neither shocking nor unique to South Korea, then democracy requires that common people be given the power to propose laws that represent their interests. Lessons across time and place have shown us that the way to the greatest evils is the accumulated disappointments and anger from settling for the lesser evil. To break free, people need to be able to rise as democratic actors. If Yoon’s impeachment opened extraordinary spaces of participation, now they must become integrated into the ordinary workings of democracy. The ability to recall elected officials and propose laws would be a start. KPI Associate Dae-Han Song is in charge of the networking team at the International Strategy Center and is a part of the No Cold War collective.

By Lim Jae-hee, Park Go-eun & Lee Ji-hye   | April 7, 2025 | Originally published in Hankyoreh Amid the joyous mood, many still underscored the tasks that lie ahead to realize true reform and democracy for all Participants in a mass march of victory on April 5, 2025, fill the streets outside Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul, where they celebrate the Constitutional Court’s ruling to remove Yoon Suk-yeol from office as president. (Kim Gyoung-ho/Hankyoreh) “We have brought down the insurrectionist ringleader Yoon Suk-yeol 123 days after his declaration of martial law,” a voice boomed over a crowd of thousands gathered in downtown Seoul on Saturday. Those gathered turned to each other with glee while the emcee addressed them. “Our lives may not change dramatically. But I assure you that those of us who learned how to win through the power of love and solidarity out here in these streets will go on to create a new world, different from the one we lived in before Dec. 3,” the speaker went on. Cries of “Out with Yoon” which had rung throughout the heart of Seoul every weekend for the past four months were replaced with cheers celebrating the triumph of democracy and ones looking forward to the “new world” on the horizon.   In the wake of the president’s ouster preparations are being made for this journey “into the new world,” based on the diverse voices who made the pro-impeachment rallies what they were these last few months.  Bisang Action for Yoon Out and Social Reform, the umbrella group behind the mass pro-impeachment rallies, actively encouraged ordinary people to speak up and make their voices and demands heard throughout the months long fight to depose the president. Since December, laborers, farmers, adolescents, women and others have taken the stage at the rallies to recount the discrimination and hardships they have faced and to call for social and institutional solutions. Now, the group’s 127 affiliated organizations and 189 experts and activists analyzed the demands Koreans made at these protests and organized them into an agenda for reform.  In doing so, the group is laying the groundwork for demanding “democracy for all” from the political sphere and the soon-to-be-elected new government.   The demands compiled by Bisang Action reflected how the public square had brought out people from all walks of life. Broken down, demands spanned 12 categories in total, including restoring the constitutional order, political and judicial reform, bettering the economy and the livelihood of the people, gender equality, climate change, caregiving, labor, freedom of the press, education and youth-related social issues, and food sovereignty. The group extracted 118 tasks to be addressed, including enacting or changing laws, reform and policy shifts, which it categorized into 424 sub-projects.  Tasks associated with gender equality and climate change issues dominated. “As a society, sensitivity on gender issues and climate change has heightened compared to when former President Park Geun-hye was impeached,” said Kim Joo-ho, the policy planning head of Bisang Action. “As areas that were rolled back considerably under the Yoon administration, people spoke that much more passionately on them.”  Bisang Action intends to work with opposition parties to put these issues on the agenda heading into the presidential election. Last month, six opposition parties, including the Democratic Party, issued a joint statement saying they would “encourage and ensure the active participation of the public as we work together to achieve major social reforms.”  As if to make up for the agonizing past four months, Saturday’s mass rally was an ebullient festival in which participants basked in the joy of finally seeing Yoon ousted from office. Still, people raised their voices to underscore that Yoon’s removal did not signify closure, but instead a new beginning.  Cho Hyeon, 45, who came to Seoul from Asan, South Chungcheong Province, said, “While the thought that we were being compensated for lost time made me well up a little, my heart did sink when I remembered that this is merely the beginning. I hope we can become a society that truly protects the values of the Constitution.”  Jin Eun-seon, a wheelchair user, took to the stage to say, “Everyone here at the square could not be more different. Despite our differences, we sought to find common ground and brought our diverse experiences of discrimination and oppression together.”  She added, “I hope we ride on the momentum of this solidarity and take it with us as we return to normalcy after Yoon’s removal from office.”  The chant, “Out, out, Yoon Suk-yeol out!” which had been sung to the melody of Aespa’s “Whiplash” and Infinite Track’s “To You,” was replaced with the chant, “Change, change, change the world!” Lim Jae-hee, Park Go-eun and Lee Ji-hye are staff reporters for Hankyoreh.

By Gregory Elich | March 7, 2025 | Originally published in Counterpunch Photograph Source: Republic of Korea – CC BY-SA 2.0 As the South Korean Constitutional Court’s impeachment trial of President Yoon Suk Yeol heads toward its finish, a second trial has opened at the Seoul District Court, in which the president is charged with the crime of insurrection. As I reported in January, substantial evidence points to Yoon’s intention to unleash a campaign of mass repression under martial law. Recently, startling new evidence has emerged that paints a much darker picture of Yoon’s plan. Investigators discovered a notebook kept by former military intelligence chief Roh Sang-won, who is widely regarded as the architect of martial law. The notebook contains instructions that Roh reportedly wrote down as dictated by his fellow conspirator, Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun. There is suspicion that Kim wrote the notes, although handwriting analysis is inconclusive. It is a distinction without a difference in that the two worked closely together at drafting the plan for military rule, and the contents of the notebook represented agreed-upon procedures. Indeed, Kim repeatedly instructed military officers that Roh’s orders were his orders . It was an ongoing collaboration, as Roh visited Kim’s home 22 times from September up through the night martial law was declared. Kim even provided Roh with his chauffeured car to pass through the checkpoint to his residential compound. Until recently, few details of Roh’s notebook’s contents had been publicly revealed, but South Korean media have now gained access to the entire text. It was known that Martial Law Command had organized two arrest teams to hunt down and seize fourteen prominent people whom Yoon loathed, and bundle them off to a detention center. Among these high-priority targets were former South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the current leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, who is regarded as the main challenger to Yoon. In his martial law speech, Yoon singled out the Democratic Party’s majority in the National Assembly as one of his motivations for imposing military rule. What the newly disclosed information reveals is that around 500 people and organizations were targets for arrest in the early days of martial law. The intended victims were assigned to categories A through D, signifying the importance assigned to their capture. The arrest list included prominent politicians and lawmakers, as well as Buddhist and Christian religious leaders, entertainment celebrities, judges, trade unionists, police chiefs, various types of officials, and even former South Korean National soccer team coach Cha Bum-geun. Up to 200 media figures were listed for “primary collection” in the first round of abductions. In addition to named individuals, entire categories of people were identified for repression, so the intended number of victims in the first wave of arrests was likely to be far higher than the reported 500. The targeted organizations included the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice , Korean Confederation of Trade Unions , Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, Lawyers for a Democratic Society, “all left-wing judges,” and “left-wing entertainers.” As a welcoming gesture for arrestees, the notebook had a reference to hiring gangster thugs to use their fists “to crush the leftist bastards.” The goal was to wipe out the opposition. As phrased in Roh’s notebook, once military rule is established, “eliminate the sprouts to eradicate the root” and “continuously cut off the sprouts” to “ collapse all leftist forces in preparation for the next presidential election.” The South Korean constitution limits presidents to a single five-year term. Nevertheless, martial law planners envisioned at least three terms for Yoon under military rule, with pre-ordained electoral outcomes in his favor. The elimination of the opposition would see to that. Martial law planners had a permanent solution in mind for the prisoners, who were to be taken to “collection centers” located on islands in the West Sea and along South Korea’s fortified northern border. Their fate, quite simply, was to be murdered . “It is difficult to avoid investigation when using domestic personnel,” Roh wrote . “We need professionals.” To carry out that task, seven to eight special agents who are “good at shooting and bombing” would be needed. Roh selected a few special forces soldiers and undercover agents for the assignment, who were to be supplemented by contractors, reservists, and volunteers. “Confirmation kill is necessary,” it was emphasized. In other words, no one should survive. Various methods were contemplated regarding how to “dispose” of the prisoners. One option was to install explosives in the barracks and then blow them up once the prisoners were inside. Another was to attack the barracks with grenades or set them on fire. There was also a plan to sink transport ships taking the abductees to their island destinations. Explosives would be placed in the engine room or hold. Martial law personnel would disembark at Silmido Island, send the ships on their way to Yeonpyeong Island, and then detonate the explosives “at an appropriate location.” Since a transmitter may not be an effective means, it was noted that time bombs were preferred. The explosives would need to be powerful enough to ensure that “no evidence should remain as debris.” Other approaches included an apparent plan to poison food and water or use chemical agents against “an entire prison cell.” There was a recognized need to “destroy the evidence” after the “killing,” or better yet, misdirect responsibility, under the heading, “taking action in the North.” Among the alternatives mentioned were “ outsourcing torpedo attacks ,” hiring foreign Chinese contractors to sink the ships, or informally reaching out to North Korea , with the open question of “what to offer the North” in exchange for its participation. What could be more delusional than to imagine that North Korea would be willing to assist the hostile Yoon to murder hundreds or thousands of his opponents? Even more dismaying, considering that the point would be to direct world blame onto the North. A less fanciful option would be to send transport ships over the Northern Limit Line into disputed waters claimed by both Koreas in hopes of “ provoking the North to attack ,” or failing to elicit a response, then “sinking ships before the North captures them for trespassing, etc.” Once the martial law regime became fully entrenched, the plan was to formalize ongoing repression with a legal veneer. This would be accomplished by establishing a special investigation headquarters staffed by regular and military police and counterintelligence agents. The organization would be responsible for expediting the arrest and trial of people labeled as leftists. Slated to operate for as long as one year, its mission was to process and sentence prisoners on an industrial scale to “the death penalty or life imprisonment.” The 500 individuals and organizations listed by name would comprise the first batch of victims, to be followed by many more in what was to be an ongoing campaign of mass repression to, as Yoon put it in his martial law speech, “ eradicate ” his opponents. Those who attempted to flee or hide would have been systematically hunted down and abducted. A ban on citizens leaving the country was planned to eliminate one avenue for escape. Thought was also given to electronic means for hunting people. The Capital Defense Command contacted ride-sharing companies last August, asking to be granted access to their data in a so-called “wartime situation,” such as identification of customers and real-time tracking location. It should be noted that the Capital Defense Command participated in planning Yoon’s military takeover and played a key role in Yoon’s attack on the National Assembly. One company, Socar, conducted an internal review and rejected the request based on the lack of legal justification. How other ride-sharing companies responded is not publicly known. Whether any agreed to cooperate or not, the result would have likely been the same, as the military could have seized control over electronic tracking capabilities. Martial Law Command attached great importance to crushing dissent and resistance. The martial law decree outlawed all political parties and activities, rallies, and demonstrations, warning that violators would be punished. It was expected that substantial numbers of ordinary citizens would raise their voices in protest and need to be imprisoned. But where to find room to house them all? From March to May last year, the 7th Airborne Brigade visited prisons in North Jeolla Province , requesting facility blueprints and permission to film. It is almost certain that other brigades were making similar requests at other prisons throughout South Korea. The information was intended to help plan to “free up space” to imprison thousands of protestors “ through a large-scale amnesty ” for convicts. Information control was a key component in planning. The martial law decree issued on the night of December 3 declared, “All media and publications are subject to the control of Martial Law Command.” As a first step, Yoon handed orders to Minister of Security and Public Administration Lee Sang-min, instructing him to block the offices and shut off the power and water at media companies critical of his rule. The action was to be coordinated through the National Police Agency and National Fire Agency. According to the testimony of the commissioner of the latter organization, “Cutting off water and electricity is not something that we can do, so we didn’t take any measures.” Whether he was telling the truth or time had run out before action could be taken before martial law was lifted, had Yoon prevailed, these media outlets were destined to be shut down. With domination imposed over media across the political spectrum, the Korean people would have only been exposed to information provided or vetted by the military. Yoon’s plan for martial law collapsed when thousands of citizens rushed to the National Assembly to resist efforts by soldiers to block lawmakers from entering the building and voting to lift martial law. Under the constitution, a president must respect the outcome of that vote. Yoon’s response, instead, was to try and organize a second martial law . By then, it was too late for him, as news broadcasts announcing the result of the vote had deflated support among lower levels of the military for his coup. South Korea had evaded disaster by the narrowest of margins, but it is not out of danger yet. In his final speech to the Constitutional Court, Yoon came across as unhinged, soft-pedaling the seriousness of his martial law plan and accusing the opposition and labor unions of working together with North Korea to threaten national security. With that mindset, Yoon seems likely to launch another martial law if the court does not confirm his impeachment. There is every sign that Yoon believes he can return to active duty as president even if his impeachment is upheld. Imagining that he can be swept back to office by his supporters, Yoon’s public messages have mobilized right-wing extremists to threaten violence on his behalf in the event of his impeachment. Yoon has not been alone in inciting violence. YouTube fanatics are actively whipping up emotions, as is former Defense Minister and martial law planner Kim Yong-hyun, as he issues messages from his prison cell. Kim provided a statement to be read aloud at a recent rally, in which he accused the opposition of colluding with China and North Korea. Kim even supplied chants for the crowd, including a call to punish the constitutional court judges and the message, “The enemy has stolen our president. Let’s rescue him with our own hands.” If Yoon is impeached, powerful forces are bent on returning him to power through violent means. South Korea sits atop a political volcano, with its future balancing on Yoon’s fate. Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute board member. He is a contributor to the collection, Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Haymarket Books, 2023). His website is  https://gregoryelich.org    Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich .