Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
President Donald Trump has told the Pentagon to scale back forthcoming joint military exercises with South Korea because they send a “hostile” message to North Korea, which he said was not threatening Washington.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote: “Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea.”
Trump said he ordered defence secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” the drills because it was too late to cancel the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, which are expected to start on Monday and run until August 27.
The two allies routinely conduct joint military exercises on and around the Korean peninsula in a longstanding effort to deter Pyongyang.
“These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful,” Trump wrote.
Trump said he had recently asked President Lee Jae Myung to join the US in the “Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran” but the South Korean leader had declined to help — a situation Trump suggested was “somewhat related” to his decision to reduce the joint military exercises.
The scaling back of the military drills comes after North Korea on Friday described the exercises as a “rehearsal for a war of aggression”.
The decision will exacerbate tensions with South Korea. Some Trump administration officials are frustrated that Seoul has not been quicker to propose concrete investment projects in the US after agreeing in trade negotiations with Washington to invest $350bn in the country.
Trump met Kim three times during his first term in office, including a summit in Singapore in June 2018. Immediately after the meeting, Trump told reporters he had decided to cancel military exercises with South Korea in a move that took his own advisers by surprise.
In recent years, North Korea has not responded to US efforts to reopen a channel of communication. At the G7 in France in June, Lee said Trump had told him that he wanted to focus on North Korea again but that he was frustrated about how to restart engagement with the regime in Pyongyang.
The move will spark anxiety among US allies in the Indo-Pacific, particularly South Korea and Japan, about how far they can rely on the US as a defence ally while Trump remains in office.
“It is as crazy as it is irresponsible for Trump, the president of the US, a staunch ally of South Korea historically, to base a decision to scale down military exercises with Seoul on Trump’s supposedly good relationship with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un,” said Mason Richey, an international politics professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “Treating this any other way is normalising what is abnormal.”
Allies are also concerned about the Iran war, which has depleted US military resources in the Pacific as well as Trump’s stance towards China, which, with the exception of trade policy, has been less hawkish. China’s President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Washington in September.
Underscoring the pressure on US military forces in the region, the USS George Washington aircraft carrier strike group is leaving the Pacific for the Middle East, which would leave the Indo-Pacific without a US carrier.
The Pentagon has also had to warn some allies that deliveries of US weapons would be significantly delayed because the Iran war has depleted stockpiles. The FT reported in May that Hegseth had told Japan to expect serious delays in the delivery of American Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the military exercises. The White House also did not respond.
