JEan Baudrillard’s 1986 travel diary of his time in Reagan’s America – in his words, “the only remaining primitive society on earth” – describes a paradox about the nature of late-century American hegemony. “American power does not seem to be inspired by any mind or genius of its own,” wrote Baudrillard, “but it is in a sense undisputed and undeniable.” The American “genius” seemed to “suffer from the weakening of all the forces that had preceded it for Baudrillard, the incoherence of American strategic thinking was therefore a measure of his success.

Today, there are American adversaries everywhere – not least in what is now the Indo-Pacific. But no such “spirit or genius” appeared to underlie the Biden administration’s response to Tuesday’s coup in South Korea, let alone South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to overthrow democratic rule. The Biden administration’s response has been lame, to say the least. At the time of writing, the State Department has said little other than assurances that its alliance with South Korea is “ironclad” and that the United States will “stand with Korea in its time of uncertainty.”

Yoon himself also shows no strategic thinking, let alone “genius”. Unlike its historical predecessors, the coup was not an intra-elite conflict over control of the South Korean state. Rather, the driving force of South Korea’s political crisis is the Dior handbag that Yoon’s wife accepted. Not even Yoon’s own party supported the self-coup; Support appeared to be limited to the military, which was reluctant to fully enforce it.

Therefore, the coup was improvised, chaotic, and seemingly dependent on the bet that South Korean civil society would not mobilize at the time of Yoon’s unannounced press conference, which banned political activity two hours after midnight. After failing to secure a single parliamentary vote for martial law, Yoon rescinded his declaration at 5 a.m. Seoul time. His political future almost certainly includes impeachment and removal from office.

Given the short-lived nature of the coup, there is a risk that Tuesday’s events will be interpreted as nothing more than the erratic convulsions of a right-wing populist – and will disappear from history entirely. The three-hour national crisis is sure to reshape South Korean politics. Still, it is also a fitting final shake to Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy of pursuing détente against China at all costs – including accepting Yoon, whose anti-democratic bias has always been clear, as a liberal Democratic ally and anchor of US policy Asia.

The Biden administration’s crowning achievement in the Indo-Pacific was the US-Japan-Korean Trilateral Pact (Jarokus), a US-led collective security agreement to counter China. In August 2023, the U.S. President hosted Yoon and the Japanese Prime Minister for a high-profile summit at Camp David and announced a “new era of trilateral partnership” – a summit made possible by Yoon’s unprecedented willingness to end South Korea’s demands for reparations from Japan its abuses during World War II in favor of an alliance against China.

Yoon’s eager participation in American efforts to consolidate an anti-China bloc in the Indo-Pacific earned him the close embrace of the Biden administration. In February, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said Yoon deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. And at a state dinner in April, Yoon serenaded his guests with American pie and was then given a guitar signed by Don McLean himself; The White House social media team turned the episode into an adorable social media video.

All this despite Yoon’s obvious disdain for South Korean democracy. The accusations of North Korean sympathies and the “anti-state” insult leveled against its opposition in Tuesday’s martial law announcement have been Yoon’s favorite phrases since 2022. But the story told by Biden supporters about a rising China and an aging America continues. For people like Yoon, it is not only a forgivable sin but also a strategic necessity.

Revisionism, argues historian Adam Tooze, is the logic of both Biden and Trump’s foreign policy. Both have sought to overthrow the existing world order in order to reverse the American decline allegedly caused by largesse towards China. Trump’s anti-Chinese policies hardly need repeating. But when it comes to China, Biden supporters have rejected the same rules they deplored Trump from attacking.

Biden, who campaigned to roll back Trump’s aggressive protectionism, has run afoul of the WTO over steel tariffs. And against the wishes of some American allies, the Biden administration has led a global push to prevent Chinese electric vehicles from “flooding” foreign markets. This has led Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s first US trade representative, to say he was “pleasantly surprised” by the administration. The Biden administration’s geoeconomics are just as radical as Trump’s.

Under the Trump and Biden presidencies, a new normative standard for American allies has solidified. Confronting American revisionism is a top priority for the United States. Whether one adheres to the rules-based order is a distant second. As with Israel, whose efforts to uproot Iran’s influence network are tacitly endorsed by the State Department (even though it is keenly aware of Israeli war crimes), Yoon’s anti-democratic tendencies have always been permissible for the Biden administration. Even Russia itself briefly met this standard – and was invited to detente towards China in 2021.

These spasms – in the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere – are to be expected within the bipartisan foreign policy of revisionism. And the first coup of this century in a democratic country with a large economy is a fitting end to the Biden era.