Trump is abandoning the South Korean alliance to a nuclear North Korea.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but when I read that the Marines just killed their biggest beach drill with South Korea, my first thought wasn’t about deterrence theory. My first thought was about the kids I served with.
Twin Dragons was the amphibious exercise scheduled for next month. Thousands of Marines and South Korean troops rehearsing a beachfront landing. Seoul’s military said Monday that Washington told them back in June the drills were canceled, because the Marines were needed in the Middle East instead. That’s the second time in a month the president has unilaterally torn up combined exercises with Seoul. Earlier this month he ordered the Ulchi Freedom Shield drills cut short, an 11-day exercise stopped after five. That earlier cut came without warning either. Now the next big drill on the calendar is gone before it started.
You don’t have to be a general to read this pattern. Two thousand Marines stationed in Japan were shipped to the Middle East in March. South Korea’s own president objected in public this spring when U.S. air defense assets were pulled out of his country. The carrier USS George Washington, which had been based in the Pacific, just rotated into the Middle East to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been deployed for more than 250 days. There is no announced schedule for any of those pieces to come back. The South Koreans who built their entire national security on the American word are not getting a transition plan. They are getting a sentence in a press readout.
The president has called these drills “costly, inappropriate and hostile” and described North Korea as “unthreatening and respectful” during his second term. Kim Yo Jong, the sister, called Seoul a U.S. puppet and said the pullback buys no goodwill. She’s not wrong about what is happening. The folks in Pyongyang read the same signals the folks in Seoul read. The only difference is what each side does with what they read.
Now here is where I have to push back on my own side too. I have been around long enough to know that the bipartisan reflex in Washington, the one that treats every combined exercise as sacred and panics at every cancellation, is its own kind of mistake. The 2024 Twin Dragons drill put more than 13,000 troops, twenty-plus ships, thirty aircraft, and forty amphibious vehicles on a friendly coastline “to rehearse eliminating enemy forces” against a country that has not fired a shot at the South in seventy years. That was not a war rehearsal. That was a show for the folks back home, and the folks back home paid for it. The Marine I served with from a town nobody ever heard of was out there on that beach in 2003, and I can tell you what that kind of drill amounts to when you are the one doing it. It amounts to a lot of fuel burned and a lot of bodies moved and not much else.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, told the country exactly where that kind of thing ends up. He warned of the military-industrial complex acquiring “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought.” When the bipartisan consensus in Washington protects empty drills at the expense of real strategy, when every cancellation is treated as the apocalypse and every exercise is treated as gospel, the complex is doing its work. The purpose of the alliance becomes keeping the alliance’s paperwork moving. The budget keeps flowing. The contractors keep billing. Nobody asks the working people whose tax dollars built the show.
But here is what the people telling you this is a “smart pivot” do not want to hear. You can call the drills what they were, expensive theater that taught the Marines nothing they would not learn in real training, and still recognize that what is happening right now is not strategy. It is abandonment dressed up in a uniform. There is no doctrine here. There is no plan. There is a president who decides on a whim that the Marines go here instead of there, and the working people on both ends of that decision, the lance corporal from some small town in Tennessee, the shopkeeper in Busan, the factory worker in Daegu, the American taxpayer whose paycheck got docked for a beach rehearsal that was always theater, they all just absorb it. Nobody asked them. Nobody is asking them.
A commitment is only as good as the keeping of it. An ally who watches exercises canceled without a word, air defense pulled without notice, and Marines diverted indefinitely does not conclude that America is refocusing. The ally concludes that America is not to be relied on. The folks in Pyongyang draw the same conclusion from the other side of the line, and the conclusion there is the dangerous one.
Both parties in Congress warned that cutting Ulchi Freedom Shield short was a mistake. They warned that cutting more would be worse. They were right.
The bill comes due in the form of a nuclear North Korea that knows it has a free hand and a South Korea that knows it has been left on its own. The men I trained with on those beaches, the ones who relied on the alliance to mean what it said, some are still serving. Some are buried at Punchbowl. Some rest at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington. They earned that alliance with their bodies. It ought to mean more than a sentence in a press readout.
The pause never really ended. It just took a two-year breath.