Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the foreign minister of South Korea, Cho Tae-yul, both acknowledged the challenges to democracy in their nations on Monday while asserting that the alliance between the countries remained strong despite ongoing political turmoil.
“Our relationship is bigger than any one leader, any one government, any one party,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference with Mr. Cho, alluding to the change in leadership in both nations. The one in South Korea — in which the president was impeached after declaring martial law — took the world by surprise and is still playing out.
“I think what we’ve seen in our own country, as well as in other democracies that have faced challenges, there has been a response that has been openly transparent, that doesn’t pretend we don’t have problems or challenges, that confronts them, that confronts them directly,” Mr. Blinken added.
Mr. Blinken said Russia intends to aid North Korea by sharing space and satellite technology with Pyongyang — and possibly accepting the nuclear weapons program, which would be a reversal of decades of policy. Mr. Blinken first spoke publicly last year of the potential technology sharing by Moscow.
The deepening political crisis in South Korea, ignited last month by Yoon Suk Yeol, a conservative politician who was elected president in 2022, has put Mr. Blinken and President Biden in a difficult position in the final days before President-elect Donald J. Trump assumes office for a second term. Mr. Yoon, impeached by the legislature on Dec. 14 after his surprise but short-lived declaration of martial law, is holed up in a hillside compound with presidential guards, resisting police who are trying to serve him with a detention warrant.
Mr. Blinken said the United States had “serious concerns” about the actions last month of Mr. Yoon and had said so to the South Korean government.
Mr. Cho said the democratic guardrails in his country are holding, and that “the international community is focusing on the resilience, and that’s the right way to assess our society.”
Mr. Blinken noted that he was making his fourth visit to South Korea as secretary of state and his 21st to the Indo-Pacific region, and that this final diplomatic mission in his current post was bringing him full circle. He and Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. defense secretary, went to South Korea and Japan for joint meetings in 2021 on their first overseas trips as cabinet secretaries.
Mr. Blinken is on a marathon trip around the globe: He plans to have meetings in Japan on Tuesday, in France on Wednesday and in Italy on Thursday, before intersecting with Mr. Biden in Rome to visit Pope Francis at the Vatican on Saturday. Mr. Blinken met with the pope in November.
Mr. Biden, his top aides and U.S. intelligence agencies were blindsided by Mr. Yoon’s anti-democratic power grab. It has been an embarrassment for Mr. Biden — the American president had hailed Mr. Yoon as a champion of democracy and had chosen South Korea to host one of his pet projects, the Summit for Democracy, an initiative aimed at promoting global democratic strength. In March, Mr. Yoon presided over the third iteration in Seoul.
Mr. Biden feted Mr. Yoon at a state dinner in April 2023 in Washington, where the tuxedo-clad Mr. Yoon sang “American Pie” to an adoring audience. Along with Japan, South Korea is a decades-long American ally in East Asia, and bolstering those military alliances has been a crucial part of Mr. Biden’s strategy to constrain China. In August 2023, Mr. Biden hosted Mr. Yoon and then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan at Camp David to announce a new trilateral security arrangement among the three nations.
The United States-South Korea alliance is also intended to deter North Korea, and Mr. Biden has relied on South Korea to help supply artillery shells for the Ukrainian military in its defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion. The shells go to Ukraine via the U.S. military.
When Mr. Yoon declared martial law on Dec. 3, the Biden administration expressed concern but refrained from denouncing Mr. Yoon, despite the fact that his move echoed Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after Mr. Biden’s election victory in 2020.
In fact, Mr. Yoon’s supporters, who gather in the streets daily by his compound, are drawing directly from Mr. Trump’s playbook — they carry signs that read “Stop the Steal” in English, a clear appeal to Mr. Trump for help, and chant the slogan at rallies. On Sunday, as Mr. Blinken was flying to Seoul, pro-democracy protesters seeking to remove Mr. Yoon from office amassed in fresh snow near the compound while Mr. Yoon’s supporters held counter-protests. Hundreds of police officers in neon-yellow jackets watched warily.
On Monday morning, Mr. Blinken left his hotel, just blocks from the protests, and went to the presidential offices to meet with the acting president, Choi Sang-mok, who is also the deputy prime minister and finance minister. Then he had lunch with Mr. Cho, the foreign minister. Both Korean officials are career bureaucrats who were appointed to their posts by Mr. Yoon.
After the news conference with Mr. Cho, Mr. Blinken heard from the other side of the political divide. He went to the National Assembly building, where he met with Woo Won-shik, the assembly speaker and a member of the opposition party. Mr. Woo was on a list of political enemies that Mr. Yoon wanted soldiers to detain after imposing martial law, according to prosecutors.
Mr. Yoon’s suspension from office has left South Korea with no elected leader of its government, adding uncertainty to its diplomacy at a time when it faces much external uncertainty, including Mr. Trump’s skepticism of U.S. alliances and the growing nuclear hostility from North Korea.
Both the acting president and the progressive opposition have committed themselves to the alliance with Washington as the domestic political turmoil continues. But Mr. Blinken has had to tread carefully on both sides of the political struggle here.
Mr. Yoon had been more enthusiastic about the U.S. alliance than any other South Korean leader in recent decades. That pleased both Mr. Biden and Mr. Yoon’s right-wing support base.
But he has long suffered dismal approval ratings. His efforts to improve ties with Japan, praised by Washington as a bold initiative that has made the trilateral partnership possible, did not go down well among most South Koreans.
His government sent police and prosecutors into the homes and offices of unfriendly journalists he accused of spreading “fake news.” He has used his presidential power to veto a series of opposition-led bills to investigate allegations of corruption and abuse of power involving him, his office and his wife. The opposition, meanwhile, used its majority power at the National Assembly to disrupt his budget plans and impeach officials and prosecutors deemed to be allies of Mr. Yoon.
If the Constitutional Court endorses Mr. Yoon’s impeachment in the coming months, he will be formally removed from office. He also faces separate criminal investigations. Prosecutors say he committed insurrection when he sent troops into the assembly to try to block it from voting down his martial law and to detain his political enemies.
Around the presidential residence, Mr. Yoon’s bodyguards built barricades with buses and concertina wire coils over the weekend to deter criminal investigators and police officers from entering the compound to serve a court-issued warrant to detain him for questioning. Investigators failed in their first attempt on Friday, and would not have tried again while Mr. Blinken was in Seoul. The secretary of state flew out early Monday evening, and residents of Seoul braced for another possible police raid.
