South Koreans frustrated with constant leadership churn: ‘I stopped caring'
In the American drama Designated Survivor, the US secretary of housing and urban development unexpectedly assumes the presidency after 12 officials ahead of him in the line of succession are wiped out.
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A less dramatic but equally surreal scenario unfolded in
South Korea on Friday, though the presidential line of succession did not make it to No 13.
On Thursday, former acting president and Prime Minister
Han Duck-soo resigned to run for president, while former Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Choi Sang-mok stepped down following an impeachment push in the National Assembly by the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK).
Now, with the snap presidential election set for June 3, Education Minister Lee Ju-ho is serving as acting president.
With former president
Yoon Suk-yeol impeached last month and the nation's No 2 and No 3 officials no longer in power, South Korea is facing an unprecedented leadership vacuum, intensifying public concerns over the uncertainty of its political future.
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'Seriously? Even the education minister is acting president now? That was my first thought when I saw the news,' Song Hyun-woo, a 26-year-old preparing to become a navy officer, said.
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It does so while unable to define its own foreign policy, lacking the expertise, coherence and unity it claims to embody, and all while courting the trade of those it publicly scolds. All in all, since the Treaties never equipped the EU with functional foreign policy machinery, Kallas has reimagined her role as a late-stage European Parliament resolution: maximally loud, thoroughly self-congratulatory and utterly inconsequential. All this choreography builds toward the July EU–China summit in Beijing. To ensure its failure, Kallas is deploying every tool at her disposal—inflammatory statements, staged moralism and the inspired Tyrolean gambit: sabotage repackaged as statesmanship, a masterclass in how to alienate partners while accomplishing nothing. In pushing this agenda, Brussels has confused activity with authority, noise with leverage and moral posturing with purpose. Foreign policy is now produced like conceptual art: provocative in form, hollow in function and legible only to fellow insiders. The Kallas doctrine—if it deserves the term—is not a strategy but a method: generate friction, claim virtue and ignore the fallout. And yet she is not alone in this European opera buffa. The system allows it. The Union's institutional design enables gestures without mandates and declarations without coordination. What passes for diplomacy is, in truth, a vacuum being filled—because no one else in the EU system knows what to say or wants the responsibility of saying it. The rise of 'antidiplomacy' is not about Europe failing to act; it is about acting when no one asked, on behalf of no one, with tools no one agreed to use. Brussels acts abroad not because it is empowered to but because the machinery keeps moving even when its purpose is unclear. Unless someone pulls the brake structurally, the Beijing summit won't just fail. It will confirm what many partners already suspect: that Europe can no longer tell the difference between having a position and staging one. Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa is a Hong Kong-based geopolitics strategist with a focus on Europe-Asia relations.
