President Donald Trump told the Pentagon on Sunday to scale down this year's joint military exercises with South Korea, writing on social media that the drills were costly and sent "a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile" to North Korea. He said the North "has been unthreatening and respectful" for as long as he has been in office, and cited what he called his very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.
The order came only hours before the exercises started. "Based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises," he wrote.
In the same post he attached a second reason that he himself marked as a digression. He had asked South Korea's president, he said, whether the country would join the United States in the "Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran," and the answer was "No thanks!"
What a reduced exercise looks like was not spelled out. The drills, known as Ulchi Freedom Shield, were scheduled to run until 27 August, and South Korea's defence ministry said on Monday that they were proceeding as planned. The office of President Lee Jae Myung said the two governments had maintained close coordination on exercises and would continue to.
The reversal is recent. In May, Hegseth used a Pentagon meeting to praise South Korea for its commitment to increase defence spending and for taking primary responsibility for security on the peninsula, calling it the kind of burden-sharing other partners should copy.
Why it is on the board
It was the most-read story on the BBC in Britain on Monday morning. The BBC's most-read piece treats it as an alliance story — what a treaty partner does when Washington moves without warning. NPR frames it as a president turning against an ally in favour of a leader previous administrations treated as an adversary, and places it beside similar friction with NATO members. NBC leads on the timing, that the instruction arrived hours before the drills began, and on the detail that Seoul says they are going ahead anyway.
확인: Al Jazeera · NPR · NBC News