Trump directs Pentagon to reduce military drills with South Korea

President Trump has instructed the Pentagon to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea, a move that carries significant implications for the security architecture of the Korean Peninsula and the broader Indo-Pacific region. Trump’s approach to US-South Korea military exercises has been remarkably consistent across both terms. In August 2018, shortly after his historic Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he suspended major joint drills. The rationale then was twofold: the exercises cost too much, and they were “provocative,” a word North Korea had been using for decades to describe them. By March 2019, following the failed Hanoi summit with Kim, the Pentagon formally ended the spring exercises known as Key Resolve and Foal Eagle. The decision came amid tense cost-sharing negotiations with Seoul over who should pay what for the US military presence on the peninsula. Several marquee exercises have been reduced or outright canceled since 2018, including Freedom Guardian and Ulchi. In many cases, the scaling back came at North Korea’s explicit request, which critics have argued amounts to granting Pyongyang unilateral concessions without receiving anythin...