Rep. Andy Kim finds 'shell shock' among South Korean contacts over martial law

Rachel Oswald, CQ-Roll Call on Dec 3, 2024

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Rep. Andy Kim, poised to become the highest-ranking Korean American politician in the United States when he is sworn in as a senator, said Tuesday he is deeply relieved that martial law in South Korea has been lifted, just hours after it was invoked by the country’s unpopular president.

But Kim, D-N.J., said he is still troubled that the situation in Seoul took the drastic and shocking turn it did, resulting in the South Korean parliament convening an emergency session to pass, 190-0, a measure demanding that South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol revoke the martial law he had imposed hours earlier.

Yoon ultimately complied, lifting martial law in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

“I’m relieved at this point that martial law has been lifted,” Kim said in an interview. “I’m heartened that the (South Korean) National Assembly was able to move quickly. … That has helped South Korea avoid an even stronger crisis, but there are still going to be real challenges ahead. There’s going to be a lot of fallout from what just happened. I don’t know what is going to happen next, and that is really alarming for the country where my parents are from.”

South Korea is one of the United States’ oldest and most important allies in Asia and is host to roughly 28,500 U.S. troops. Its geostrategic importance to the United States is expected to grow in the months and years ahead, given Seoul’s alarm about the presence of North Korean troops fighting alongside Russian soldiers in Ukraine and North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons capabilities.

“I’m worried about what comes next … in a country that has been a strong ally to the U.S. and a strong democracy in the region,” said Kim, who won the race last month to fill the New Jersey Senate seat that Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez vacated after being found criminally guilty on federal corruption charges. “There needs to be a tremendous amount of transparency here: What happened? Why were certain actions taken by the president, including (decreeing) martial law?”

Kim, who is on both the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees, said he spent a good chunk of Tuesday reaching out to his contacts in South Korea to learn more about what was going on.

“Many of the leaders and officials I’ve talked to were just expressing shell shock from what’s happened,” Kim said. “Not a single one of them had any idea this was coming. I think there was a lot of real worry about just what comes next. All of that was before the martial law effort was repealed, so I don’t know what the current feeling is. It’s the middle of the night (there).”

In his television speech announcing the imposition of martial law, Yoon said it was necessary to respond to the “threat of North Korean communist forces,” but he didn’t offer evidence of an imminent danger from Pyongyang to justify the first invocation of martial law in South Korea since 1980. Yoon is deeply unpopular, according to South Korean public polling, and has been beset by multiple influence-peddling scandals involving people close to him.

Yoon, a conservative, tried to justify martial law by blaming the opposition liberal Democratic Party, which controls the National Assembly, for blocking agreement on a national budget.

“The speed with which the National Assembly came back, that the leaders of President Yoon’s own party were publicly speaking out about what happened, I think that gives me some confidence that hopefully the foundations and the fundamentals are going to be able to prevail here,” Kim said of South Korea’s democracy.

Yoon received the rare honor of addressing a joint meeting of Congress in April 2023 in recognition of the 70th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Kim was in the audience for that speech and also attended the state dinner that President Joe Biden held at the White House later that night in honor of the alliance.

Kim, a former State Department official who said he hopes to get a seat on one of the Senate’s national security committees, went viral nearly four years ago for his response to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 7, after Congress had finally finished certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, Kim, still wearing his blue work suit, spent more than an hour cleaning up the trash and debris left behind by rioters. The photos of his spontaneous cleanup went viral.

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