Jean Baudrillard’s 1986 travel diary of his time in Reagan’s America – “the only remaining primitive society on earth”, in his words – describes a paradox about the nature of late-century American hegemony. “American power does not seem inspired by any spirit or genius of its own,” wrote Baudrillard, “but it is, in a sense, uncontested and incontestable.” American “genius” appeared to suffer “from the weakening of all the forces that previously opposed it” – the incoherence of American strategic thinking, to Baudrillard, was thus a measure of its success.
Today, there are American adversaries everywhere – not least in what is now called the Indo-Pacific. But no such “spirit or genius” seemed to underpin the Biden administration’s response to the Tuesday coup in South Korea, much less South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempted overthrow of democratic rule. The Biden administration’s response has been, to say the least, limp. At the time of writing, the state department has said little beyond an assurance that its alliance with South Korea is “ironclad” and that the United States will “stand by Korea in its time of uncertainty”.
