Category Archives: Korea (South)

My Take in Foreign Affairs on S Korea’s Constitutional Crisis: A Super-Presidency + Deep Polarization = Temptation to Rule by Decree

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downloadI wrote a short essay for Foreign Affairs this month on South Korea’s ongoing political turmoil. My co-author is Suh Jae-Kwon; we are both in the political science department here at Pusan National University. Here is the essay page at FA. Unfortunately it is pay-walled, so you can find our text below the jump instead.

My basic take is that President Yoon Seok-Yeol wildly over-reacted to divided government, which is when the executive branch is controlled by one party and the legislative branch is controlled by another. Divided government is very common in presidential systems. And it constantly tempts presidents to rule by decree, executive order, fiat, and so on. In this, I am pretty clearly following Juan Linz who famously noted these problems in presidentialism.

A few other variables specific to South Korea make Linz’ basic framework even worse here:

1. Yoon is a political neophyte who didn’t understand that divided government is a normal democratic condition, not a constitutional emergency. A more seasoned politician who had risen through more typical processes – running in lots of other races (losing some, winning some), grooming party relationships – would have known divided government is just how democracy is. If Yoon had been an MP or a mayor for a decade first, he would have seen that being harassed by the opposition is normal and doesn’t remotely justify martial law. In fact, why didn’t his advisors tell him this?

2. SK’s super-presidency makes divided government problems even worse. SK pretty clearly has an ‘imperial presidency.’ This routinely makes the opposition hysterical. They fear getting steamrolled, which is what happened to the conservative opposition under the previous, progressive President Moon Jae-In. (Moon just ignored the legislature and ran a controversial foreign policy with a couple of his friends out of his office.) So the party out of power engages in all kinds of wild opposition behavior. Under Moon, conservatives claimed he was a NK asset; under Yoon, progressives derailed normal governance with endless, excessive investigations of everything. All this then tempts the president to just ignore the legislature and do whatever he wants – which is what Moon did. Yoon just went a step further.

3. SK’s domestic polarization is really intense, making the zero-sum contest for the over-powered presidency even more zero-sum and bitter. Typically this gets blamed on the right, and it is true that the far-right in SK is filled with radical Protestant fundamentalists and crazy conspiracy theories (on YouTube especially). The hard right here is convinced that the left is secretly aligned with North Korea, and that it stole the 2024 parliamentary election. Pro-Yoon protestors even wave around ‘stop the steal’ signs. So it sure looks like the SK far-right is turning into the type of far-right party we often see in the West. Indeed, I genuinely wonder if Yoon got his semi-coup idea from watching other elected authoritarians – Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, Erdogan – undermine their democracies and thinking he could do the same here. (This radicalization of the SK right here is a great research topic, btw.)

But the SK left is also pretty unhinged, which doesn’t get nearly the attention in English-language media and scholarship which it should. The left’s guerilla campaign against Yoon’s government last year was an appallingly malicious effort to halt basic governance in SK with the hope that voters would blame Yoon for the ensuing gridlock. Similarly, its investigations of Yoon’s wife were excessive, salacious, and grossly inappropriate. The left was openly gleeful about how much that hurt Yoon personally. None of this justifies Yoon’s semi-coup – Yoon should be impeached – but some Yoon’s grievance in his martial law declaration were accurate.

More broadly, the SK left regularly manipulates painful episodes in Korean political history for partisan gain. It struggles to admit basic facts about NK – that its human rights record is appalling, that it is governed like the mafia, that it would almost certainly use nuclear weapons against SK – and about Japan – that it is a genuine liberal democracy, that it is morally preferably to NK and China, that it has apologized many times for its imperialism. The left’s party leader has blamed Ukraine for the war and said SK should not participate in a conflict over Taiwan. Its original impeachment indictment of Yoon even included this foreign policy moral equivalence in its text. This is exactly the kind of amoral transactionalism we associate with Trump.

Anyway, the left will win the post-impeachment election, as it should. At least it is committed to constitutionalism. The full FA essay follows the jump:

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Original Version of My Foreign Affairs Essay on South Korean Nuclearization: America’s Response to Nuclear Risk in the Ukraine War Tells Us a Lot about its Likely Response in a Second Korean War

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Screenshot 2025-01-11 134514This post is the original version of an article I published this month in Foreign Affairs on potential South Korean nuclearization with my friend Kim Min-Hyung. I think the editing made the essay more readable, but some topics I wanted to elaborate got edited out.

Specifically, US hesitation against fully and robustly supporting Ukraine against Russia – because of Russia’s nuclear threats – is a model for what will happen to South Korea in a second Korean war, especially when Trump is POTUS.

We have known for years that the Biden administration has repeatedly held back on aid, discouraged certain Ukrainian military actions, balked at giving certain weapons systems, and so on for fear of Russian nuclear ‘red lines.’ Here is yet another example from the last few days. Apparently, the Biden team got Russia out of an even bigger defeat around Kherson in 2022 for fear of a Russian nuclear response. Russia’s nuclear threats have worked well, and they aren’t even as credible as North Korea’s!

A lot people think the Russians are just bluffing, but the Biden team has been super cautious anyway. So in a Korean contingency, where NK nuclear threats are even more credible, our behavior in Ukraine suggests we will respond even more cautiously. Our Ukraine behavior strongly suggests we will slowroll aid to SK and try to avoid full involvement for fear of nuclear escalation.

NK nuclear escalation threats are more credible than Russia’s or China’s, because NK is far more vulnerable to collapse after just a single significant conventional defeat than they are. NK’s military is conventionally obsolete; NK lacks strategic depth; its economy is a shambles; its state is sclerotic and shallow. One big defeat at the DMZ, and it’s all over for NK and the Kims who will be lynched by their own people. Russia by contrast does not face regime collapse and an existential leadership crisis if it loses badly conventionally in Ukraine; nor does China face immediate implosion if it loses in a war over Taiwan. But NK and its ruling family do face immediate existential risk if they lose even one battle at the DMZ. So NK has to threaten nuclear use immediately, and it has to use those weapons if its bluff is called. It can’t issue vague, maybe-sorta threats like Putin has for the last 3 years.

So if Russian not-so-credible threat have successfully gotten the US and NATO to slow-roll aid to Ukraine, imagine how much more successful they will be in Korea where NK’s nuclear threats are far more credible because nuclear escalation is its only chance to survive?

If NK will go nuclear almost certainly, will the US risk nuclear strikes on US targets for a distant, medium-sized ally of mid-range importance to US national security? Probably not – because that also describes Ukraine. Like SK, Ukraine is an exposed, mid-sized ally of middling importance to US security under direct nuclear threat. In both cases, a victory by the US partner would be good, but its loss would not be a huge loss for the US either. It would be more important for regional locals. Specifically, SK’s defeat/destruction by NK (or China) is more important to Japan, India, and Australia than to the US, just as Ukraine’s is more important to Europe than to the US.

Now, you say that SK is a treaty ally of the US, but Ukraine is not. So the US will be willing to risk nuclear war for SK, but not for Ukraine. I find this fantastical thinking. US alliance commitments are credible in conventional scenarios in Korea, but would they really be in a contingency where NK would launch a nuclear weapon against Guam, Hawaii, or even CONUS? Are alliance commitments automatic in nuclear escalation scenarios? I doubt that. De Gaulle realized this point 65 years ago. Maybe Biden would act on the US alliance commitment to SK despite high nuclear risk, but Trump very obviously won’t. In fact, I doubt Trump would even fight conventionally for SK.

Then you object that SK is not a mid-sized partner like Ukraine which could be lost, but a major ally because we need it against China. This would be so if SKs wanted to come with us on great power competition with China. But they don’t, especially not the SK left which is about to take the presidency when impeached conservative president Yoon is removed in the next few months.

So if you don’t think the US is going to risk highly like nuclear escalation for you; and you face a frightening nuclear opponent who routinely threatens you with nuclear devastation; and your alliance patron is about to be governed by an irresponsible, autocrat-admiring con-man, what should you do?

If you think about potential SK nuclearization that way, it’s not too hard to figure out why SK opinion tilts towards nukes.

The original, pre-edited version of my essay follows the jump:

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North Korea will Use Nuclear Weapons First in a Serious Contingency – and No One Really Quite Knows What to Do about That

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d-thumbnail-600x370This re-posts an article I wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently on N Korea’s likely first-use of nuclear weapons in any serious Korean contingency.

The University of Pennsylvania invited me to participate in two-day forum on nuclear weapons back in September. This is the short paper I brought. Here it is at BAS.

My core argument is that NK will go nuclear almost immediately because: 1. It faces a very intense use-it-or-lose-it dilemma. 2. It can’t hope to win conventionally. 3. Any conflict almost immediately become existential for it.

No one really quite knows what to do in response. Missile defense doesn’t work well enough to guarantee that we can shoot down all their inbounds. And sanctions can only slow NK down, not stop their nuclear march. So my suggestion is to start deconcentrating US forces on the peninsula – to more and smaller US bases – so that they are not such a juicy hostage-taking target.

But that runs directly counter to what we have been doing here for the last decade or so – concentrating US forces in a few super-bases like Camp Humphreys. That may make logistical and financial sense. But it offers huge, inviting, clustered targets of Americans for NK to threaten or strike.

And if they NKs do nukes a US base in East Asia and kill thousands of Americans, the pressure on POUTS to massively retaliate will be enormous. And if we respond by nuking NK, the potential for spiraling escalation, including possibly China is high.

Below is my original, pre-edited and more technical version of my paper:

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My Comments to the South Korean Navy’s International Seapower Symposium: A Big SK Inter-Service Budget Fight Looms

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20230608_061928000_iOS 4Without a headline defense budget hike, ROKA, ROKAF, and ROKN are going to collide over the costs of army manpower replacement, missile defense, and an aircraft carrier in the next decade. (I am second from the left in the picture.)

This was the gist of my comments at the South Korean Navy’s 16th Annual International Seapower Symposium here in Busan this month. Here is my Twitter thread on that event with some nice pictures. I also wrote up these ideas in an essay for 1945.com.

To my mind, a big new issue for the SK navy in the next 10-20 years is the Chinese naval threat to SK SLOCs through the South China Sea. Particularly, SK oil shipments from Persian Gulf through the SCS are vulnerable to a PLAN blockade if China gets upset at something South Korea does, like cooperation on missile defense with the US and Japan. China has already bullied SK on missile defense in the past.

China’s creeping control of the SCS will eventually allow it to ‘quarantine’ shipping there to punish SK, Japan, and Taiwan. The odds of this strike me as pretty high once China has de facto control down there. Any embargo will be done informally, first with fishing fleet and coast guard harassment, escalating if necessary. I am surprised more thinking is not given over to this possibility. It seems really obvious to me.

This is one reason why South Korea is thinking about building an aircraft carrier, which I support. Expecting the US to do all the heavy lifting in the SCS is cheap-riding, so SK. Japan, and others should consider maritime bulking up to help.

For SK, the problem is the expense of the carrier at the same time that its army and air force have new, expensive needs too:

    • ROKA is facing a large manpower shortage in the next twenty years bc of SK’s birthrate is super low. ROKA will likely try to fill that gap with tech like drones and armor, which is pricier than conscript infantry.
    • ROKAF faces NK’s spiraling missile program. It will need lots of missile defense and strike fighters (to hit NK missile launch sites). That too will be expensive too given just how costly THAAD and F-35s are.

These army and air force pressures will probably squeeze out the aircraft carrier – an argument I made for the Korean Institute of Maritime Strategy a few years ago (and which has turned out to be correct).

So I figure that MND will see a pretty sharp inter-service budget fight in the next decade or so unless the overall defense budget goes up. All three service branches are looking for pricey, big-ticket platforms.

My Extended Comments on Potential South Korean/Japanese Nuclearization for the Asian Leadership Conference and Foreign Policy Magazine

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imageI spoke at the Asian Leadership Conference in Seoul a few weeks ago on S Korean/Japanese indigenous nuclearization and then published my basic thinking with Foreign Policy magazine on the topic a few days later.

Both of the venues required a more abbreviated presentation for time/space constraints, so I thought I would put up my full remarks here, at my own site. Here is the 2022 ALC site, and here is my original article for FP.

In brief, my argument is that the US should get out of the way to let Seoul and Tokyo make up their own mind. The US has long opposed ROK/Jpn nuclearization, but increasingly that strikes me as inappropriately hegemonic or strong-arming of them. There is a pretty strong case for SK and Japan to counter-nuclearize against China, Russia, and especially NK. I sketch that in detail after the jump, but the short version is:

1. The US is not going to exchange LA for Seoul/Tokyo. In 1961, de Gaulle asked JFK would he exchange NY for Paris. JFK waffled; de Gaulle was no idiot; he built French nukes shortly afterwards. The logic is the same here. The US is not going to fight a nuclear war solely for non-Americans. This will raise endless, irresolvable credibility debates between the US and its Asian allies. The best way to resolve that is to do what our European allies did – self-insure through indigenous nuclearization.

2. Trump will likely get elected – or ‘elected’ – in 2024, and he will ‘blow up’ the ROK alliance as he promised he would. So ROK nuclearization may happen no matter what we think. And a US retrenchment from SK would probably scare Japan so much that the whole nuclear debate there would shift substantially to the right.

There is a lot of anxiety about this step, and I share it too. So I don’t endorse SK/J nuclearization. But there is SK polling showing high interest in this, and SK is terribly exposed to NK nuclear devastation with few good options as the NKs continue to build relentlessly. (All this I cover below.) So the least we Americans can do is get out of the way and let them debate it themselves.

The original, pre-edited FP essay on this follows below the jump:

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Does South Korea Need a Aircraft Carrier? Creeping Chinese Control of the South China Sea’s Oil Sea Lane is the Best Argument for It

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South Korea's new CVX Aircraft Carrier project: An overview - Naval NewsThere has a been a pretty vibrant debate in South Korea over building an indigenous aircraft carrier. That debate has been especially resonant where I live – Busan – because it would probably be built here.

This post is a re-up of an op-ed I wrote for the Japan Times this week. I also wrote on this once before for a ROK navy-adjacent think-tank.

IMO, the best argument for a ROK carrier is China’s creeping, long-term effort to dominate the South China Sea. Oil from the Persian Gulf traverses the SCS on its way to East Asia’s democracies – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. Chinese control of the SCS oil sea lane would allow the PLAN to embargo carbon imports for whatever bogus reason Beijing could think of.

We can be sure that Chinese bullying in the region will use this tool as soon as China consolidates control of the SCS and puts up enough bases to launch blockades. Indeed, I have long thought that this is the primary reason China wants to control the SCS so badly. It’s not clear that there are a lot of natural resources in the seabed there or that they can be cost-effectively extracted. And all the little islands and sandbars in the SCS aren’t valuable in themselves.

But this would require SK to start seriously thinking about 1) power projection southward, 2) contesting Chinese sea control inside the first island chain, and 3) cooperating with Japan which is also threatened by this and which has a larger navy. That would all be great but is a big ask for a country not used to thinking about foreign policy much beyond the peninsula. And that is my big concern: that the previous Moon administration really wanted to build this because Japan is building an aircraft carrier, and wants to park it next to Dokdo. That is the wrong reason to build one.

Here is the original, pre-edited version of my essay from the Japan Times:

South Korean has considered, in the last year, constructing a light aircraft carrier. This has provoked controversy. The decision to build it or not has swung back and forth. The South Korean navy very much wants it and has made a public push for it. The South Korean legislature, the National Assembly, ultimately decided to fund it last year. But the government of new President Yoon Seok Yeol is apparently re-considering.

South Korea the Land Power

Most countries in the world lean into either land or sea power, as dictated by their geography. Unsurprisingly, island states develop ‘blue water’ (i.e., ocean-going) navies. Japanese modernization, for example, lead to maritime power in the last century and half. Britain too had a large navy at its peak.

South Korea would appear to fit into this box. It is an island of sorts. It has just one land border, but that is tightly sealed. So strategically, South Korea is nearly an island.

But necessity has made South Korean a land power nonetheless. Its border with North Korea is the most militarized place on the planet. The North Korean army numbers over one million active-duty soldiers, with millions more in reserve. North Korea’s air and naval power are small in comparison. A second Korean war, like the first one, would mostly be fought on the ground. Continue reading →

South Korea’s New President is Probably a Bland Centrist – and That’s Fine

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South Korea's new president, Yoon Suk-yeol (right), greets the country's outgoing leader, Moon Jae-in, at his inauguration ceremony in Seoul on Tuesday. | REUTERSThis is what a peaceful transition of power looks like, American Republicans! Moon and Yoon follow the rules. That’s good. Learn from that.

This is a repost of an article I wrote for The Japan Times.

My impression from teaching my student is that the new South Korean president, Yoon Seok-Yeol, ignites no enthusiasm. He reminds them of their grandfather – old, kinda out-of-touch, lacking charisma. But honestly, after 5 year of Moon Jae-In’s rollercoaster with Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, I’ll take some bland boredom.

Yoon jumped into the race last year and does not have deep roots on the right here. Most importantly, he does not (seem to) share SK right’s fatiguing obsession with vindicating impeached former conservative president Park Geun-Hye. Park was guilty already! Get over it. I am hopeful that means he won’t prosecute Moon in his post-presidency solely for revenge, which I think almost any other traditional right-wing POTROK would do.

On policy, Yoon will lean to the right. He’ll be conservative on social mores – no gay marriage, no anti-discrimination law (sigh) – but he won’t be Trump. On economic issues – chaebol power, overlong work hours – he’ll do nothing, unfortunately. But at least on NK, we won’t have to hear anymore about what a misunderstood great guy Kim Jong-Un is. Enough of that. Those calling him the Donald Trump of Korea are probably just casting around for a label. Yoon doesn’t behave like Trump at all, thankfully.

Here is my essay for The Japan Times:

Yoon Seok-Yeol was inaugurated president of South Korea this week. He is a former prosecutor who only entered politics in the last year. He is from the conservative People Power Party. But he has no roots in that party or its various factions. Nor does he seem particularly ideological. He channels the basic anti-communism – aimed at North Korea – of the South Korean right. That has long been the core motivator of South Korean conservativism. But beyond that, he seems like a bland centrist.

This is a surprising turn. There is no obvious reason why South Korean conservatives would want him as their candidate, beyond simply defeating the left in the election. Yoon has no particularly programmatic interest in domestic politics. He is not a libertarian or religious social conservative, for example.

He has been called the ‘Donald Trump of Korea,’ but that feels mostly like foreign journalists grasping for an ideological handle for him. If he is a Trumpian populist, he has not talked that way. Trump’s signature mix of bombast, racism, tariffs, and loud nationalism is not how Yoon campaigned.

Please read the rest here.

S Korea’s Confused Response on the Ukraine War wasn’t just Reflexive Mercantilism, but also the Leverage Autocracies Gain Over Democracies who Trade with Them Too Much

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South Korean voters were less than pleased with their government's standoffish stance on the Ukraine invasion, which arguably helped hawkish candidate Yoon Suk-yeol win the presidential election. | POOL / VIA REUTERS South Korea got a lot of (deserved) criticism for its erratic, corporate-profits-uber-alles approach to the Ukraine War. It has since come around, but only after the US twisted its arm with export control threats. And its MPs mostly skipped Zelensky’s speech to the SK parliament. All in all it was a pretty poor showing.

This is a re-post of a column I wrote a few days ago for the Japan Times. For other commentary in the same vein, try here, here, and here.

Some of this was straight-up mercantilism. The government complained about corporate investments in Russian being put at risk, plus the wider trade relationship. That came off so callous and tone-deaf that South Korean citizens pushed back. But it illustrates a long-established problem in South Korean foreign policy: the country’s largest corporations are far too influential, creating a what’s-good-for-Samsung-is-good-for-Korea mentality which is wrong, plutocratic, and undemocratic.

But the larger issue applies to all democracies trading a lot with autocracies: trade creates leverage, and autocracies are happy to weaponize it. China already did this in the THAAD fight with S Korea a few years back; New Zealand has gotten criticism as a weak link; American businesses like Disney and the NBA have been craven before China. All of us democracies are going to have to start unwinding our economies from nasty dictatorships to avoid betraying our values for corporate profits, and since China is South Korea’s biggest export market, the new Yoon government should start that now.

Here is that Japan Times essay:

The Ukraine war has a been a unique challenge to Asia’s democracies. The war is far away. It involves peoples cultural distinct from this region, and its impacts will be most directly felt in Eastern Europe. Russia’s complaints and motivations mostly concern the West, particularly the post-Cold War European settlement which much reduced Russian power there. Inevitably then, the West’s response has been the most active. It is in the firing line.

But there are Asian ramifications too, which Japan, to its credit, seems to have grasped. Despite long hesitation on the use of sanctions – despite the regular use of sanctions by its American ally – Tokyo appears to have decided that this Russian aggression needs to be punished. The Russian invasion is blatant imperialism. Were Russia to get away with absorbing a smaller neighbor as the world watched, it would send a powerful signal to China that it could do the same to Taiwan. That would be a direct security threat to Japan. And Russian tactics – the purposeful shelling of civilian areas, and the operation of death squads to murder civilians en masse – have been a moral shock. Japan’s decision to support the sanctioning of Russia looks increasingly like the right call.

By contrast, South Korea’s response has a been mixed bag. When the war started, Seoul’s response was hesitant and ambiguous, provoking a wave of international criticism which the government neither seemed to understand, nor know how to respond to. The first response of South Korean President Moon Jae-In’s administration was fear for South Korean exports to Russia. Lee Jae-Myung, the leftist candidate in the recent presidential election at the time, blamed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for provoking the invasion, which brought another wave of social media backlash. For days, it was not clear if Seoul would support the sanctions regime. South Korea only came around when the US threatened a trade exemption its exporters need.

Read the rest here.

South Korean President-Elect Yoon Suggested Preemptive Strikes on N Korea. There will be a Lot More of that Talk if the NKs Don’t Slow Down, which They Won’t

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North Korean MissileThis was accepted and then withdrawn by a SK newspaper as too controversial even though the SK president himself suggested this. I don’t get that…

So I sent it to 1945.com instead. Basically the problem is that neither missile defense nor negotiations are dependable enough to protect South Korea against what is emerging as an existential threat to SK from North Korea’s spiraling missile program. Missile defense does not work well and is very expensive. Negotiations might reduce the North Korean arsenal but almost certainly not enough to eliminate the state- and society-breaking threat of the North’s nuclear missiles

Yoon’s answer is preemptive strikes on NK missile sites in event of a crisis. He got a lot criticism as a reckless war-monger earlier this year, and his suggestion is obviously hugely risky. It could provoke the very war it is trying to defend against. But he is ‘thinking the unthinkable’ as they used to say. Presidents must think about this stuff; that’s Yoon’s job, and if you don’t like his answer, come up with something else.

North Korea increasingly has the ability to rapidly devastate South Korea. The North Korean missile program is mature – more missiles, faster, longer-range, more easily fueled, more maneuverable, and so on. Its nuclear program is maturing too. Kim Jong Un now wants to develop tactical nuclear warheads and MIRVs. And this frightening arsenal is unsupervised. There are no inspectors, no NPT, no IAEA.

So yes, let’s keep talking. And yes, let’s keep throwing money at missile defense and pray it works. But when your facing an orwellian tyranny right next door who has aggressively threatened you for decades, you inevitably start thinking about options which might otherwise seem extreme.

Here’s that 1945 essay:

South Korea’s Debate over Preemption is the Inevitable Result of North Korea’s Rapid Missilization – As a presidential candidate, South Korean President-Elect Yoon Seok-Yeol suggested that South Korea might need to preemptively strike North Korea because of its spiraling missile development. This was criticized as provoking the very conflict it seeks to avoid. Obviously, no one but the most belligerent hawks seeks confrontation with North Korea. A second Korean War would be devasting, which Yoon clearly knows. Instead, Yoon is identifying, correctly, a growing strategic threat to South Korea – one which might become genuinely existential if left unchecked.

The North Korean Missile Challenge:

The conventional inter-Korean stalemate is deadlocked on the ground. In fact, North Korea is gradually losing that stand-off as American and South Korean technological prowess outstrip its large but antiquated conventional forces. The North knows this too. It has therefore invested for decades in nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. These capabilities help it level the playing field.

Please read the rest here.

The S Korean Presidential Election: A Third-Party Leftist Candidate Threw the Election to the Right

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South Korea's new president-elect, Yoon Suk-yeol, celebrates his victory outside his People Power Party's headquarters in Seoul on Thursday. | AFP-JIJIThis is a local re-post of a column I wrote for the Japan Times on the election.

Basically, the left should have won. Its combined vote total was 1.5% greater than the right’s. But that vote was split over two parties (47.83% and 2.33%), with a small left-alternative party pulling away enough votes for the right (48.56%) to win the election.

As I argue in this Twitter thread, this election is a textbook example of Duverger’s Law and strategic voting in action. Whenever I discuss this in class, students always complain about strategic voting. The voters hate it. Everyone wants to vote their heart (sincere voting). But in a plurality race, that is a great way to throw the election to the other side.

In fact, the irony of sincere voting is that your precisely your enthusiasm to pull policy further to the left (in this case) by voting for the left-alternative party actually pushes policy to the right. That is, South Korea’s most convinced leftists delivered the country a right-wing government.

There are alternatives, like proportional representation (like in Germany) or double balloting (like in France). But that usually requires constitutional changes, so it’s best to follow the math not ideology. Which sucks. But I don’t see an alternative.

Here’s that Japan Times essay:

In South Korea’s election this week, the conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol, of the People Power Party, defeated progressive Lee Jae-myung by just 0.73%.

Less reported in the international press is the fact that an alternative left-wing candidate, Sim Sang-jung, also ran. She received 2.33% of the vote, which almost certainly would have gone to Lee, of the ruling Democratic Party, had she not run. Sim “threw” the election to Yoon, as her votes would have given Lee a clear victory margin.

South Korean presidential elections reward the candidate with the most votes. This plurality requirement strongly encourages all voters on the right and left to converge around one unity candidate for each side. Small-party candidates can pull away votes from an ideologically similar, large-party candidate who might otherwise win.

Please read the rest here.