South Korea has been a loyal ally and a key pillar of U.S. security alliances in Asia ever since the Korean War.

So the current turmoil in Seoul needs to be addressed by the incoming Trump administration. A month ago, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol briefly made a botched effort to impose martial law in the country. The resulting furor resulted in a.warrant for his arrest. Yesterday, efforts to detain Yoon failed after his presidential security service blocked investigators from entering his residence for more than five hours. He remains suspended from office, and South Korea is embroiled one of the biggest challenges to its stability since it embraced democracy 40 years ago.

America’s security partnership with South Korea has never been stronger and more able to deter North Korean aggression and its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. But the unsettled political situation in Korea poses a possible danger to the alliance. South Korea’s currency has plunged to its lowest level in nearly 16 years, the response to one of the world’s deadliest airline crashes in years is being criticized, and there is a leadership vacuum in government.

It’s important that the U.S. have an ambassador in Seoul who knows the players in South Korea, understands the country and can promote U.S. interests there.
Luckily, exactly the right person has just become available for the job.

Congresswoman Michelle Steel is leaving office today (Friday) after losing her bid for re-election in California’s Orange County to a Demcorat by 655 votes in a district Joe Biden carried. When she was first elected in 2020 she became the first female Korean-American member of Congress in history. As a proud Korean American who immigrated to the United States from Japan, she has built a stellar career in her adopted country. She served as both a county supervisor in Orange County (population 3.1 million) and a member of California’s State.Board of Equalization.

Steel has frequently visited Korea to try to strengthen the U.S.-South Korea relationship and build support for a genuine free trade agreement between the two countries. Raised partly in Japan and fluent in both Japanese and Korean, she is positioned to assist in aiding the growing trilateral alliance between the U.S., South Korea and Japan that will be necessary to contain China’s ambitions in the region. As a three-time Trump delegate to the Republican conventions that nominated him for president, she knows his way of thinking. “President Trump’s proven policies signal that greater stability can be accomplished in the Korean Peninsula,” she told me. “His strong hand is exactly what the world, and peaceful actors in the Indo-Pacific, need to navigate current crises.”

It’s rare that a foreign policy challenge and the right person to help address it have together so clearly at the same time, President Trump has.a lot of ambassadors to name – both from within the State Department and outside it. But one of his priorities should be to fast track a possible appointment for Michelle Steel so she might represent U.S, interests in Seoul as soon as possible.