EDITORIAL:

Former South Korean president doesn’t escape accountability for insurrection

A TV screen shows footage of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol during a news program at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. Photo by: Lee Jin-man / AP

Sunday, Feb. 22, 2026 | 2 a.m.

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In a world in which those with wealth and power too often escape accountability for even the most heinous of crimes, the South Korean legal system sent a message last week that no one is above the law. Former President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to life in prison over his role in leading an insurrection in the country two years ago.

In a ruling delivered by the Seoul Central District Court, judges concluded that Yoon’s brief declaration of martial law in 2024, along with his deployment of armed forces and orders targeting political adversaries, amounted to an insurrection against the constitutional order he had sworn to defend.

The South Korea ruling was not merely punitive. It was a civic statement: Democratic institutions are resilient only when leaders who attempt to bend them to personal political ends are held responsible. That principle should not be lost on President Donald Trump, whose rhetoric and governing tactics increasingly test the boundaries between hardball politics and the weaponization of state power.

Yoon’s actions triggered a constitutional emergency. His decree rejected foundational principles of democracy by using tactics of fear and intimidation to chill free speech and expression, placing media under military oversight and using uniformed troops to target political opponents. Citizens mobilized rapidly, lawmakers convened under extraordinary circumstances and the martial law order collapsed within hours. Yet the brevity of the episode did not spare Yoon from severe legal consequences. The court determined that the attempt itself constituted a grave assault on democratic governance.

The United States operates under a different constitutional framework and legal tradition. Definitions of insurrection, executive authority and military deployment are not identical. Even so, the parallels are difficult to ignore. Both democracies are anchored in strong convictions that elected officials are accountable to civilian voters with legal rights and freedoms including political speech and expression; that control of the military must remain separate from partisan ambition; and that law enforcement personnel, officers of the court and other agents of the state cannot be used as weapons to silence political dissent.

Setting aside the obvious parallels between Yoon’s declaration of martial law and the violent insurrection led by MAGA cultists at the U.S. Capitol in 2021, there are other actions that can more directly be tied to the Trump administration that should raise red flags among patriotic Americans.

Trump’s ongoing immigration crackdown, including aggressive federal deployments and highly visible enforcement operations in major cities, raises concerns about the president’s respect for the boundaries of democracy and constitutional law. The involvement of agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection in domestic operations far from the border has amplified fears that immigration policy is becoming intertwined with political theater. Trump is pressing the Department of Homeland Security to create a private police force unrestrained by laws other than the orders of an increasingly unstable president.

Equally troubling are Trump’s efforts to challenge election outcomes, launch pressure campaigns directed at public officials, frame political criticism as a national security threat and normalize describing political rivals as criminals or existential threats to the nation. Yoon justified his extraordinary measures by portraying the legislature as dominated by “anti-state forces.” The language is familiar to American ears. When political disagreement is reframed as treachery, the groundwork is laid for extraordinary responses that risk undermining democratic norms.

Recent efforts to prosecute Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and other members of Congress for speech-related conduct while violent offenders who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are pardoned and released to commit additional violent crimes, only deepen anxieties about the politicization of the justice system. Democracies rely on the legitimacy of legal institutions; when prosecutions appear selective or retaliatory, that legitimacy weakens.

South Korea’s political divisions remain raw despite the conviction, and the country now faces the difficult task of healing while reaffirming democratic resilience under President Lee Jae Myung. The United States, similarly polarized, would be wise to study the lesson embedded in Yoon’s fate. Accountability did not destroy South Korean democracy; it reinforced it.

The most striking image from Seoul is not the protests outside the courthouse or the heated partisan rhetoric. It is the quiet finality of a former president who once echoed populist slogans about “Making Korea Great Again” now facing the stark reality of a prison cell.

The threat to American democracy is subtler but no less urgent: the misuse of state power, the framing of opposition as enemies and the blurring of law enforcement with political ambition can and should carry consequences that outlast any single administration.

There are reasonable concerns that Trump intends to try to rig or otherwise nullify the coming midterm elections, If that’s the case, seeing Yoon’s imprisonment, and for that matter former Prince Andrew’s arrest for crimes related to Jeffrey Epstein, will serve as a haunting reminder to the president that misuse of power can have calamitous consequences for culprits down the line. It would serve him, and the nation, well for Trump to back off from his most egregious acts.

Democratic systems, whether in Seoul or Washington, ultimately depend on the willingness of leaders to accept limits, on institutions prepared to enforce them when those limits are tested, and on voters prepared to demand their democracies are not disfigured.