Your first book was called Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. I greatly enjoyed it. What do you make of the recent events in South Korea?

Well, it definitely was not a coup d'état, because the president made no attempt to recruit military chiefs to follow his orders or anything of the sort. He just abruptly had a moment of panic and realized that he proclaimed martial law.

Because there were neither secret nor non-secret events that justified it, as soon as he proclaimed it, basically none of the authorities moved to implement it. Then there was a parliamentary reaction, a popular reaction, and obviously, he will either resign or be resigned, one of the two.

I don't know what happened. It could have been a purely personal nervous breakdown. Now, it is a nervous breakdown in the context where the national capital is within rocket range of North Korea, and where there are supposedly preparations for national emergency and a provision for martial law in order to respond to a sudden North Korean attack. There have been North Korean attacks in the past, including one that penetrated the presidential Blue House complex and killed the wife of then-ruler Park Chung-hee.

So we don't know. It could be a private psychiatric event. It could be a piece of information that reached him directly without being filtered by professionals, and which he took upon himself to view as a warning of an imminent all-out attack....