The impeachment of President Park Geun-hye by South Korea’s parliament over a spiralling corruption scandal is not only a domestic political earthquake but also an unsettling geopolitical development in Asia. Due to its pivotal geographical location and role as a lynchpin for security and balance of power in Asia, turmoil in South Korea’s internal affairs has wide ramifications for the region.

Since entering the Blue House in Seoul in 2013, Park’s foreign policy posture had benefited the US and dismayed China. Like her late father, the Cold War-era military dictator Park Chung-Hee, Park adopted uncompromising opposition towards North Korea. She steered her nation strategically much closer to Washington and Tokyo with an eye to sustaining pressure on the bellicose and secretive regime of Kim Jong-un.

Park’s hardline attitude towards trigger-happy Pyongyang angered Beijing, which believed she had been roped into the American game plan of containment of China. The culmination of Park’s enhanced military coordination with the Barack Obama administration came earlier this year when she decided to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system in South Korea as a shield against adventurism of the mercurial Kim. She also overcame historical animosities to sign a military intelligence sharing pact with Japan.

Beijing interpreted these steps as American tricks to surround China and constrain its assertive foreign policy. China’s state-owned media vented spleen at Park as a Western accomplice who “had no hesitation about undermining regional stability and flagrantly damaging the security interests of neighbouring powers”.

However, in the absence of a credible Chinese counter-offer of tamping down North Korean belligerence, Park saw no alternative to deepening strategic links to Washington and Tokyo. Unwilling to sit down and negotiate with Kim and alarmed at his provocative spree of nuclear and missile tests, she held a skeptical assessment of China as the facilitator whose generosity Kim was exploiting to bypass UN sanctions and endanger the whole of Northeast Asia.

Now that Park has been ousted due to the political fracas at home, Beijing will breathe a sigh of relief. In the increasingly likely event of fresh elections being called, the top contenders to next rule South Korea are relatively dovish towards North Korea and also keen on avoiding Seoul’s excessive tilt towards Washington by advancing friendship with Beijing.

Earlier this year, the US lost the confidence of treaty ally Philippines after the rise of the controversial crime-busting and human rights-abusing President Rodrigo Duterte. The government of corruption-plagued Prime Minister Najib Razak in Malaysia too has swung towards China by signing a historic defence agreement and denouncing “former colonial powers” (code for the West) for “lecturing countries they once exploited on how to conduct their own internal affairs”.

The military leadership in another traditionally pro-Western nation, Thailand, has also inked naval accords with China as a deliberate snub to the US, which has critiqued the anti-democratic regime of Prime Minister, General Prayut Chan-o-cha. The drift is clear in East Asia. It is becoming Chinese in orientation and alienated from America.

The situation has a parallel to Russia in Europe. Like Beijing, Moscow has lately enjoyed geopolitical success in eastern Europe, where pro-Kremlin ‘friendly regimes’ have emerged in Moldova and Bulgaria with support from President Vladimir Putin. Far-right populists are the flavour of the times throughout Europe and they are openly ‘Putinist’ and derisive of Western liberal values.

Speculation is rife in the West about Russia willfully skewing elections, referendums and public opinion in America and Europe through a barrage of ‘fake news’, cyberattacks and propaganda. China may not be conducting such covert operations in the Indo-Pacific, but it is dangling economic and military carrots to key nations and subtly fanning the flames of discontent against American liberalism and military power projection.

Can President-elect Donald Trump reverse the Chinese momentum in Asia? Given his conservative ideological credentials and apparent isolationism, he himself is an exhibit for the decline of the liberal West and the concurrent ascent of illiberal China and Russia. Yet, the unpredictability that he brings to the White House will keep Beijing guessing.

The only certainty in this period of massive flux is that China, which had earlier lost ground in Asia through its aggressive behavior over territorial disputes, can afford a smile.