Today, Explained - South Korea’s incoming “anti-feminist” president

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

With its neighbor distracted by domestic culture wars, North Korea is making new moves. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A very divided South Korea just elected a new president. It was the closest election in South Korean history. The margin of victory for Yoon was about 0.7%. His name is Yoon Seok-yool. He's conservative, he's never held office before, and his campaign strategy was lean in to divisiveness. Mr. Yoon is a self-proclaimed anti-feminist. He wants to abolish South Korea's

Ministry of Gender Equality. The thing is, with most of the world's attention focused on Russia and Ukraine, fewer people were paying attention than you might expect, even though the stakes are very high. Because South Korea elected a hawk, right as North Korea is making some worrying moves on its nuclear weapons program. On today's show, are we too distracted to see a potential crisis unfolding in the Koreas? I'm Noelle King. This is Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Nathan Park, fellow at the Sojong Institute. What do we know about South Korea's new president, Yoon Suk-yool? What kind of guy is he? The confusing thing about Yoon's ride is that he's not a particularly charismatic person. During the campaign trail, his nickname was Agafa Day. He had this infamous episode where he was on live television. Mr. Yoon Seok-yeol, presidential candidate for People Power Party, will share his vision for Korea. But he was not given a prompt to speak with,

so he was just standing there on live television, frozen solid for about more than two minutes. He froze up on TV. What I'm hearing is not a natural politician. So people, I'm guessing, must have been voting on issues, not on personalities. What were the issues at stake in this election? I'd say there were two. One is the rising real estate tax. So Moon Jae-in government, the current government, delivered a world-class response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the issue is that part of the COVID relief was low interest rate and access to easy credit.

In the United States, we would see a huge rise in the stock market. But South Korea, where the stock market is not as well developed, all that money went to real estate. That led to skyrocketing housing prices, especially in Seoul, the biggest city. I trusted and waited for the Moon Jae-in government, but the price of housing has more than doubled and I can't even afford the rent. It really very upset the younger voters who are trying to afford their first homes. I have no hope of buying a home in Seoul in the future. But it's not as if the homeowners were happy that their housing value suddenly doubled

because they are subject to a progressive real estate taxation, which means that their real estate tax rose significantly during this period too. So people are fed up over the economy, specifically over housing. And you said there were two issues that this election was really about. What was the second? The other issue is this gender strife issue. We started seeing in South Korea a very strong conservative turn for young men voters. And this is coinciding with emergence of this very aggressive, aggrieved type of sexism among young men in South Korea. Men had always considered themselves to be the breadwinner. But this began to change.

Radical feminists took advantage of this situation. They voted for conservative candidates who promised essentially sexist government policies. And opposing feminism for these young men was the primary motivating factor for their political stance. In this political atmosphere, men lost their place in society. It's about power balance. The primary motivating factor, what were the policies that oppose feminism?

The headline item that the president-elect Yoon is continuing to push is abolishing a cabinet ministry in South Korea called Ministry of Gender E action quotas, which is rather ironic when you look at it because a lot of times it's actually men who benefit from those quotas because women a lot of times end up testing better. Oh, gosh. He actively courted votes among anti-feminists, promised to raise penalties for falsely reporting sex crimes, and blamed low birth rates on the rise of the feminist movement. So you've got young men in their 20s who are aggrieved. They're being very clear about the form in which they want their grievances to take, abolishing a ministry, changing laws around reporting of sexual assault. How did the winning campaign manage to tap into this sentiment of, as you call it, misogyny?

So there's a key figure in this, key figure in the conservative party. And his name is Lee Joon-suk. He's the chairman of the conservative party. And that itself is somewhat extraordinary because when you say a party chairman in the context of South Korean politics, you're usually talking about this gray-beard, multi-term legislator who's like in his 60s or 70s

who could potentially be a presidential candidate. Whereas this person, Lee Joon-suk, is 36 years old, has no electoral experience. He ran three times and lost all of his elections. What he's primarily known for is being a conservative pundit on television catering to this misogynist grievances. And he was essentially the architect of the campaign plan for Yoon to campaign to these young men. Is there kind of an analog to this sexist pundit in the United States? Is there someone that he reminds us of? He loves to remind everyone that he attended Harvard. That to me reminds me someone like Ben Shapiro. Whores in this house. There's some whores

in this house. There's some whores in this house. This is what feminists fought for. Or the fact that he has this sort of bigotry based political philosophy that animates the president elect who won in a very narrow election. That reminds me of someone like Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon during the Trump presidency. Hillary Clinton has been the single greatest purveyor of disinformation in the history of our country. What she did to this democracy, what she did to President Trump, it's criminal.

It sounds as though the thing that helped the conservative candidate win this election was just straight up misogyny. It's misogyny in real estate taxes. Okay. It's those two factors, which is unfortunate in my view. All of this seems to be reminiscent of some things that have gone on in the United States over the last years. And I'm wondering, is there a sense in South Korea, or do you have a sense, that the United States exported a kind of grievance politics to South Korea? Or did South Korea come up with this independent of what's going on here in the U.S.?

In my view, South Korean politics is actually sort of chronologically ahead of American politics because the internet came around there earlier. South Korea had nationwide broadband internet by the mid to late 1990s. The United States and the rest of the world were still relying on dial-up. So sort of political culture of the internet, the online political culture arose in South Korea faster than anywhere else in the world. This aggrieved misogyny turning into a political force, I think it might be a preview of what might be coming. In the United States? Yes. We have talked about the domestic issues, real estate taxes and misogyny, a lot there. But

I would imagine that South Korean voters, when they choose a president, are also choosing a president who they understand can deal with the question of North Korea. One very interesting feature of this election was that Yoon, the president-elect, ran this very nihilistic campaign where he did not give all that much specifics for any of his campaign platform. And when you ran opinion polls, sort of specifically asking which candidate is more suited to handle this issue, that issue, right? Issues of the economy, issues of national defense and things like that. Lee Jae-myung would win. So the Lee voters, the liberal voters, were probably voting based on the perceived ideas of competence in the face of a crisis.

The exit polls bear it out when they were asked, why did you vote for this candidate? And it's like, because we wanted a competent candidate. Whereas the voters who voted for Yoon all essentially said, when they were asked why did you vote for this candidate? And it's like, because we wanted a competent candidate. Whereas the voters who voted for Yoon all essentially said we just wanted a different administration. Wow. What is happening with our neighbor to the north, as threatening as it may feel to the rest of the world,

what we're concerned about here is the domestic stuff. That's exactly right. Coming up, what's happening in North Korea while the world isn't paying so much attention. Thank you. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday.

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Sumi Terry is an expert on the Koreas. She's currently a director at the Wilson Center, which is a think tank in D.C. And Sumi, you've been worrying about North Korea for reasons that you're going to explain. But we've just talked about South Korea's new president, who will certainly have to deal with the North. He'll be running a very divided country. What does that mean for his ability to govern? Well, it's going to make it very challenging for him. He doesn't really have a mandate of the public. Society is deeply divided along the generational line, along the regional line, along the gender line. And of course, the ruling party still has a majority in the parliament, which is going to make it very difficult for Yoon to govern. So presumably one of the first things he'll have to deal with is North Korea.

The last time the Western world was really focused on the Koreas was when President Trump went to meet Kim Jong-un. President Trump says North Korea wanted too much to end its nuclear program, so he walked away. Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn't do that. What has North Korea been up to since then? Well, since then, they've been committed to expanding and modernizing their nuclear missile program. Of course, you know that Kim Jong-un still values nuclear weapons as critical for regime survival. It's a military asset.

It's an insurance policy. It's a source of power and prestige for Kim Jong-un. They've been nonstop working on the program. And you've seen very recently that North Korea has conducted several different types of missile tests. The United States and South Korea are accusing North Korea of testing a powerful new long-range missile system. Washington says it is a serious escalation. But of course, we didn't pay attention because we were engaged in this Russia-Ukraine crisis. Tell me a bit more about how Russia and Ukraine are perhaps distracting

the United States from what's going on in North Korea and what the implication of that might be. Well, the Biden administration and the world is completely distracted, understandably, which means that North Korea will take advantage to conduct provocations of their own. Even in ICBM, ICBM is an intercontinental ballistic missile test or nuclear test. I think now Kim Jong-un has a wide open pathway for more robust missile testing without any fear of consequence, right? Particularly consequences from the United Nations Security Council. It's not like Russia is going to do anything to stop them or even China. China and Russia were already proposing in December 2020 to weaken United Nations Security Council sanctions on North Korea. So they were already

working on their program. They have reasons to test beyond this Russia-Ukraine crisis, but the timing is right. Okay, so North Korea is thrilled by the distraction. I wonder, is North Korea drawing any other lessons from the war happening in Ukraine right now? Of course. Watching this crisis, Kim Jong-un can only calculate that if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Russia would not have dared to attack it, right? So I think this will just make him all the more determined to hold on to or even expand his arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Already there were lessons from the past, right? There was Iraq. As news of Saddam Hussein's execution spreads across the globe, many Iraqis watch the execution on television. It was Libya. Overnight, the body of the dictator was placed on the ground for all in the city of Misrata to see for themselves. There he is, crowds surrounding him. The last bloody moments of his life show him wounded and begging for mercy. The lessons from those situations were that leaders who give up nuclear program gets overthrown

and killed. Now, that lesson has been just reaffirmed by this crisis in Ukraine. And to put an even finer point on it, didn't Ukraine give up its nuclear weapons the same year that North Korea negotiated a bilateral agreement on nukes with the U.S.? That's right. Less than two months after North Korea signed a bilateral agreement called the Agreed Framework with the United States to freeze operations and construction of nuclear reactors in October 1994, Ukraine, along with fellow post-Soviet republics Belarus and Kazakhstan, agreed to give up its nuclear weapons under the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine formally renounced nuclear arms by joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Ukraine inherited almost 2,000 warheads when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

And in return, the other signatories of the agreement, the United States, Britain and Russia, promised to guarantee territorial integrity of these states. Skeptics once claimed that the nuclear threat would actually grow after the Soviet Union dissolved. But because of the wisdom and statesmanship of the leaders who joined me here, the skeptics have been proven wrong. Of course, in 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine. He annexed Crimea and fomented a pro-Russian insurgency in the east. Now, of course, Putin has invaded Ukraine on a much larger scale.

And again, watching this crisis, what can Kim conclude from this except to say, I need to hold on to the nukes. That's the only way we can survive. And what is the point of the testing that he's doing? Is that a warning of sorts? It's not only a warning, but they need to test to genuinely make progress on their program, right? So although it is a warning and it does increase their leverage when they do return to negotiations, but it's more than that. They do need to test to continually modernize and expand their program. Okay. What has the new South Korean president said about his plan for dealing with North Korea? Conservatives are usually tougher and he did himself say he's not going to just,

you know, bend over backwards like the Moon administration has done to engage with North Korea, that he does not believe in talks for just sake of talks, that if there's any kind of engagement, it has to correspond with, like, because North Korea

took steps to denuclearize. So I'm concerned that inter-Korean relations will deteriorate further. We just talked about how North Koreans have just recently tested something, right? Nobody paid attention to because of this Russia's invasion. And now the report just came out that they likely tested something called post-boost vehicle, something called a bus that's used to deliver multiple nuclear warheads from a large ICBM like Hwasong-17. That's a big monster size ICBM and bigger than the

ones that Kim Jong-un launched in 2017. Now he showed us this ICBM, a very big ICBM on October 2020 parade, a nuclear weapon that can carry multiple warheads, I'm very concerned that they're going to test it. April 15th is Kim Il-sung's birthday, a good day to test such a weapon. So I'm afraid that North Korea is going to be the sleeper crisis of this year. Wow. What does the Biden administration think about this new South Korean president at the same time that North Korea is conducting what appear to be very high stakes missile tests? The Biden administration, I'm sure, welcomes this president. And I'm sure that watching

this North Korea policy is going to be more aligned with Seoul's. South Korea's president-elect, Yoon Suk-yool, vows to forge closer ties with the United States in the face of North Korea's increasing missile activity. Frankly, President Moon Jae-in's policy was too accommodating to North Korea, talking about how we need to give North Korea a peace declaration in the middle of all these weapons tests and when no progress has been made on denuclearization front. So I'm sure the Biden administration likes what they're hearing from the new president-elect Yoon and his camp. The problem is Washington have very few options as we contemplate response to all this.

You know, North Korea's nuclear program has bedeviled five U.S. presidents. So it's not even Biden administration's fault. This problem goes over, you know, over many, many decades. But the goal of denuclearization remains remote as ever. And, you know, what option is there? We already tried bilateral negotiation that produced a great framework. We tried multilateral negotiations, six-party talks process. We tried strategic patience of Obama, you know, not talking to them, talking to them, maximum pressure, fire and fury, Rocky Man on a suicide mission, to summitry where Trump met with him three times. So what's the response? What can we do? And again, we're distracted right now to focus on this.

It seems potentially as if we are almost sleepwalking into a very volatile situation. North Korea seems more committed than ever to growing its weapons arsenal. You've got a new president in South Korea who's a hawk. The rest of the world is paying attention to Ukraine, not so much to North Korea. What are the best and worst case scenarios that you envision playing out in the next couple of months? What's at front of mind for you? I'll give you the most likely scenario. North Korea will conduct an intercontinental ballistic missile test

or even a nuclear test as early as next month. And there is no end to this. So the crisis is something like what we've seen in 2017 when President Trump was talking about fire and fury and so on. Except this time, we don't even have any kind of real response. At least in 2017, even though no one liked President Trump's talk of preventive strike on North Korea or, you know, fire and fury and so on. There was a maximum pressure. There were sanctions. The world was united. Even China was on board in the fall of 2017 to implementing sanctions. But all of that is moot. That's not going to happen because right now what's happening with Russia, North Korea has just

open pathway. So I don't know what we can do as a response. It's the frustration. That was Sue Me Terry of the Wilson Center. We also heard from Nathan Park of the Sojong Institute. Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you. you