The South Korean president is doing quote-post diplomacy

“This is no different from Comfort Women or the Holocaust,” wrote South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on X last week, quoting a post with a video of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers throwing a body off a rooftop in Gaza.

The president’s post kicked off an internet firestorm for a thousand different reasons, not least because the video in question was misleadingly labeled. The quoted post reads “LIVE FOOTAGE: IDF soldiers tortured a Palestinian kid and threw him off a roof.” The video was actually from September 2024, and depicted Israeli soldiers kicking, dragging, and eventually hurling a limp body from a rooftop. The incident — involving at least four bodies — was captured from multiple angles by The Associated Press, which identified the bodies as “apparently lifeless.” Israel claimed the bodies were dead militants. Under international law, the bodies of enemy combatants should be treated with dignity; accordingly, Israel launched an investigation into the incident at that time.

As far as fact checks go, it’s not a particularly exonerating one. Nevertheless, the president of a sovereign nation probably should not go around quote-tweeting random accounts with sketchy, unverified posts. But tweet diplomacy is gradually becoming par for the course even beyond the deranged confines of the White House.

To put it delicately, Lee Jae-myung really Loves To Post. It might be tempting to brush off his online feud with the state of Israel as a brief one-off by a social media junkie. An exhausted-sounding op-ed noted that Lee had posted his way into a diplomatic gaffe with Cambodia earlier this year, and called for an “overhaul” of how the president’s social media account is currently run. Presumably, they want responsible staff members to post on his behalf. But before Lee Jae-myung became president, he achieved international fame for livestreaming himself jumping the fence around the National Assembly building in order to vote to block a martial law declaration; impulsive social media use both giveth and taketh away.

Lee ended up making follow-up posts clarifying that the video was old, but he refused to leave it there. “I’m disappointed that Israel is refusing to reflect upon the worldwide suffering caused by its relentless violations of human rights and international law,” he said. He also reposted a lengthy critique of Israel written by a progressive South Korean activist.

Israel took particular offense at the mention of the Holocaust, but seemingly missed the much more loaded analogy in Lee Jae-myung’s original post — the reference to the systematized sexual abuse of Korean women under Japanese colonial occupation. The issue of the comfort women — Japanese denialism, the demand for apologies, the question of adequate reparations — has shadowed relations between South Korea and Japan for decades. For Koreans, it might be the most prominent of atrocities committed by colonial Japan, and it is a symbol of a large-scale orchestrated attempt to destroy everything it means to be Korean.

A day later, Korea’s Foreign Ministry “expressed regret” over the “misunderstanding” (per Yonhap); a few days after that, The Jerusalem Post reported that the “dispute” had been “resolved.” But as The Blue Roof points out, institutional politicians from Lee’s liberal party came out of the woodwork for days to back him up throughout the diplomatic conflagration. Lee Jae-myung’s X post drew a clear parallel between Japan’s ongoing denial of atrocities committed during the occupation and Israel’s actions in Palestine, and institutional voices legitimized the analogy. Resistance to the Japanese occupation is fundamental to what it means to be Korean in the modern day; it’s no small thing to draw this connection between Palestine and Korea, especially given that South Korea currently does not even recognize Palestine as a state.

It might have started off as a slightly dubious quote-post, but days later, the chair of the ruling liberal party hailed the affair as “a milestone in the history of South Korean diplomacy,” describing Korea’s foreign policy as one of “world peace and human dignity.” Other party members much more explicitly referenced universal human rights and adherence to international law. These politicians are framing the X posts as the dawn of a new era, but it’s probably more accurate to see them as the inevitable close of an old era, brought about by a confluence of many factors: the Trump tariffs, the Iran war’s effects on the South Korean economy, and in March, the humiliating unilateral retrieval of American missiles from South Korean soil to be used in the Middle East. About a decade ago, the mere presence of these missiles on the peninsula sparked Chinese boycotts that wreaked havoc on the South Korean economy, but that was just the price of being one of America’s closest allies.

However, a few years of Donald Trump make all the difference, and the old world order is dead. South Korea is no longer ride-or-die for the United States; NATO and the other alliances that once secured American hegemony are all on the bubble. America grows more and more hostile to the international legal regime that it helped to birth at Nuremberg. As China hawks vanish in the US State Department, so do many of the reasons why South Korea’s relations with China have been strained in the first place. When the American century recedes into history, former American-bloc countries will all be trying to find their own way, and South Korea will be no exception.

Lee Jae-myung’s internet flame war is but one of the many reverberations of a real-life war. At first blush, redefining South Korean diplomacy with a post fired from the hip is almost Trumpian. But despite the chaotic delivery, Lee was setting forth on a coherent, maybe even somewhat predictable course. An affirmation of international law and human rights, after all, shouldn’t count as spicy. That it is is an indictment of the world at large.