President Donald Trump moved to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea after Seoul declined to help the US confront Iran, folding that grievance into a Truth Social post touting his “very good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. It left Washington easing pressure on a longtime adversary while pulling back from a treaty ally over an unrelated dispute.
Trump wrote on Sunday that he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, saying they send a “totally inappropriate and hostile” signal to a North Korea he described as unthreatening and respectful during his presidency.
He called a separate episode “somewhat unrelated,” saying he had asked South Korean President Lee Jae Myung to join the US effort to denuclearize Iran and that Lee turned him down.
The exercises, which involve about 18,000 South Korean troops over 11 days, began Monday as planned. South Korea’s defense ministry said planning had not included any instruction from Washington to scale them down.
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Kim’s record on Iran and Russia
Kim has used the Iran war to justify North Korea’s own nuclear arsenal. CNN reported in March that he told the Supreme People’s Assembly the war proved North Korea was right to reject US pressure to disarm, and called the North’s nuclear status irreversible.
Trump has kept courting Kim regardless, posting a photo of the two of them over the weekend and saying they get along well.
Pyongyang has also sent roughly 14,000 to 15,000 troops to fight alongside Russian forces in the Kursk region since 2024, and Ukrainian military intelligence said earlier this month that a North Korean missile unit had begun deploying to western Russia, eventually carrying up to 120 ballistic missiles for strikes on Ukraine.
Backlash in Seoul and Washington
South Korean lawmaker Na Kyung-won, who belongs to the PPP, South Korea’s main opposition party, wrote that Trump was straining the allies’ joint defense arrangements and reducing a partnership “forged in blood” to a matter of cost.
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The party’s chief spokesperson Park Sung-hoon said the government’s approach to Pyongyang had fed what he called a mistaken impression in Washington that Kim’s government poses little threat, while lawmaker Kim Gunn questioned whether South Korean diplomats had adequately tracked the developments.
In Washington, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona said that hollowing out the exercises was “shortsighted and a mistake.” New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, a Korean American Democrat, said the allies should decide on joint exercises together, not have one side announce changes unilaterally on social media.
A familiar playbook
Trump has done this before. In 2018, he ordered a similar halt to the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise, and it was the first such suspension in 28 years. He ordered it after his Singapore summit with Kim, and the following year Seoul and Washington scrapped the separate Key Resolve and Foal Eagle drills. Large-scale field training did not return until 2022, under then-President Yoon Suk Yeol. Trump is due to meet Lee in Washington on August 25, about a week after this latest episode.
