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A sudden, six-hour declaration of martial legislation in South Korea that shocked its basic public and baffled the broader world was not, because the Wednesday morning cliché had it, on anybody’s 2024 bingo card.
That features the playing cards of some very seasoned gamers. On the similar time that president Yoon Suk Yeol was initiating the shortlived gambit that now appears to be like destined to topple him, senior teachers, diplomats and navy brass from South Korea and its closest allies had been assembly in Seoul to speak geopolitics. No person within the room, admitted one participant, would have put cash on martial legislation by bedtime.
However the playing cards themselves are actually completely marked by the rise of China and the return of Donald Trump in a manner that skews in direction of precisely this model of unpredictable. Particular person incidents might shock; the better ambush of expectation must be handled as a everlasting, rolling actuality. Significantly so for South Korea, although the elements behind the occasion — and its nonetheless unquantified political influence — will resonate across the area and past.
The truth that Yoon’s transfer was so stunning is to Korea’s credit score. As is the velocity with which the democratic course of (by way of a vote within the legislature) compelled him to reverse place. Within the 40-plus years since martial legislation was final imposed, the South Korean financial system shines as an awesome rarity for having been formally upgraded (in 2021) to developed standing.
It has produced fiercely aggressive international corporations in key progress areas. Korea’s sovereign bonds are scheduled to affix the FTSE Russell World Authorities Bond Index from November 2025. Wednesday’s 1.44 per cent dip within the Kospi index of Korean shares was modest, mentioned fund managers, as a result of the affair (for now, not less than) supplied a shopping for alternative for high quality names.
However Korea can also be a concentrated illustration of the usually zero-sum influence of China’s rise, and of its capability to quickly and savagely destabilise the certainties of earlier occasions. If Tuesday’s insanity was, by way of the method that put in the outsider Yoon within the first place, a pathology of deepening public despair on the capability of politics to resolve the massive points, China is among the many causes that lots of these points appear so intractable.
In financial phrases, Chinese language corporations and their regular ascent up the worth chain now mount a formidable problem in areas similar to semiconductors, white items, client electronics and automotive. That is powerful for everybody, however these are sectors which were disproportionately answerable for Korea’s industrial miracle, and thus disproportionately pain-inducing.
The geoeconomic course Korea should navigate, as even icons of competitiveness like Samsung are made to look languid, is fraught with danger and paradox. Korea, like Japan, has been an enormous beneficiary of the outdated, globalisation-friendly world order. Now, it could be compelled not solely to select sides, but additionally to determine, excruciatingly, that its greatest hopes relaxation on the US turning into maximally hostile to Chinese language imports.
In geopolitical and safety phrases, China’s rise and the ever hardening US response to it place Korea in a posh place. The societal divide between those that would place the nation even nearer to Washington and its allies, and those that favour one thing looser is deepening.
Swirling round this are tightly linked issues. These embrace the concern of being sucked into any battle erupting round Taiwan. There’s additionally the nervousness that the current deployment of North Korean troops in Russia is symptomatic of a better reset of the co-operation calculus between Moscow, Pyongyang and, in the end, Beijing.
And now, looming over these geopolitical and financial tangles, is the unanswerable query of how Trump’s presidency will dictate Korea’s course via all this or, if essentially the most pessimistic interpretation of “America First” comes true, make the outdated certainty of US assist really feel immediately fragile.
Yoon’s inexperience as a politician and emergence from exterior that a lot decried pool was, to a big extent, what gained him the presidency. It was additionally, in all chance, why he even thought-about martial legislation as an possibility. For all of the political destabilisation that South Korea has introduced upon itself, it’s an instance of a developed financial system enduring extra broadly destabilised occasions. China’s rise is barely one of many elements right here, however it’s an immovable one into which South Korea can not afford to crash, notably when its house grown crises of age and fertility demand a lot consideration.
Yoon’s gambit was an excessive climate occasion; the underlying local weather change is extra troubling.
leo.lewis@ft.com
