He has said that sanctions are necessary, but that “their goal should be to draw North Korea back to the negotiating table.”
He believes that Ms. Park’s decision to allow the deployment of the American missile defense system — known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad — has dragged the country into the dangerous
and growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing; China has called the system a threat to its security and taken steps to punish South Korea economically for accepting it.
Yet Ms. Park’s impeachment was also a pushback against “Cold War conservatives” like her father, who seized on Communist threats from North Korea to hide their corruption
and silence political opponents, said Kim Dong-choon, a sociologist at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul.
After the ruling, Mr. Hwang called key Cabinet ministers to put the nation on a heightened state of military readiness, saying the
lack of a president represented a national “emergency.” He also warned North Korea against making “additional provocations.”
The last time a South Korean leader was removed from office under popular pressure was in
1960, when the police fired on crowds calling for President Syngman Rhee to step down.
Park Geun-hye, the nation’s first female president and the daughter of the Cold War military dictator Park Chung-hee, had been an icon of the conservative establishment
that joined Washington in pressing for a hard line against North Korea’s nuclear provocations.
With the conservatives discredited — and no leading conservative candidate to
succeed Ms. Park — the left could take power for the first time in a decade.