Trump's call for reduced drills puts Seoul in a bind
US President Donald Trump's call to "substantially" reduce US-South Korea military drills has revived speculation that he is seeking another summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, even as it places Seoul in the awkward position of defending the alliance while not undercutting his latest overture to Pyongyang.
The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise between the US and South Korea began on Monday, a day after Trump posted his comments on Truth Social. In the post, he 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," calling the drills "costly" and a "totally inappropriate and hostile" signal to North Korea. The announcement came hours before the drills were to begin, delivered via social media in what The Guardian described as the president's "blunt, discourteous fashion."
Echoes of Lee's own agenda
The move echoes a pledge made by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. At their first summit in August last year, Lee told Trump: "If you, Mr President, become the peacemaker, then I will assist you as the pacemaker." That remark, made in the Oval Office, captured Lee's approach to the North: dial down military posturing and make repeated peace overtures to revive dialogue, even if they have been consistently rejected by Pyongyang, largely over Seoul's insistence on denuclearisation.
Trump's decision to cut joint exercises aligns with what Lee had pledged to achieve during his term. Lee's broader message is that South Korea should take more responsibility for its own defence and reduce its reliance on others. On Tuesday, he used the moment to renew calls for wartime operational control of the military and progress on his country's nuclear submarine programme.
An inversion of the usual political lines
Yet the move has inverted South Korea's usual political lines, where the left-right divide is shaped more by attitudes toward North Korea—hawks versus doves, confrontation versus engagement—than by economic or social values. Reducing joint drills has long been advocated by some on the Korean left. Now a right-wing US president is imposing the policy on his centre-left South Korean counterpart, landing awkwardly for both sides.
The opposition conservative People Power party has called the decision a "security disaster" and warned of a return to "Korea passing"—a term suggesting that the US might bypass Seoul on matters of its own security. The influential daily Chosun Ilbo went further, blaming Lee's government directly for inviting the cut in joint exercises.
Meanwhile, the progressive paper Hankyoreh called the delivery of the decision—unilateral and discourteous—"regrettable," though it raised no objection to its substance. Another outlet, Kyunghyang Shinmun, suggested the cut could help create an atmosphere for dialogue with North Korea, provided deterrence holds.
Deterrence and doubts
The louder concern in Seoul, however, is that Trump is weakening a key pillar of deterrence while leaving South Korea with little say over decisions that directly affect its security. That could strain an alliance that has been the bedrock of security on the peninsula since the Korean war. As Professor Jaechun Kim of Sogang University put it, such remarks reinforce the impression that US obligations are viewed through a "highly transactional lens" and may deepen doubts about US reliability.
Public support for an independent nuclear deterrent among South Koreans and their neighbours has hovered around or over 70% in recent surveys, a sign of the anxiety the debate has stirred.
Little prospect of a breakthrough
Analysts see little prospect of a breakthrough with North Korea, despite Trump's apparent desire to rekindle ties. They point to Pyongyang's growing alignment with Russia and China, its nuclear ambitions, and its distrust of Washington after the failed Hanoi summit in February 2019. Trump appears to want talks with Kim again and to secure a foreign policy win, analysts say, but Kim has expressed no such interest.
In the same Truth Social post, Trump said he had asked Lee whether Seoul would like to join the effort to denuclearise Iran, and was told: "No thanks." Trump also posted a photo on Saturday of him meeting Kim at the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom in June 2019, repeating his claim that the two "get along great." In June, he posted photos from his first meeting with Kim in Singapore in June 2018, their second summit in Hanoi, and their Panmunjom meeting—fuelling speculation about his desire to rekindle ties with the North Korean leader.