North Korea News Podcast by NK News - How Yoon’s ouster will impact the future of inter-Korean relations

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol on Friday for his controversial declaration of martial law citing “pro-North” domestic forces, raising questions about the future of inter-Korean relations.  This week’s episode discusses Yoon’s justification of martial law as a response to perceived North Korean threats, why North Korea may be […]

Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host Jack O's Whetslut and I'm joined here in the studio today for a quick rapid response to the ruling by the Constitutional Court this morning on the impeachment of Yoon Sung-yeol, ex-president. I'm joined here today by Chris Green of the International Crisis Group and Leiden University and my colleague Shreyas Reddy from NK News and NK Pro. Welcome. Good afternoon. Hello again, Jacko. Hello. Okay, so we're not going to focus too much on the the ruling itself because that's left to our Korea Pro colleagues, but there's something that I think that we should talk about in reference to that night of December 3rd, martial law and also the

impeachment and the ruling today. And that is what role North Korea played in it, or rather what role fear of subterfuge or undermining by North Korea played in the whole thing. I mean, Yoon mentioned it on the night of the martial law and he referred to it again and again as these followers afterwards, but it was not mentioned by the judges at all. What do you make of that, Shreyas? No, I think to be honest the judges were perhaps more focused on the overall constitutionality of his actions and just in general whether he had the authority, the right to call martial law essentially for domestic purposes, citing issues like what he perceived to be electoral fraud, backed by North Korea according to Yoon, as well as of course,

the opposition's attempts to curtail the budget, to block his budget. But from their perspective, that his actions at no point really merited martial law. So they didn't really delve into the politics of it all in terms of North Korea. As far as they're concerned, just the actions of it were not in keeping with the South Korea's constitution. Can we dismiss all these accusations of North Korean meddling? Chris, what do you think? I don't think we should dismiss them. I agree with Shreyas that the court should not have considered those aspects of the case

as sort of substantial elements of their judgments because that gets into the realm of speculation and there was plenty to go on with what Youn actually did and whether what he did was constitutional or not. But the reason why I say we shouldn't dismiss these concerns out of hand is not only because maybe in extremists some of them may have some merit, but even if they don't there are plenty of people in South Korea who think they do. And so as we go forward into the election campaign and we get another president in around 60 days time, it's not as if all of the polarization that has beset this process of impeachment will suddenly go away.

And part of that is to do with the belief of plenty of people in this country that these accusations that Ewan was making are real and substantive. And in that sense, the fact that the court quite rightly didn't deal with them also, in a sense, gives them some extra weight. Shrauz, do you have any comments on that? Yeah, to be honest, it is a substantial factor in Yoon's actions. Now I think the questions will always be asked about how much he truly believed these things. Certainly there's been suggestion, there's evidence that he seems to have bought into a lot of far-right conspiracy theories about North Korean interference, about North Korean backed opposition in South Korea. But at the same time, the fact is he justified it.

He took things to quite an extreme in terms of the actions he was willing to pursue because of this. And as Chris pointed out, his supporters have lashed onto a lot of these. When we go out into the protests to speak to UN supporters, they essentially parrot these claims and say that UN Security Council was essentially South Korea's last defense against the communists, as they put it. And so now they're not going to give this up easily.

They're going to continue with this. Whether UN's party will stick to that line ahead of an anticipated election two months Remains to be seen but yeah Was there a given all that was there a historic irony or at least an interesting unintended? juxtaposition By the fact that the the man who prosecuted the case against Yoon Se-kyung in the constitutional court was himself a former student activist and allegedly a Jusa power lover of North Korea who broke into the residence of the US ambassador when it was Donald Greg as ambassador back in, what, 1989 or so?

Well, I'm sure his supporters will probably lean into these sorts of things. You mean the supporters of Yun? Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's still about lawyers presenting the case as they have it in front of them, whether it's those seeking to prosecute Yun as well as his defense team and for practical purposes, what the prosecution would have argued is that Yoon's actions were not merited, that there was nothing that really backed it. Whether they politically disagreed with him or had other leanings doesn't necessarily factor into the political judgment at the end of the day. It's also interesting, right, that case that you presented, that's just one individual official's backstory. It's quite clear.

And it just goes to show, though, that these stories and this history is embedded so very deeply all across Korean society. Now, the younger you are, arguably the less it's embedded, but even still, these things run really deep and so it's clearly the case that they're going to keep coming back for at least the next few decades until those who were most affected by this past leave the scene. And certainly we've seen that many of UNE's supporters have very much tried to spread these narratives further, just these narratives further just to cast out on the legitimacy of the whole process. Whether it's the prosecutors, whether it's the judges involved, everyone at every stage,

I think they've tried to say if this decision goes against UN, it's because of a conspiracy backed by essentially North Korea, backed by China. And that's something that even before the verdict came out, a survey suggested that I think 44% of the country on both sides, obviously, would not accept the verdict if it went against their beliefs. And we're certainly going to see that with UN supporters in the next few months. Yeah, well 40% of the country, that is a big chunk of the population there.

Now it's less than 12 hours since the verdict was announced or the ruling was announced and so that's usually by North Korean standards, it's too early for the media of Pyongyang to report on it. Shreyas, have you heard anything coming out of North Korean state media just yet? Well, at the time of recording, they haven't, but I should perhaps point out that after Park Geun-hye's, former President Park Geun-hye's impeachment verdict in March 2017, North Korean radio actually reported it within two hours.

Goodness me. Okay. So, we've seen that with the UN situation, they've been somewhat circumspect, usually waiting a few days, sometimes even over a week to report on the martial law, then the impeachment and UN's arrest. And mostly they're focused on factual reporting, other than occasionally just tossing a few insults at UN as they tend to do. But we saw with Park, they were occasionally following that approach, but also occasionally issuing stronger condemnations. And certainly once the confirmation came through that she was gone, it didn't take them long

to respond. I think at the moment though, for various reasons, perhaps partly not to give credence to Yoon's claims of North Korean interference, as well as perhaps just a broader, not disinterest, but at least attempt to detach themselves from South Korean engagement over the past year or so, past year and a half, they seem to be following an approach of not commenting directly, whether they'll make an exception this time. I think that we'll see hopefully in the coming hours, if not, and days. Yeah, Chris, how do you see this in the context of North Korea removing itself from any engagement with South Korea and apparently expressing a complete lack of interest in peaceful unification

with South Korea and demolishing or dismantling the instruments and the organizations with through which North Korea sought to exert influence on South Korea. Well, there's several things to say. I mean, to speak to what Seraj was just talking about, South Korea remains a sensitive political topic, not at the level of the public because as you pointed out Kim Jong-un has moved to distance North Korea from South Korea and has started to eliminate the idea of peaceful unification from North Korean politics. But it's still a sensitive matter, it's going to take them a little while to decide whether to comment on it at all. This isn't something that low level journalists or editors would take a decision on, it would come from

higher up in the propaganda architecture of North Korea. Just to interrupt, is some of that sensitivity around perhaps putting dangerous ideas in the heads of North Koreans that leaders can be removed from power? Well potentially, yes, but I just think that issues surrounding North Korea's closest neighbors, sensitive political matters, but I just think that issues surrounding North Korea's closest neighbors, sensitive political matters have to be decisions taken at the very top, which is why we sometimes find that it takes an awfully long time, much longer than we would expect for them to pass comment on things.

In terms of actually instrumentalizing this event for their own purposes, that policy shift by North Korea at the turn of 2024 was strategically extremely unwise in that it reduces their ability to try and influence South Korean politics, to use South Korea to try and bring about conversations with the United States or to show a different face to other partners. So it was strategically very unwise to bind their hands in the way that they did. Chris, for our listeners, could you mention a couple of the organs that have been dismantled in North Korea that would preclude that kind of instrumentalizing of what's happening in South Korea right now? Yes. They've taken down Uri Minjokgiriyev by way of example.

This is the website. The website targeting South Korea with propaganda narratives. And of course, this is all part of the, or was all part of the United Front Department, which has also gone. So, in that context, on the one hand, in South Korea so far, and touch wood, this will continue, there hasn't been any dramatic clashes

as a result of this constitutional court decision we've seen a parade of very happy left wingers past Gwanghwamun this this morning and early afternoon. You saw them yourself? I saw them myself yes there haven't been any violent clashes. This doesn't seem to indicate that South Korean society is in uproar. There is dramatic polarization, we know that, but there aren't any visual representations of it. So on the one hand, these propaganda websites and other tools the North Koreans used to have couldn't have been used to sort of to show that South Korea is unsafe or in uproar or socially unstable or anything else. But the fact of the matter is they've already hamstrung themselves by

eliminating those tools of propaganda influence anyway. And you said that that's unwise from their perspective. From a strategic perspective, in the long run, why not just dial that stuff down, right? Or put a lid on it for a while, and then you can ramp it back up when you need it. But instead Kim Jong-un took the somewhat extreme move of killing these institutions, and that was unwise. If I may add to that, so in decades past, for example after martial law in 1980 and 81, like the early 80s when Chanduwan was the military dictator running South Korea, at that point North

Korea was more than happy to present images of protests against that situation just as it has presented images of the protests leading up to Yoon's impeachment or at least for six months before and then it suddenly stopped that visual. I think for this idea, there's of course some concern, some paradoxical behavior in showing its citizens

actual democracy in action, but at the same time, the way North Korea frames it, it's always about, this is what happens when an unjust, unsuitable regime is in charge and compare that with the stability we offer you. And that's where perhaps it might be a case of playing with fire, but they seem to be willing to push the boundaries on that. Yeah.

And actually we've talked on this podcast before, haven't we Shreyas? You've written a number of articles looking at websites and organs of propaganda used by North Korea to to try to influence or paint a negative picture of South Korea. Yeah, and to be honest, I would agree with Chris that they honestly this is exactly the situation where perhaps in previous years those organs would have been integral if North Korea wanted to engage with the team or if Korea wanted to engage with the theme or if it wanted to lob criticism at South Korea.

Essentially, many of those outlets were targeting South Koreans specifically. Instead, now they're left with a situation where any messaging they put out, now some of it could go through the externally focused news agency, KCNA, but much of it, whatever little they do, if it comes from the highest level, it will probably be something that will be carefully measured.

As Chris said, at this point, journalists aren't going to make those calls. That comes from officials, from organizations that many of which no longer exist when it comes to the inter-Korean decision-making. So perhaps at some stage, at some level, they're also a little uncertain, a little confused about what direction they have to take, they get to take, which could also contribute to perhaps the relative detachment from the situation. Yeah, and if you go back to the 1970s, 80s and 90s, North Korea made a large number of political propaganda leaflets that it would send by balloon into South Korea to, for example, rail against

President John Doohan or talk about protests against the South Korean government and things that the South Koreans were doing with the Americans that North Korea wasn't happy about. And I was quite surprised that in that whole period since December the 3rd, not a single propaganda leaflet has been flown, as far as I'm aware, from North Korea to South Korea, none of the websites have been fired up again. It's really been quite silent. Yeah, I think perhaps again, the last thing North Korea needs to do right now is actually justify what you're saying or try and add to that with, as South Korea puts it, provocations. And at the same time, South Korea, these activists wouldn't necessarily need, who have been targeting

North Korea with leaflets, for them also, it's not the best time. So I think on both sides, there are a lot of tensions. North Korea, though, just needs to sit back and hold off. It doesn't need to do anything as far as it's concerned. South Korea where those leaflets, that sort of activity comes in, maybe in the next few months it might ramp up again but for now it is also going to be relatively quiet. It will be interesting to see whether the North Koreans participate as it were in the election to come. I was about to ask exactly. We've got just under two months, a snap election. What are

you expecting? Honestly, I'm not expecting any dramatic change on the present, but this does give us another two months to see whether they have any interest in implementing any kind of strategy and if they do, what tools they have left to do it with. Definitely. Does it have any that you can see? Well, I mean, to be honest, again, with those propaganda outlets gone, not that they were ever particularly effective, I think with the very old school Cold War era rhetoric, but with those propaganda outlets gone that was facing the South, they don't really have

those in the same way now, whether, so initially when they dismantle those we wrote in that perhaps they could take the opportunity to move on actually in implement a more modern approach to propaganda perhaps you know spread misinformation and disinformation in South Korea's online communities like Russia's been doing yes but we haven't really seen any evidence of that so far and to be perfectly honest South Koreans seem to be doing a pretty good job of that themselves because it is a very politically divided country and So there are you we see youtubers and influencers on both sides of the political spectrum who already catered to their own echo chambers

these people living in ideological thought bubbles where they're not really willing to listen to the other side. So it makes it very easy to spread that kind of misinformation. What about looking through the intelligence lens that there's open ways of sending propaganda in, but there's also other channels sending coded messages or illegal emails that sort of thing to agents here in South Korea. Yeah sure there are many ways to skin a cat it's true. I mean you mentioned Russia so we've got the very reasonably well funded very clear propaganda tools like RT and others and then there's the

Chinese approach which North Korea is very adept at learning from. So if they were going to do anything, I would expect them to reform their approach to follow something like the Chinese model. As you mentioned, their previous approach was indeed sort of sprinkled with Cold War rhetoric, probably not that effective. And a lot of people came to know where this material was coming from but if you look at the Chinese approach of creating sort of fake websites that recycle news new and old which paint South Korea or the Alliance or whatever in a dismal light those websites don't get any hits really but the information on them gets recycled through social networking

networks and then reappears as something that people are more able and willing to just to just accept. So that's another way to do it. Yeah and just to add to that this is something that North Korea cyber criminals already are good at creating fake websites. They're already using tools like AI to improve their own phishing email. So why not start to apply that to propaganda? Why not start creating these fake news websites? We've seen that in action in other countries, in other parts of the world, Europe, for example.

And as Chris mentioned, China is very effective at it. So why not move to an approach like that? It's not going to be all that complicated. How effective it will be, that's a different matter. But certainly there is scope for that. But at any rate, who's going to tell Kim Jong-un that your policy of the turn of 2024 was misguided, strategically inept, we need to row back on it? They're in a bind in this respect.

But also, could it be that leadership of North Korea is seeing more return on investment from reallocating those assets away from South Korea directed influence operations into cyber theft and cyber crime? I mean it's you know we've seen some stories in the last couple of weeks there that what apparently 60 percent of all money stolen through cyber crime in the last year was apparently stolen by North Korean agents. So maybe North Korea just sees that there's more to be gained by doing that. I think in general that does reflect North Korea's, the evolution of North Korea's cyber ops. At one point they were following the Chinese model, trying to replicate their cyber warfare efforts pretty much since the late 80s early 90s. And they were quite effective at that

until about a decade ago. But then sanctions hit. And I think pretty much since 2016 onwards, we've seen them almost entirely focus on things that would suit their strategic objectives, whether it was getting illicit money or whether it was just stealing data that the regime would want. That is fundamentally been, it's a very objective oriented approach at this point.

And yeah, in that sense, even now they'll be going into the same, is this really the best use of our resources? And maybe not, but. Now in the election coming up, E.J. Myung looks like a pretty solid candidate for the Democratic Party. When Moon Jae-in was president, what was his involvement with North Korea? Wasn't he trying to get himself an invitation or a trip to North Korea on behalf of Gyeonggi-do? Yes, I think he was Gyeonggi province governor and to be honest he's had a lot of legal issues as well in

recent years regarding his dealings with North Korea or his alleged dealings with North Korea. More often than not it's been his underlings implicated in attempts to possibly send money to North Korea. But at the same time, so… Well, some people on the right here in South Korea might think, well, this is a gift to North Korea, him having another run at the presidency. Absolutely. I mean, that is the narrative that is going to spread. And certainly we've seen a lot of people on the right saying,

oh, if I-J-Myeong comes to power, it'll basically sell the country out to China and North Korea. But at the end of the day, I think people need to remember that I-J-Myeong is not an ideologue. He's as pragmatic as it gets. He's already tried to position himself as a center-right politician, and his party as center-right. Is pragmatic a nice word for cynical in your vocabulary, Srinath?

I would say he will play to the crowd. He was willing to lap up the epithet of South Korea's Bernie Sanders before the last election, and now he's kind of gone in the other direction going, I'm as centric as it gets. And I think in terms of his views regarding North Korea, he previously expressed skepticism regarding the goal of unification because frankly many South Koreans have already walked away from that idea. But with Donald Trump proposing a resumption of talks

with Kim Jong-un, or at least mooting the idea, Lee Jae-myeong a few months ago did say that Seoul could also push for renewed dialogue. So he will shift with the changing winds. Interesting. Last question. Anything that I haven't asked you about that you wanted to comment on or bring into the discussion today?

Well, to continue with what Shreyas was just saying, I don't know whether E.J. Myung is really highly pragmatic or whether that's just a message that everybody is hearing about him these days, but I do know that hypocrisy is baked into politics and he needs to win an election, right? So there are two factions in the liberal side of politics. One of them is the sort of those with a nostalgic view of Korea, those who wanted to see a return to Kim Dae-jung or Moon Jae-in style politics of engagement. And then there's the large group of young people who, as Schwarz put it, have already walked away from the idea of unification anyway.

So if he wants to win the election, as I'm sure he does, he's going to have to get all those people onside. So that may mean taking the pragmatic decision to walk away from any kind of engagement with North Korea if he thinks that that's going to get him over the line. And if I may, so on a completely different team, I think let's, so far we've talked more about dialogue and engagement and the prospects for that, but there's also the security issue to consider which, I mean, in the wake of UN's martial law, much of the leadership of South Korea's military either resigned or was suspended or dismissed because of

their involvement because of the way they were mobilized for that. Now they've tried to distance themselves from those actions since and express regret for the way it happened but that does not take away from the fact that there is a massive hole at the top of South Korea's military leadership including the fact South Korea hasn't had a defense minister in four months since Kim Jong-un, who was heavily implicated in the martial law plans by all accounts, was… Since he resigned, there's been no one, and this is the longest South Korea has gone without a defense minister in its history. So I think South Korea's next steps will be

how do you maintain that continuity? Yes, there are people in place, there are systems in place. North Korea perhaps doesn't look like it is immediately interested in presenting any security threat for various reasons. Although acting president Han-Dok Su after his impeachment was overturned did come back in and very quickly said that he's expecting to see some provocation. Oh yes, in fact, and he did it again today. He has said it at least thrice since he returned a week and a half ago. So I think there's that, at least there's that concern, but also at the same time the

military, it'll want to regain the public's trust. And if it wants to be able to continue operating, that's something that as it used to. And this is this is well beyond the scope of this podcast. But the reason why South Korean military is is okay without a defense minister for several months is because there are 28,000 American troops here. There is an alliance with the United States. Deterrence is robust. North Korea is deterred from doing anything, if it was even minded to do so. So in that sense, as long as the alliance is strong, the ROK military can have no defence

minister. And that then brings in the question of what's going on in Washington. But maybe we should save that for next time. We definitely should. But at the moment, with your ICG hat on, Chris, you don't see any any crisis immediately looming in South Korea? Look, there's a democratic transition going on here. We have two months with Han Doxu doing his best to provide sort of firm, trustworthy, stable leadership, right? These are

the adjectives he would want us to use about his leadership for the next two months. But obviously an election in a democratic country is a time of a time of change and things can things can get unstable if if it goes the wrong way. So, you know, there's gonna be some there's gonna be lots to watch for the next two months. And Straz you'll be doing a lot of that watching for us. Indeed and yeah, I think just to add to what Chris said a lot of that watching for us. Indeed. And yeah, I think just to add to what Chris said, yeah, right now, South Korea is, of course, deeply divided. Like, we're seeing those divisions all over the, all over Seoul on a daily basis at this

point. But I think fundamentally, this judgment brings some degree of closure, not entirely, but at least after four months of questions about what will happen next, we can at least finally start moving into what happens next. And I think that's something that South Korea has done in the past and it should be able to do in the future. Let's see what direction that takes. That's a good, hopeful note to end on and a good way to end the working week on this

Friday. Thank you very much, Reyes Reddy and Chris Green for joining me on the NK News podcast. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode and to our post-recording producer genius, Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time.