How to Kill Another Terrorist State

“Eternity has fallen.” Or as we say in Virginia, sic semper tyrannis.

The main story of the past week is, quite obviously, the sudden and dramatic collapse of the Assad regime in Syria.

But first a short follow-up about the coup attempt in South Korea.

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“Aren’t You Ashamed?”

The more I see about South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s fleeting coup attempt, the more I see it as a possible preview of the near future in the US.

Yoon was elected by a historically narrow margin which he treated as a mandate, trying to enact an unpopular agenda and to suppress whatever he called “fake news.” In reaction, voters gave the opposition party a strong majority in the legislature, which obstructed his agenda. So in frustration he declared martial law and attempted essentially to suspend or dissolve the legislature, egged on by a defense minister who was his crony.

After the coup attempt, which failed largely because the army had not yet been politically purged and refused to go along, the legislature attempted to impeach him. But his party rallied around him and walked out, narrowly denying the supermajority necessary for impeachment. The leader of the president’s party is now saying Yoon will leave office early, but the promise is still vague.

You could see all of this happening in some form in the US over the next four years. That includes this bizarre headline in the Washington Post’s story on the case: “South Korea’s President Avoids Impeachment after Martial Law Misstep.” Misstep? There have been a lot of headlines like this in the past few years that betray an attitude toward politics in which everything is just a game, and the question is not whether an action is right but whether you can get away with it.

It looks (so far) like Yoon won’t get the chance to stage another coup attempt, but as in the US, South Korea’s democracy is not responding to this challenge as sharply or effectively as we might wish. The system is supported by norms that tend to bend and break when an aggressive would-be strongman pushes at them.

There’s one other twist that is distinctive to South Korea but has echoes in the US. Yoon was elected in part with support from young South Korean men who are rebelling against the fading of traditional gender roles. I’ve recently done some reading on South Korea’s catastrophically low birth rates. Part of the cause is a long anti-fertility campaign, from the 1960s into the 1990s, driven by the overpopulation hysteria. But the main reason South Korea hasn’t been able to reverse course is that it has one of the most educated female populations in the world—combined with extremely traditional gender roles in which women are expected to quit their jobs and do all the work of tending to the house and the children. In response, South Korean women have essentially been going on strike—and some of the men resent it.

All of that is just to set you up for the story of An Gwiryeong, the toughest chick in Korea.

In the groundswell of fury and defiance that erupted among South Koreans after their president declared martial law, curtailing the country’s hard-won freedoms, it was perhaps the iconic moment.

As parliamentarians scrambled to get inside the National Assembly building to reverse the emergency measure, a woman in a leather coat confronted one of the soldiers who was trying to stop the lawmakers, grabbed his automatic rifle and tried to tug it away while yelling “Aren’t you ashamed?”

As the soldier backed away, he raised the rifle’s barrel toward the woman. She pressed on, grabbing it as it was pointed at her chest, still yelling, before he gave up, turned, and walked away.

Video of the encounter quickly went viral and became a social media rallying cry that helped fuel the six-hour outburst of protest before President Yoon Suk Yeol was forced to rescind the martial law order early Wednesday morning.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” seems like a good rallying cry—and judging from the results, an effective one.

Pointing to South Korea, someone recently said to me—regretfully—that “democracies usually die.” I think it’s very premature to say that. Modern democracies are still very young on a historical scale, and while they have their turmoil and their backsliding, free societies are still stronger than they have been in most of history.

More to the point, dictatorships die much more often and usually more suddenly. That bring us to the news from Syria.

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How to Kill Another Terrorist State

The big headline news of the past few weeks is the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, in a civil war most of us had written off as a stalemate years ago. That in itself is an important lesson. Assad held out against rebellion for 13 years—and then his regime collapsed in a little more than a week. Rebels in the north launched a new uprising on November 27, and rebels from the south were entering Damascus by December 7. Assad has fled to Moscow, and Russia now has one more ophthalmologist.

How did his regime collapse so quickly?