Gearoid Reidy: Yoon's impeachment widens East Asia fault lines

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, impeached at the second time of asking, was always more popular abroad than at home.

Just over a year ago, he was holding hands with Japan’s former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and President Joe Biden at a historical trilateral summit at Camp David; a few months before that, Yoon was feted at the White House, serenading Biden with a rendition of Don McLean’s American Pie and crooning about “the day the music died.”

After his botched attempt to declare martial law, few will write wistful ditties about the day his premiership died. But there is something to regret: With it, the region risks losing an important trilateral relationship at the worst possible time.

Yoon’s bridge-building with Tokyo was politically unwise, but nonetheless the right move. It led to the Camp David meeting and what seemed a new age of ties. Just last month, the three countries formed a permanent secretariat aimed at future-proofing their relationship against changes in leadership. The near-term target was no doubt President-elect Donald Trump more than Yoon, who still had half his term remaining.

With Yoon now in limbo as South Korea’s Constitutional Court reviews his case following his baffling brief declaration of martial law, rocky days are ahead for a three-way partnership that’s more important than ever in an increasingly unstable region. Isolationist North Korea has exhibited a new fervor for geopolitics, moving closer to Russia economically and militarily, with its dispatch of soldiers to fight in Ukraine. After the unexpected conflicts that have kicked off from Ukraine to Syria, the relative calm at the Demilitarized Zone may just be temporary. And China will be seeking levers to exploit the change in U.S. administration and nudge Seoul and Tokyo closer to its orbit.

Next year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the 60th of the normalization of ties between Japan and South Korea. Commemorating those dates with the spirit of Camp David, which hailed “a new era of trilateral partnership,” would have been encouraging.

But it now seems unlikely. Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, considered the most likely to replace Yoon, has frequently dipped into the anti-Japan stance of the South Korean left. He has called for more apologies from Tokyo, chastised Yoon’s administration for its “degrading diplomacy” toward its neighbor over the ownership of the messaging app Line and likened Tokyo’s release of water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant to a “second Pacific War.”

The first impeachment motion against Yoon went out of its way to criticize his “bizarre Japan-centered foreign policies” and appointment of people “lenient toward Tokyo to key government positions,” while criticizing his anti-Pyongyang stance. The anti-Japan language was removed from the second, successful motion.

It’s easy to pin the blame on Yoon and his strange actions this month. But in truth, he is just the last domino to fall. Biden gave himself far too much credit when he said in July he had restored ties between Japan and South Korea after “essentially having hostilities toward one another since the end of World War II.” The Yoon-Kishida era was indeed a high-water mark, but hardly the only one; the relationship between the two countries has long been a roller-coaster akin to the “we are so back/it’s so over” meme.

Biden’s involvement was nonetheless vital to smoothing the relationship that had soured before COVID-19, under Yoon’s predecessor Moon Jae-in. Now, Biden himself is a lame duck and his successor an erratic operator. During his first term, Trump considered withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea and by turns threatened and courted Kim Jong Un.

Meanwhile in Tokyo, in the place of the diplomatically savvy Shinzo Abe and Kishida, there is now Shigeru Ishiba, leading a minority government that’s the weakest in recent memory. While Ishiba doesn’t by himself threaten a radical shift in policy, his inexperience on the world stage raises questions over his diplomatic dexterity. It was on full display at the APEC forum last month, where he made a multitude of faux-pas and missed an important photo op.

In a sign of how strained relations were even before Yoon’s martial law declaration, Seoul boycotted a memorial ceremony at the Sado Island Gold Mines, recently declared a World Heritage site, seemingly over a report that Japan’s representative to the event had once visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. In another ironic twist, the report itself turned out to be wrong.

It’s also concerning that bilateral relations between Japan and the U.S., having reached new heights in recent years, suddenly look a little rockier. The U.S. is edging closer to having to, in effect, declare Japan a national security threat in order to reject Nippon Steel Corp.’s bid for U.S. Steel Corp. Tokyo is losing its biggest cheerleader on the global stage in Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, as he prepares to depart Japan early next year.

Tellingly, Ishiba failed to even secure a meeting with Trump during his recent visit to the Americas. Abe’s widow, Akie, just dined with Trump and wife Melania at Mar-a-Lago, but it’s unclear if it’s at the government’s behest. (Abe and Ishiba were bitter political rivals.) And to top it off, Trump’s likely secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has had choice words on the issue of wartime “comfort women” that will raise eyebrows in Tokyo.

All of which leaves things in East Asia looking rockier than could scarcely have been believed at the start of 2024. Yoon, Kishida and Biden, in their Camp David statement, noted that the “opportunity that lies before us was not guaranteed — it was embraced.” Cordial relations between the nations are indeed far from set in stone, regardless of attempts to future-proof them. They require constant work, sacrifice and, indeed, bravery. The three leaders who will replace Yoon, Kishida and Biden would do well to remember that.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia, and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief.