President Donald Trump announced Sunday that the United States would scale back military exercises it is conducting with South Korea, a key regional ally, citing good relations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Seoul’s lack of support for Iran.
“Given our very good relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, I am not satisfied with the fact that the United States long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. (As always!) Much of these costs are borne by the United States, and these exercises are not only expensive, but they send a completely inappropriate and hostile signal to a country that has posed no threat and shown respect as long as Donald J. Trump has been president,” Trump wrote. true society.
President Trump went on to ask South Korea for support in the US war against Iran.
President Trump wrote, “This is somewhat unrelated (?), but I recently asked the South Korean president if he would be willing to participate in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he said, “No thanks!”
Despite North Korea being a longtime enemy of the United States, President Trump has cultivated a warm relationship with Kim. Earlier this weekend, President Trump posted a photo of himself and Kim with the caption, “He looks brusque in this photo, but there are many smiling faces. Kim Jong Un and I are very close!”
The joint exercise with South Korea, called the Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercise, began on Monday and was scheduled to run for 10 days.
North Korea has long criticized such exercises, and the Central Military Commission last year called the trilateral exercises with Japan and South Korea “the most comprehensive and offensive war of aggression exercises ever conducted in the southern Korean peninsula in terms of scale, content, and nature.”
During President Trump’s first term, the United States and South Korea also scaled back joint operations as part of efforts to ease tensions with North Korea.
The president said in 2018 that it would be “inappropriate to play war games” on the Korean peninsula as the United States engaged in nuclear negotiations with North Korea.
In March 2019, after the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi failed to reach an agreement, the United States and South Korea announced that the large annual exercises that had been a common feature of the defense relationship between their militaries would be restructured into smaller exercises.
As on Sunday, President Trump in 2019 also mentioned the cost to the United States. “The reason I don’t want military exercises with South Korea is to save the United States hundreds of millions of dollars that will not be compensated,” he posted at the time.
