Trump gutted the exercises that keep South Korea safe — to please Kim Jong Un.
That is the plain reading of what he posted Sunday from the White House, and it deserves plain words. He ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” the joint military drills that have held the peace on the Korean peninsula for seventy years. He cited his “very good relationship” with the dictator who runs a gulag state armed with nuclear weapons. He also threw in a grievance about South Korea’s position on Iran denuclearization, which has nothing to do with exercises on the Korean peninsula. He did not bother to explain the connection. There is no connection. The trade is not being made on the merits.
The exercises are not theater. They are the work. Eighteen thousand South Korean troops training alongside American troops at Camp Humphreys and across the peninsula this week, as the U.S. and South Korea had announced just days before. Live fire. Command-post work. The practiced coordination that lets U.S. armor crews and Korean mechanized infantry fight as one outfit when the artillery starts falling. That is what the men and women rotating through Korea drill all year. That is the rehearsal. The rehearsal is the deterrent. You do not cancel the rehearsals because the audience flatters you.
The people who pay the price when the rehearsal gets canceled are not in Washington. They are the GIs who pack up their household goods, fly to Korea with their spouses and kids, and settle into base housing for a year. They are the base schoolteachers, the PX workers, the Korean nationals who keep the mess halls and motor pools running. They are the ten million people who live in Seoul, thirty-five miles south of the DMZ, within artillery range of the hardened tubes and rocket launchers dug into the northern side of the line. Those tubes have not moved. Those rockets have not moved. The training that keeps the alliance ready to defend those people is what is being hollowed out, this week, because a president wants another photo.
Trump has done this before. In 2018, after the Singapore summit, he canceled the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drill and scaled back others. The summits produced no denuclearization agreement. North Korea’s arsenal grew through the period of reduced drills. The exercises that came back came back diminished, and the readiness gap persisted through the next administration. There is nothing in Kim’s behavior since then — the ballistic missiles fired into the East Sea last Wednesday and the week before, the propaganda broadsheets, the parade of long-range missiles — that suggests this round ends any differently. The arsenal comes back larger when the drills go away. That is the trade record.
David Maxwell, who ran the Korea Regional Review, laid out what Kim is actually after. He does not want the exercises eliminated. He wants them reduced, weakened, the alliance divided. He wants what Trump is now delivering. Kim is playing Trump, and Trump is letting him, and the bill comes due in the readiness of the force.
Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who spent his career inside this problem, put it in plain language: watering down the exercises “lowers coalition readiness and puts U.S. forces at risk with no real tangible benefit to the United States.” Sen. Mark Kelly, who flew fighters off carriers for the Navy and now sits on the Armed Services Committee, called the move “shortsighted and a mistake.” They are right, and the counterargument is not an argument at all. It is the hope that this time the dictator will be flattered into giving up his weapons. The hope has been tested. The hope has failed. The president is buying more of it with other people’s readiness.
The service members on the peninsula did not sign up to be props in a photo op. They signed up to do a job that requires training with the Koreans they may have to fight alongside. The job has a point. The point is that the alliance can defend itself, and that Seoul does not burn. When a president decides that his personal relationship with Kim Jong Un is worth more than that readiness, he is making a decision about other people’s lives. He should have to say so out loud. He did not. He posted a social media message instead.
The drills will go ahead this week, because Trump himself admitted it was “too late to cancel.” They will go ahead reduced and hollowed out. The North will keep firing missiles. Kim will keep smiling at the man in the White House who is doing his work for him. The alliance will outlast the relationship. The question is how many years of readiness the trade costs, and whose kids pay it when the bill comes due.