SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
After 11 days of political limbo in South Korea, the Parliament has voted to impeach the president. President Yoon Suk Yeol attempted to invoke martial law earlier this month, sparking mass protests. And now President Yoon has been suspended from power, but his fate as South Korea's leader is still unclear.
Joining us for a look at what could happen is Victor Cha. He's the former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. And these days, he's a professor of government at Georgetown University. Welcome to the show.
VICTOR CHA: Thank you, Scott.
DETROW: So I want to start by getting your reaction to this development.
CHA: Well, we saw it coming. I mean, the previous week, they had tried to impeach him after he had declared martial law and failed. This time, they were successful. The roots of this go all the way back to last spring where President Yoon's party lost the midterm election, and the legislature has since blocked everything that he's tried to do, including the budget. There's also investigations into his wife. The government is investigating the opposition party leader. All of this was a powder keg waiting to explode, and it happened with the martial law declaration.
DETROW: Yeah.
CHA: But now he's been impeached, and we have to see the next steps going forward.
DETROW: And we should remind listeners that impeachment works a little differently in South Korea than the U.S. Can you just broadly walk us through the next few steps here?
CHA: Sure. So the most important thing for the listeners is that he's been impeached by the National Assembly, the National Legislature. And now the Constitutional Court has basically about six months to decide whether the impeachment motion is constitutional. So their ruling will determine whether he is really impeached, whether President Yoon is really impeached. In the meantime, the prime minister becomes the acting president and governs the affairs of state.
DETROW: And that stays that way until the court rules in, even if it's months down the line.
CHA: That's right. That's right.
DETROW: I mean, let's zoom out and talk big picture. South Korea, a key U.S. ally - this has been an unstable stretch for South Korea. I guess you could argue that's the case for the U.S., as well. But what could this particular development mean, do you think, for the U.S.-Korean Alliance?
CHA: Well, a couple of things. I mean, the first is that, as we all know, President Trump will start in office on January 21, and there will be no South Korean leader. Of course, there will be the prime minister who's the acting president, but there's very little likelihood that he would be the next president of South Korea. Meanwhile, leaders from - as we've seen, leaders from Canada, from Japan, from other places, will all be trying to meet with Trump to try to get on a steady footing from the start. And so South Korea is going to be at a big disadvantage.
In addition to that, there are many things that President Yoon did on foreign policy that were greatly admired in the world. They may not have been appreciated at home, but they were admired around the world. Things like joining the United States in the Chips (ph) 4 Alliance with regard to semiconductor export controls, investing tens of billions of dollars in the United States for the development of electric vehicle batteries, being on the global stage at the G7 summit, being a - participating in the NATO summit. South Korea was a - is a big supporter of the war in defense of Ukraine, in some cases giving more humanitarian and economic support than NATO countries.
DETROW: Yeah.
CHA: So all of these things could be at jeopardy with this next election and a new president.
DETROW: I mean, this was such a shocking development, going back to that martial law declaration and then quickly backing down in what's come next. But I'm curious, this crisis - I'm wondering how you think it fits or maybe doesn't fit into these broader global trends we've seen this year, whether that comes to wildly unpopular incumbents in institutions or democratic backsliding.
CHA: Well, I think there certainly was a concern about democratic backsliding in Korea. There was a period of time when, after the first impeachment vote, the president said that - the president's party said that they were going to take control of the affair's estate with the prime minister. That was extraconstitutional. So there's certainly concerns about democratic backsliding there.
And in the broader scheme of things, this is another democracy that has a very weak or dysfunctional leadership, unfortunately. We see it in the case in Japan. We have a new prime minister but a divided legislature. You know, we see it in France. We see it in a number of other countries. And this is against a backdrop of autocracies that are all getting together - right? - China, Russia, Iran, North Korea - so it's a very disturbing picture on the global stage.
DETROW: That is Victor Cha, professor of government at Georgetown University and the former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council. Thanks so much for talking to us.
CHA: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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