He has said that sanctions are necessary, but that “their goal should be to draw North Korea back to the negotiating table.”<br />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<br />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.<br />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<br />and silence political opponents, said Kim Dong-choon, a sociologist at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul.<br />After the ruling, Mr. Hwang called key Cabinet ministers to put the nation on a heightened state of military readiness, saying the<br />lack of a president represented a national “emergency.” He also warned North Korea against making “additional provocations.”<br />The last time a South Korean leader was removed from office under popular pressure was in<br />1960, when the police fired on crowds calling for President Syngman Rhee to step down.<br />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<br />that joined Washington in pressing for a hard line against North Korea’s nuclear provocations.<br />With the conservatives discredited — and no leading conservative candidate to<br />succeed Ms. Park — the left could take power for the first time in a decade.
