The turmoil surrounding South Korea’s impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol is bitterly disillusioning to U.S. officials and think-tank influencers who had thought Seoul and Washington were getting along famously. Americans were just as shocked as Koreans when Yoon declared martial law on Dec. 3, as well as when the assembly voted down the martial law decree and then impeached President Yoon by four more votes than the requisite two-thirds of its 300 members.

The prospect of Korea’s constitutional court either approving or disapproving the impeachment, ousting Yoon as president or reinstating him with the authority that he lost with his impeachment, inspires scenarios ranging from civil war to business as usual.

As much as the State Department and Pentagon wish the Korean crisis would calm down enough to ensure the Korea-U.S. alliance emerges unscathed, the bond is in danger, with no chance of reconciliation between Yoon’s conservative People Power Party (PPP) and the left-leaning Minju (or Democratic Party). The Minju, the dominant force in the National Assembly, spearheaded Yoon’s impeachment and now is pressuring the badly scarred PPP regime and the courts to dispose of Yoon. His foes want him imprisoned for “insurrection” — the reason a district court in Seoul issued a warrant for his arrest at the behest of the high-level Corruption Investigation Office.

Serving the warrant, though, was another matter. First the investigators had to breach thousands of Yoon sympathizers blocking the way, and then, once they got into Yoon’s compound, his security people refused to let them near him. Initially, the investigators gave up and left, resolving to come again in a portent of long-term civil unrest. Finally, after the police refused to help serve the warrant, the investigators got another warrant as Yoon stood fast. All this as Antony Blinken, shoring up U.S.-Korean relations in his last foreign foray as........

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