Jean Baudrillard’s 1986 travel diary of his time in Reagan’s America – “the only remaining primitive society on earth”, in his words – describes a paradox about the nature of late-century American hegemony. “American power does not seem inspired by any spirit or genius of its own,” wrote Baudrillard, “but it is, in a sense, uncontested and incontestable.” American “genius” appeared to suffer “from the weakening of all the forces that previously opposed it” – the incoherence of American strategic thinking, to Baudrillard, was thus a measure of its success.
Today, there are American adversaries everywhere – not least in what is now called the Indo-Pacific. But no such “spirit or genius” seemed to underpin the Biden administration’s response to the Tuesday coup in South Korea, much less South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempted overthrow of democratic rule. The Biden administration’s response has been, to say the least, limp. At the time of writing, the state department has said little beyond an assurance that its alliance with South Korea is “ironclad” and that the United States will “stand by Korea in its time of uncertainty”.
Nor does Yoon himself display any sort of strategic rationale, let alone “genius”. Unlike its historical antecedents, the coup did not represent an intra-elite clash for control of the South Korean state. The animating force of South Korea’s political crisis is, instead, the Dior handbag accepted by Yoon’s wife. Not even Yoon’s own party backed the self-coup; support appeared limited to the military, which nonetheless hesitated to see it fully through.
As such, the coup was improvised, chaotic and seemingly dependent on the gamble that South Korean civil society would fail to mobilize at the time of Yoon’s unannounced press conference banning political activity two hours past midnight. Having failed to secure a single parliamentary vote in favor of martial law, Yoon reversed his declaration by 5am Seoul time. His political future almost certainly involves impeachment and removal from office.
The risk is that, in light of the coup’s short-lived nature, Tuesday’s events will be read as simply an erratic right-populist’s spasms – and left from history altogether. The three-hour national crisis is certain to transform South Korean politics. Yet it is also a fitting final convulsion of Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy of pursuing detente against China at all costs – including embracing Yoon, whose anti-democratic affect has always been clear, as a liberal-democratic ally and an anchor of US policy in Asia.
The Biden administration’s crowning achievement in the Indo-Pacific has been the American-Japanese-Korean trilateral pact (Jarokus), a US-led collective security agreement intended to counter China. In August 2023, the US president hosted Yoon and the Japanese prime minister at a high-profile Camp David summit, proclaiming a “a new era of trilateral partnership” – a summit made possible by Yoon’s unprecedented willingness to end the South Korean request for reparations from Japan for its abuses during the second world war in favor of an alliance against China.
Yoon’s eager participation in American efforts to consolidate an anti-China bloc in the Indo-Pacific earned him the Biden administration’s tight embrace. In February, the deputy secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, suggested Yoon deserved the Nobel peace prize. And at a state dinner in April, Yoon serenaded his guests with a rendition of American Pie, and was then gifted a guitar signed by Don McLean himself; the White House’s social media team edited the episode into a charming social media video.
This was all despite Yoon’s readily apparent contempt for South Korean democracy. The accusations of North Korean sympathies and the “anti-state” slur leveled at his opposition in Tuesday’s announcement of martial law had been favorite phrases of Yoon’s since 2022. But the story told by the Bidenites about an ascendant China and a senescent America makes holding close the likes of Yoon not only a forgivable sin but a strategic necessity.
Revisionism, the historian Adam Tooze argues, is the logic of both Biden and Trump’s foreign policy. Both have sought to overturn the existing world order in an effort to reverse the American decline supposedly brought on by permissiveness toward China. Trump’s anti-Chinese policy requires little recapitulation. But, when it comes to China, the Bidenites have discarded the same rules they deplored Trump for attacking.
Biden, who campaigned upon rolling back Trump’s aggressive protectionism, has clashed with the WTO over steel tariffs. And against the wishes of some American allies, the Biden administration has spearheaded a global push to prevent Chinese electric vehicles from “flooding” foreign markets. This has led Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s first-term US trade representative, to profess himself “pleasantly surprised” by the administration. The geoeconomics of the Biden administration are every bit as radical as those of Trump.
Under the Trump and Biden presidencies, a new normative standard for American allies has solidified. Alignment with American revisionism is the United States’s first priority. Whether one complies with the rules-based order is a distant second. As with Israel, whose efforts to uproot Iran’s network of influence are quietly favored by the state department (even as it is well aware of Israeli war crimes), Yoon’s anti-democratic tendencies were always permissible to the Biden administration. Even Russia itself briefly met this standard – and was welcomed into detente against China in 2021.
These spasms – in the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, and elsewhere – are to be expected under the bipartisan foreign policy of revisionism. And this century’s first coup in a democratic country with a major economy is a fitting coda to the Biden era.
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