The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Korean Martial Law Starts (and Ends) || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

South Korea caught fire yesterday as President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and deployed the military to shut down parliament. But that didn't last long...the parliament summarily overturned that decision – unanimously no less. So where does that leave the Koreans?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/korean-martial-law-starts-and-ends

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to from New York Central Park. We have to talk about the Koreans today. So on Wednesday, things got a little weird. We had a declaration of martial law by the president, President Eun, who asserted that North Koreans had infiltrated the country and were trying to trigger a drug-induced orgy throughout the entire civilization that is today's South Korea. Anyway, martial law, he deployed the military to,

shut down the parliament, we had what can best be described as drunken protests. The Koreans, wow, know how to drink. And within a few hours, 190 of the 300 members of parliament broke through the barricades, jumped through windows and everything, and had a unanimous vote to rescind the martial law declaration. And a couple hours later, Yun himself admitted that it had fallen apart. What's going on here was basically we had a little bit of a coup attempt by the state. Yun is a bit of a political neophy. I don't think he's want to say he's incompetent or anything like that, but he's not a career politician by any stretch of the imagination. His background is in prosecution. He actually has put two of South Korea's former leaders, military generals, in prison.

So he has some idea of what's going on. But he kind of combines the worst political instincts of Donald Trump and Barack Obama. He expects to be able to say something. It just happens. And he hates people and hates having meetings. So we basically got this incompetent policymaking going down where he's seen his control over domestic politics wither away. In midterm elections, his party got trounced and the opposition nearly has a two-thirds majority now. Well, you fast forward this to now, and we're probably going to have impeachment proceedings. Declarations have already been filed in the parliament, and he'll probably be going to be going to be going to be going to be. He's going to be on by the end of the year. The Koreans, when they do move, they move fast. In many ways, the

Koreans are a lot like the United States. The United States has some great land. And the further the pioneers pushed in, the better it got. So for 150 years, everything just got better and better and better in the United States. And so when the world reaches out and punches us in the face, we kind of lose our mind. And then we use the whole strength of society and economics to reshape our environment, which means we reshape the world. The quintessential example, of course, is Sputnik, the beeping aluminum grapefruit that caused us to think that we had already lost the Cold War, even though we were ahead in rocketry and metallurgy and electronics and all the rest. And that overreaction triggered a basically a scientific revolution at the primary and

secondary school level that we're still coasting on today. The Koreans have kind of the first half of that, the panic, without the languidness in the meantime. Because they're surrounded by some really huge powers. China, Russia, Japan, and then there's that little thing called North Korea. So when they do move, they move very, very quickly. And it almost always feels like they're moving. So this is a country that went from one of the poorest countries in the world back in 1955 at the end of the Korean War, when everything was devastated, to one of the ten richest countries in the world right now,

and very clearly a technocracy. Anyway, the Koreans will get through this, assuming there's no court challenge, we will have new elections 60 days after the impeachment is finalized. If there are short challenges, it might take a couple more months. But we're going to see a new government in South Korea. There's really not a lot of debate in South Korea over what direction to take the country's international affairs. There's a general understanding that now that the Russians are actively helping the North Korean military complex, that the South Koreans have to take a more active stance in not just regional affairs, but global affairs,

most notably the Korean War, and that that has to be done in league with the United States and especially Japan. And that is probably going to be the biggest piece of Yun's legacy, because it was Yun who actually got the Koreans to admit that they have to have a constructive relationship with Japan. Japan was their colonial ruler, brutal occupation in the years leading up to World War II. And so by many ways, the two countries, South Korean Japan, were still in a state of de facto war until very recently, and you can credit Yun for the normalization. So if you're looking for a legacy, that's it, but if you're looking for Yun to be sticking around, you read that one wrong. Even his own party voted to rescind his martial law

ruling, and the opposition only needs a handful of votes from his party in order to remove him for good.