Trump cuts South Korea drills, nods to North Korea as US focus shifts to Iran
Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.
US President Donald Trump has ordered his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce the scale of joint military exercises with South Korea. The instruction came just as the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield drills were set to begin on Monday, involving roughly 18,000 South Korean troops alongside American forces and personnel from several United Nations Command members.
Trump made it clear that a full cancellation was no longer possible because it was “too late,” leaving only the option of a substantial reduction. In his Truth Social post he described the exercises as “totally inappropriate and hostile” to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea, a country that, in his words, has been “unthreatening and respectful” for as long as he has been president. He pointed to his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong-un and added that South Korea had declined his request to join efforts aimed at the denuclearization of Iran.
The timing is striking enough. Only days earlier North Korea had conducted a ballistic missile test, widely read as a protest against the planned drills. US, Japanese and South Korean officials condemned the launch. Trump nevertheless acknowledged the exercises themselves were part of the problem, casting them as an unnecessary provocation toward a leader with whom he claims to get along well.
It is worth recalling that during his first term Trump already suspended major US-South Korean exercises in pursuit of diplomacy with Kim, famously promising to stop “war games”. In June 2018, the Pentagon suspended that year’s Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise following the Singapore summit. The exercise series itself dates back to 1976, when Ulchi-Focus Lens was established; it was renamed Ulchi Freedom Guardian in 2008 and, after several changes to the format, became Ulchi Freedom Shield in 2022.
The current move could thus be read as a revival of an approach the American leader has used before. The strategic context, however, is considerably different, with it being now presented both as a goodwill signal toward Kim and as a response to South Korea’s refusal to help on Iran - all while the US is militarily overstretched elsewhere.
Ironically, Hegseth himself had earlier argued that the American military campaign against Iran would send a useful “signal” to North Korea. In April, while defending the operation before Congress, he explicitly described North Korea as the “lesson” to be learned from Iran’s nuclear trajectory. Now the same secretary has been told to dial down the very exercises meant to deter the DPRK.
In any case, the shift is quite blunt: an ally that refuses to join a distant campaign finds its core defense cooperation reduced, while a long-standing adversary is granted remarkable diplomatic deference.
Here a wider context should be considered: as a matter of fact, the United States has just pulled its last deployed aircraft carrier from the Western Pacific, as the USS George Washington sails to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln - which has already spent a record stretch of more than 240 consecutive days at sea supporting operations against Iran.
That leaves the Pacific without a US carrier at a moment when China continues to assert itself in the South China Sea - analysts have noted that this paints Washington as an overstretched power “distracted” by the Middle East.
Reports of desperate sailors attempting to suicidally go overboard amid allegations of food and supply shortages, plumbing failures and extreme isolation have highlighted a deeper military crisis haunting Washington.
The vessel’s extended deployment, originally routed through the South China Sea before being diverted to the Middle East, has become an endurance test. These accounts form part of a larger picture of depleted inventories, recruitment shortfalls and industrial lag.
Earlier this year, as I commented elsewhere, the United States also began diverting some THAAD missile defense system equipment and munitions from South Korea to the Middle East - amid the war in Iran. Washington later stressed that the THAAD system itself remained on the Korean Peninsula, while Seoul publicly downplayed the move. Yet the message was already clear enough: when resources are finite, even strategically important allies have to adjust. The same reasoning now appears to be going on with the “scaling down” of joint drills.
Thus far the administration has insisted that the Pacific remains a priority after the Western Hemisphere. The recent facts tell a quite different story: carrier presence has been sacrificed, exercises with a key ally scaled back, and missile defenses redeployed, all while the war in Iran continues without any defined endpoint.
So much for the long-promised “pivot to Asia”, a recurring oscillation that I have described as a swinging pendulum, repeatedly pulled back toward the Middle East. American domestic critics, especially within the conservative camp, are increasingly describing this state of affairs as Israel having “hijacked” American foreign policy.
Be that as it may, American allies in Asia are thus left to draw their own conclusions about the reliability of American security guarantees. It is no wonder then discussions in Seoul about greater strategic autonomy, including a domestic nuclear option, have been gaining some traction.
The reduction of Ulchi Freedom Shield is therefore yet another chapter in the decline of the American superpower. Tangled in a distant conflict, Washington is finally exercising restraint toward Pyongyang at the expense of a long-time ally, thereby further alienating partners who once counted on consistent American presence and its nuclear umbrella.