Mr. Cho said the democratic guardrails in his country are holding, and that “the international community is focusing on the resilience, and that’s the right way to assess our society.”
Mr. Blinken noted that he was making his fourth visit to South Korea as secretary of state and his 21st to the Indo-Pacific region, and that this final diplomatic mission in his current post was bringing him full circle. He and Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. defense secretary, went to South Korea and Japan for joint meetings in 2021 on their first overseas trips as cabinet secretaries.
Mr. Blinken is on a marathon trip around the globe: He plans to have meetings in Japan on Tuesday, in France on Wednesday and in Italy on Thursday, before intersecting with Mr. Biden in Rome to visit Pope Francis at the Vatican on Saturday. Mr. Blinken met with the pope in November.
Mr. Biden, his top aides and U.S. intelligence agencies were blindsided by Mr. Yoon’s anti-democratic power grab. It has been an embarrassment for Mr. Biden — the American president had hailed Mr. Yoon as a champion of democracy and had chosen South Korea to host one of his pet projects, the Summit for Democracy, an initiative aimed at promoting global democratic strength. In March, Mr. Yoon presided over the third iteration in Seoul.
Mr. Biden feted Mr. Yoon at a state dinner in April 2023 in Washington, where the tuxedo-clad Mr. Yoon sang “American Pie” to an adoring audience. Along with Japan, South Korea is a decades-long American ally in East Asia, and bolstering those military alliances has been a crucial part of Mr. Biden’s strategy to constrain China. In August 2023, Mr. Biden hosted Mr. Yoon and then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan at Camp David to announce a new trilateral security arrangement among the three nations.
