South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol imagined he might be presiding over a two-week-old military junta by now.

The media would be regulated, political activity circumscribed and maybe there’d be troops — or “police” dressed like troops — loitering in the streets, just in case a still-restive populace got any ideas.

Finally, at long last, he’d be able to get some things done having freed himself from the annoying constraints of democratic consensus-building.

But it wasn’t to be. Just hours after shocking the country — and the world — with a martial law decree that harkened to decades of fraught authoritarianism and military rule in pre-Sixth Republic South Korea, Yoon got cold feet. He rescinded martial law after the 300 or so soldiers he dispatched to the legislature failed to prevent a nullification vote.

As noted here on a couple of separate occasions since Yoon’s failed power grab, you can’t half-ass something like this. There’s no such thing as trial ballooning a military dictatorship. If you’re going to go there, you can’t put it up for a vote, which is effectively what Yoon did.

On paper, the juxtaposition between i) a president empowered to declare a political state of emergency enforced by the military, and ii) a legislature with the authority to nullify such a declaration via referendum, makes sense. But if the whole point of the emergency declaration is to seize power with the military, that collocation — of executive discretion and legislative review — is an oxymoron.

In other words (and readers will forgive my morbid candor): For Yoon’s gambit to work, his martial law police would’ve needed to make an example of a lawmaker or two (or three or four), where that means shoot them when they tried to vote down Yoon’s decree.

He didn’t have the stomach for that, which is good for South Korea, but not so good for Yoon, who was impeached Saturday on a second try. The first attempt to oust Yoon failed when his party put politics over principle, but enough People Power Party lawmakers defected this time around to get the job done.

Prime Minister Han Duck-soo will step in as president on an interim basis. Han’s an archetypal technocrat, a moderate, a centrist and a professional diplomat. Over decades in politics, he’s served in all manner of capacities and roles, including a stint as ambassador to the US, an experience which might come in handy. Han’s been trade chief, finance minister, OECD envoy and too many other things to plausibly enumerate. Now he’s president.

At some point over the next six months, South Korea’s Constitutional Court will decide whether Yoon should be tossed out for good or reinstated. If he gets the thumbs down, South Korea will hold a new election within two months. “I will never give up,” Yoon insisted, in pre-recorded remarks aired after the impeachment vote.

With apologies to all the Yoon Suk Yeol fans out there (and there are some, somewhere, I suppose), I think we’ve seen just about enough from this particular idiot. He’s too autocratic to preside over a democracy, but too timid to be an autocrat. So what good is he?

Earlier this week, South Korea marked 45 years since general Chun Doo-hwan instituted what would become an infamous military dictatorship following the assassination of Park Chung-hee, who was himself a general and a dictator.