The standoff between South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk-yeol, and investigators bent on dragging him from his presidential bastion raises the specter of bloody clashes in a society fractured by extremists from left to right.

“There should be no physical clashes and bloodshed,” the chief of the presidential security service, Park Chong-jun, warned hours before he resigned and agreed to be questioned about his role in defending the president, Yonhap News reported.

Violence, however, remains a distinct possibility even if Mr. Yoon, stripped of authority but not the title of president, is arrested. The acting president, Choi Sang-mok, warned against “physical clashes between government agencies under any circumstances,” according to Yonhap, but thousands of demonstrators both for and against Mr. Yoon remain poised for battle beyond the barricades blocking them from the presidential residence.

“I am concerned,” a retired Korean lieutenant general, Chun In-Bum, tells the Sun. “There have already been minor incidents, and the more prolonged the standoff continues, the more chance violence is a possibility.”

The fear of bloodshed focuses first on the presidential security service forming a tight line of impregnable resistance against renewed attempts by the high-level Corruption Investigation Office to serve a warrant for Mr. Yoon’s arrest. The CIO says it needs to hold Mr. Yoon for interrogation after he spurned repeated calls to submit to questioning about the martial law decree he issued on December 3.

Though he rescinded the martial law decree six hours after the national assembly, dominated by the leftist Minju, or Democratic party, rejected it before voting to impeach him, his foes want him held for staging an “insurrection.” Often described as “a coup,” Mr. Yoon’s decree may  inspire a counter-coup by his enemies.

“Police fear there could be a shootout in the event they try forcing their way into the presidential compound,” a long-time analyst who covered Korean issues for years for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Shim Jae Hoon,  tells the Sun. “That’s what the Democrats are egging on the police so as to extract Yoon out of his redoubt.”

The danger of violence begins with the security service living up to what its leaders see as their obligation to defend the president —  and extends to firebrands in the throngs confronting one another in freezing weather in the upscale neighborhood near Korea’s military headquarters on the historic Yongsan base.

At stake are disagreements extending from economic and regional feuds at home to the American Korean alliance and relations with North Korea.

“Divisions in South Korea are very deep, and, for many Koreans, the stakes are enormous,” a former senior American diplomat in Seoul, Evans Revere, tells the Sun. “That is a dangerous combination.” Conservatives, he noted, “despise and fear” the “progressives” led by Lee Jae-myung, whom Mr. Yoon defeated by a margin of less than one percent of the votes in the 2022 presidential election.

“These conservatives are rallying around Yoon,” said Mr. Revere, “because they want to prevent what his failed martial law declaration will almost certainly produce — a new government led by the hated left-of-center progressives represented by the Democratic Party.”

Fears of violence might well intensify if Mr. Yoon is detained while the constitutional court considers whether to approve the impeachment motion adopted by the national assembly. The court has opened hearings at which Mr. Yoon’s lawyers say he will testify in the next few weeks. It’s not clear if he could appear via video or would leave his residence to go to the court if he’s not in detention.

Mr. Yoon’s foes see him and his conservative allies “as heirs to Korea’s military dictatorship,” said Mr. Revere. “They want to oust Yoon and quickly replace him with DP leader Lee” in a snap election that would be held 60 days after the court kicks him out of office. “Their urgency is cynically driven by the need to put their standard-bearer, Lee, into power rapidly so that, as president, he can avoid prosecution on numerous corruption and other charges,” he said.

Regardless, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has to love the chaos in the South. “Ironically, this is the outcome that the Kim family regime’s political warfare strategy is designed to achieve — subversion of the South Korean political system,” a retired American army colonel with a long background in Korea, David Maxwell, tells the Sun. “We really need the Korean people in the South to understand how their violent actions support Kim’s  political warfare strategy.  This is critical.”