A Xi-style purge, with a nuclear submarine on the side
What is Lee’s endgame with nuclear-powered submarines?
Why it matters: Seoul’s pursuit of nuclear-powered submarines inevitably make Seoul more dependent on Washington, but does the Lee administration understand it?
Ambiguity remains the watchword in negotiations with Washington, especially in the era of Trump 2.0. While the recent White House fact sheet leaves many gray areas—not least where the submarines will actually be manufactured—getting a US endorsement for Seoul’s civil uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing is a significant breakthrough indeed.
What remains baffling is the Lee administration’s endgame. No one seriously expects Seoul to stop at acquiring a fleet of cool-looking submarines. The clear intention is to “level up” South Korea’s nuclear latency. But this requires a coherent strategy, one that moves beyond foreign policy NIMBYism and establishes a firm stance against Beijing and Moscow, which is the price of Washington’s cooperation.
Building a single nuclear-powered submarine will take over a decade, a period during which any number of regional cataclysms could occur. Washington will expect Seoul to show the world precisely which side it stands on. Does the Lee administration fully grasp what this entails, or does it believe it can still “balance” between Washington and Beijing? (Better be better than what the party chief did to curry favor with President Lee.)
This is precisely what makes the deal so puzzling: it is strategically incoherent with the established foreign policy of either Mr Lee or Minjoo. It begs the question again: is this a strategic shift in the Minjoo foreign policy or just a cynical play for short-term gains in Korea’s defense and shipbuilding sectors?
Killing off an appeal is unlikely to make Lee safer
Why it matters: The apparent executive interference in the justice system erodes institutional credibility and signals a return to the political volatility that has historically derailed South Korean presidencies.
As the quality of politicians seemingly deteriorates, the turn to negative campaigning becomes inevitable. Rivals rummage through each other’s shady pasts, hoping to unearth a career-ending scandal.
However, negative campaigns work only until they don’t. They were damaging, but they didn’t prevent the elections of Lee Myung-bak or Park Geun-hye. Nor did they keep President Lee Jae-myung from the presidency.
That doesn’t mean they lived happily ever after. Mr Lee went to jail, and Ms Park was impeached before finishing her term. What’s telling is that the scandals that ultimately brought them down had been public knowledge for years. The public voted for them not because they believed they were innocent, but because they believed they would do their job. They faced the music only when that job was done.
And the leader, any leader, is always a scapegoat-in-waiting.
Empoli, G. da. (2025). The hour of the predator: Encounters with the autocrats and tech billionaires taking over the world (S. Taylor, Trans.). Pushkin Press. (Original work published 2025)
The prosecution’s decision to drop its appeal in the Daejang-dong development scandal, which unfolded during Mr Lee’s mayorship, came as a shock. I have never seen such a conspicuous capitulation from prosecutors. The case, while not directly involving Mr Lee, could have had direct consequences for his own pending legal battles.
Will this make Mr Lee safer? Of course not. The administration—though we remain in the dark about who exactly pressed the prosecutors—apparently pressed the prosecution to stand down. The last time an administration tried to manipulate the prosecution, a top prosecutor resigned in protest and got elected as the next president. (In retrospect, that was neither the best outcome for him nor the country.)
Like an inverted prophecy from an Oedipal myth, the very attempt to avoid a fate often ensures its fulfillment.
Xi has corruption, Lee has insurrection
Why it matters: This internal “insurrection” probe, mirroring Xi’s anti-corruption drives in style, risks paralyzing the civil service and replacing institutional expertise with partisan loyalty, impacting state effectiveness.
President Lee is good at taking notes from successful leaders. Facing multi-pronged legal battles before the election, he employed Donald Trump’s playbook: endlessly delay the court hearings.
Now in office, he’s employing Xi Jinping’s: purge, purge, purge!
When Mr Xi launches a purge, the pretext is always corruption. Corruption, however, is not a card Mr Lee can comfortably play right now (have you read the above section?). Instead, he has the “insurrection” card.
This is a plan titled “Investigation into Public Officials Involved in Insurrection,” operating under the name “Constitutional Respect Government Innovation Task Force.”
The plan states that digital forensics will be utilized as an investigation method, alongside interviews and written inquiries. It aims to induce public officials to voluntarily submit their personal mobile phones; if they do not cooperate, measures such as being placed on standby or removed from their positions, followed by a referral for criminal investigation, are being considered.
The establishment of “reporting centers” within each of the 49 central administrative agencies where the investigation TFs will be formed is also a point of controversy. Concerns have been raised that these centers could be flooded with malicious, false tips under the guise of reporting “involvement in or aiding insurrection.”
Kim, S. (2025, November 12). 공직자 휴대폰 포렌식…사생활 침해엔 “들여다보기만” [Public official mobile phone forensics… “just looking” regarding privacy invasion]. SBS News.
The martial law incident was a terrible event in a democracy, but it was also a stunningly poorly planned and executed affair. It leaves little reason to suspect wider collusion across government agencies, to say nothing of the blatant illegality of this new investigation itself.
Minjoo’s frustration with the civil service
Why it matters: The administration’s war on the bureaucracy misdiagnoses its own policy failures as sabotage, ensuring that future governance will be hampered by bureaucratic inertia and a deepening talent gap.
This purge may reflect the Minjoo Party’s long-simmering frustration with the civil service. A recurring complaint from Minjoo politicians since the Roh Moo-hyun administration is that civil servants, whom they suspect of harboring conservative leanings, are not cooperating with—and are at times actively sabotaging—their agenda. At first, the targets were career diplomats (“these pro-US traitors are ruining our policy of peace and prosperity!”). Later, finance ministry officials shared the blame, as their role in planning budgets grants them a wide, operational understanding of the entire government.
Purging them and installing loyalists will make things work, so the thinking goes. But the problem often lies in their own policymaking incompetence, not in a hidden cabal of saboteurs.
Imagine you win an election. Everyone you meet suggests a policy that sounds like the single most important thing to save the nation. Combined, these proposals are not just competing but are often contradictory. It requires a genuine bird’s-eye view of the country and the world to prioritize initiatives within a finite budget.
In an ideal democracy, political parties would cultivate talent capable of this. But in South Korea, it was the intelligence agency that historically conducted most policy research, not the weak political parties under the military dictatorship. Intelligence officers formed the core of the leadership, including Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan; the military elite’s experience in policy research surely helped when they switched hats to join the political elite.
With the country democratized decades ago and the spy agency’s domestic intelligence role severed in 2020, the only government department that retains anything resembling that bird’s-eye view is the finance ministry—the very ministry now under special scrutiny by the “insurrection” task force.
At the heart of policymaking, however, lies the essence of politics: gathering information, coordinating conflicting interests, and ultimately, making decisions. This is work civil servants are not supposed/prepared to do. But the ever-degrading quality of elected officials, which suffered a dip specifically since the 2019 election reform, blinds them from seeing the true roots of their grudges.
Minjoo’s civil service purge, conducted in the name of democracy, will only strengthen bureaucratic inertia as officials everywhere learn the first rule of survival: do nothing that could get you targeted in the next purge.