The Failure of Yoon’s Desperate Power Grab

More than a week after Yoon’s attempted coup, the South Korean president is digging in his heels and refusing to quit. Yoon is now under investigation for insurrection, and he is under a travel ban so that he cannot leave the country. The disgraced president delivered another speech in which he repeated many of the same deranged claims he made when he declared martial law. He has vowed to “fight to the end.” Yoon’s party shielded him from impeachment last week, but that support has crumbled as more details about the coup have come to light and Yoon refuses to resign:

South Korea’s ruling party has thrown its support behind attempts to impeach embattled President Yoon Suk Yeol over his ill-fated decision to declare martial law that sparked a political crisis and widespread public anger in the country.

It seems likely that the second impeachment attempt will be successful. Yoon cannot continue as president after what he did, and he should be out of office soon. Fortunately, his attempt to smash the opposition with martial law failed and destroyed what remained of his presidency in the process. It’s clear that electing Yoon was a terrible mistake, but with any luck South Korea will not have to live with that mistake for much longer.

The fallout from the attempted coup has been swift. Following his arrest, the former defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun, attempted suicide in jail, but he was stopped from ending his life. There are reports that the former defense minister was attempting to provoke a crisis with North Korea earlier this year to create a pretext for a martial law declaration:

South Korea’s former defence minister Kim Yong-hyun ordered a drone deployment to North Korea to lay the ground for martial law declaration, it has been alleged.

Park Beom-kye, a lawmaker from the main opposition Democratic Party, said on Monday that Mr Kim ordered the deployment of drones to the North Korean capital Pyongyang in October, hoping to instigate a retaliatory attack from the North and use it to justify last week’s martial law declaration.

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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.