The warmth of Korean American relations during the era of President Yoon Suk Yeol has always been a little too good to be true.

Everything seemed to be going so well as American and South Korean troops conducted joint exercises and President Biden got Yoon and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to clasp hands last year in “tripartite” ecstasy at Camp David. But now, suddenly and without warning, we’re thrust into a new era, with Yoon declaring martial law for the first time in almost 50 years.

Yoon's demise would not be exactly the equivalent of a war, but the shock of his imposition of martial law, and then his almost immediate reversal of that decision, caught everyone totally by surprise. Some intelligence agents claim to have had a sense of what was coming, but, if so, they neglected to pass the word to the ambassador, Philip Goldberg, or the commander of American forces in Korea, Gen. Paul LaCamera.

American officialdom is falling back on familiar cliches. The alliance, they persist in saying, is “ironclad,” and of course “there’s no daylight between us.” But we know those expressions of solidarity are open to question and confusion. Another word bandied about by Americans is “resilience,” for the Korean capacity to stick together and move on through the miasma of political conflict, protests, unrest and uncertainty about where the country is going.

Where was the CIA, the know-it-alls who so often are caught knowing very little? Somehow it often seems that way through modern Korean history. The odd expert may claim to have read or heard that some American advisers in South Korea saw the North Korean invasion coming in June 1950,........

© The Hill