South Korea’s New Defense Minister

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s first defense minister, Lee Jong-sup, was hailed as the right pick for Yoon’s desire to end Seoul’s conciliatory stance when it came to China and North Korea. Known for his tough talk against Pyongyang, Lee smoothly performed Yoon’s directives to rebuild South Korea’s security relations with Washignton and Tokyo.

Seoul and Washington have expanded the scope of their joint military exercises, including ones involving the United States’ strategic assets. In March, Seoul and Tokyo normalized the General Security of Military Intelligence Agreement, a bilateral arrangement to share information on Pyongyang’s military activities. In April, Washington renewed and strengthened its vow to honor its extended deterrence against Pyongyang. In June, Lee met his Japanese counterpart to discuss the future of bilateral military cooperation. It was the first defense talk on a ministerial level in four years, since the latest flare-up in the South Korea-Japan spat over wartime forced labor and the ensuing trade dispute.

With this track record, Lee’s downfall was at once unexpected and shocking.

Lee became embroiled in a scandal involving judicial interference and abuse of power to shield a couple of high-ranking officers, whose senseless order for a search and rescue mission led to a marine’s death during a torrential flood in July. When evidence surfaced to suggest his and Yoon’s meddling in the matter, Lee took the flak and tendered his resignation in September before the opposition Democratic Party could begin the process of impeaching him and delving deeper into the truth. (I detailed that saga in my article for the October issue of The Diplomat Magazine.)

Shin Won-sik, a former three-star lieutenant general, took over from Lee on October 7. Unlike Lee, who is soft-spoken and careful with his diction in public, Shin is a war hawk and a far-right firebrand. Shin looks well set to reinforce Yoon’s flanks on both military and political fronts.

As a defense policy planning officer under former President Park Geun-hye, Shin oversaw the second revision of the Seoul-Washington missile guidelines in 2012. At the time, the bilateral missile guidelines capped South Korean missiles’ range at 300 kilometers, which the revision extended to 800 km. (The guidelines were entirely scrapped under the Moon administration.)

More notably, Shin has been known to entertain quixotic, hare-brained schemes to assassinate North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un with “decapitation strikes” and “decapitation missions.” In his retirement speech in 2016, Shin regretted not having been given the opportunity “to fight neck or nothing in a battlefield” and urged everyone to “prepare unification through marching North,” an allusion to an open hostility with Pyongyang.

Shin’s remarks from 2016 onward seem to be a precursor to Yoon’s and the ruling People Power Party’s current political posture. As a political commentator and an advisor to the PPP’s special committee on inter-Korean relations, Shin has long expressed ideologies that the party is advancing today.

In a far-right rally in 2019, Shin labeled the 2016 candlelight rallies that led to Park’s impeachment for her corruption as “treason.” This line of thinking has become a far-right talking point that paints the 2016 anti-corruption demonstrations and the subsequent lawful, peaceful removal of Park as a wily liberal tactic to wrest back control.

Shortly after Yoon won the presidential election in March 2022, he visited Park and promised to “inherit your policies … and restore your honor.” Likewise, in September Kim Gi-hyeon, the head of the PPP, received Park’s blessing for the party in the 2024 general election.

Shin has also defended South Korea’s dictators in the past. In 2019, appearing as a guest speaker in an online video, he praised the 1961 coup d’etat as a “social, economic, and philosophical revolution” that “industrialized” and “helped” South Korea. Regarding another coup that took place in 1979, he said it was necessary to “save the country” from the Seoul Spring, a series of peaceful democratic movements. Yoon shares Shin’s view. In one of his election campaigns, Yoon praised authoritarianism and dictatorship for having uplifted the South Korean economy.

And Shin’s declaration that “it’s only a matter of time until we cut Moon Jae-in’s throat” reflects – albeit in more violent tones – the PPP’s sworn oath to uproot almost every single one of Moon’s policies.

Shin was also an early proponent of the New Right, a revisionist historico-political movement that seeks to justify the Japanese occupation of Korea, absolve Japan of its colonial atrocities, and improve Seoul-Tokyo relations. In one of his most controversial remarks, he observed that “we can’t be sure if we would have been happier” in an independent Korea than under Japanese occupation. As a PPP legislator before his appointment as defense minister, Shin was the first one that broached the subject of removing an independence fighter’s bust in order to downplay Korea’s legacy of anti-colonialism.

The opposition Democratic Party opposed Shin’s appointment as defense minister on the grounds that he is highly politicized and therefore unfit for a job that constitutionally requires political neutrality. The DP maintains that Yoon is likely to mobilize the Defense Ministry in advancing the PPP’s political agenda.

In response, the PPP rattled off Shin’s long list of former military posts to explain how he was the right choice to face North Korea’s evolving military threats and innovate South Korea’s defense plans. Shin’s track record in managing joint military operations also influenced Yoon’s decision, as South Korea and the United States are scaling up their combined defense posture and readiness.

In the foreseeable future, inter-Korean tension is likely to jack back up, as Shin wants to abolish the 2018 9/19 Military Agreement between Seoul and Pyongyang. The agreement, which North Korea has repeatedly violated, created buffer areas around the border where no military drills and reinforcement would be allowed, as well as no-fly zones. Shin also wants to resume Seoul’s psychological warfare against North Korea. South Koreans used to float political and cultural messages over to the North, which was banned by Moon as it riled up Kim and hampered the peace process.

In the meantime, Shin has already filled Lee’s shoes. On October 17, he met Saudi Arabia’s deputy defense minister in Seoul to discuss expanding Seoul-Riyadh military cooperation and defense procurement. Then on October 20, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also confirmed over the phone Shin’s desire to deepen trilateral military collaboration among Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington.

At a time when the issue of defense and security is as politically polarized as other social agenda, Shin couldn’t be a better right-hand man for Yoon.