MOST PRESENT PROBLEMS
The longer this fiasco drags on, the harder it will likely be for the present authorities to deal with the nation’s most urgent issues. Domestically, it has to take care of a weak financial system and a struggling foreign money, which fell 10% towards the U.S. greenback within the final quarter.
And as a reminder of the risk posed by North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s regime launched its first missile of the yr into the Sea of Japan this week. Pyongyang’s nearer cooperation with Moscow means the North may achieve entry to new applied sciences to assist it advance its nuclear weapons program.
The risk is now so acute that many more and more help nuclearization, observe Robert E Kelly of Pusan National University and Min-Hyung Kim of Kyung Hee University in Foreign Affairs. According to a 2022 ballot, 71% of South Koreans favor such a transfer.
These sorts of conversations needs to be on the middle of Korean political life, quite than the interior disaster enjoying out within the streets at present.
Seoul additionally must handle its ties with Washington. The missile check befell whereas US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was within the capital, talking concerning the alliance.
But this relationship is just pretty much as good because the people who preserve it. Yoon shared a great relationship with Biden, and along with former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, they helped forge a partnership that might function a bulwark towards China’s rising affect.
There isn’t any assure that President-elect Trump will comply with his predecessor’s lead.
In a speech on Tuesday (Jan. 7), Trump spoke of ambitions to make use of “financial may” to pressure Canada to turn out to be the 51st U.S. state and steered calling the Gulf of Mexico “America’s Gulf ”. There was no point out of his plans for Asia, however Trump is more likely to usher in an unpredictable period that might embrace getting companions like Seoul to pay for its personal protection.
None of that is encouraging for South Korea’s new chief, whoever he could also be.
Against the backdrop of an advanced geopolitical context, residents should put their nation first and alter their political tradition, as Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, observes, a about South Korean politics, the place a number of presidents have ended up in shame or in jail.
“Demonization of opponents, divisive identification politics, insular political fandoms, and populism haven’t any place in a wholesome democracy,” he writes.
