Unilateral drift

: Trump's decision on Korea-US joint drills forces Seoul to rethink strategic posture

An alliance can survive disagreement. It is harder to sustain when one side learns about a major security decision from social media.

That is what happened as South Korea and the US began this year's Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise. On Sunday, US President Donald Trump said he had ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "substantially reduce" joint military exercises with South Korea, citing their cost and saying they send an inappropriate and hostile signal to North Korea.

It is worrisome that Trump's instruction came without any apparent advance consultation with Seoul.

UFS is a defensive exercise designed to test the allies' ability to respond to a North Korean attack and strengthen combined readiness. Its value cannot be measured simply by the money spent on it. For an alliance facing a nuclear-armed adversary, training is integral to military capability.

Trump's reasoning reveals a deeper structural flaw. By tying joint drills to his personal rapport with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un while publicly airing frustration over Seoul's refusal to support US efforts concerning Iran, he treats deterrence, burden sharing and out-of-area commitments as line items in a single transactional ledger.

Conflating peninsular readiness with unrelated Middle Eastern conflicts undermines the predictability that collective defense requires.

South Korea should take legitimate US concerns over defense costs and contributions seriously. It should also recognize that Washington has broader strategic demands.

Yet collective defense requires clear boundaries. Decisions affecting combined military readiness should be reached through the institutions responsible for them, rather than announced unilaterally by a president on social media.

The strategic premise behind Trump's decision is even more troubling. He described North Korea as having been "unthreatening and respectful" during his presidency.

That assessment sits uneasily with Pyongyang's continued development of nuclear and missile capabilities, repeated ballistic missile launches and growing military cooperation with Russia.

North Korea has gained experience and potentially useful battlefield knowledge from the war in Ukraine, including advances in precision-strike and drone warfare.

Against this backdrop, reducing opportunities for US and South Korean forces to train together could create a readiness gap. It may also reinforce Pyongyang's belief that pressure can produce results while weakening allied readiness.

There is a case for diplomacy. Trump appears interested in reviving direct engagement with Kim, having met him three times during his first term. Seoul should welcome any serious opening that could reduce tensions.

However, Pyongyang's strategic calculus has fundamentally shifted since 2019. Kim now has greater leverage and stronger incentives to preserve North Korea's nuclear status, making a return to the conditions of the earlier summit diplomacy far more difficult.

With the US midterm elections approaching in November, resuming diplomacy with Kim could offer the Trump administration a useful foreign-policy breakthrough that could shift public attention away from the protracted Iran war.

That may explain Trump's dramatic gesture, but it does not make the security consequences any less real. Few expect another summit between Trump and Kim to produce the concessions Washington might seek.

Seoul should respond without either panic or complacency. It needs to make clear that diplomatic flexibility is possible while the core requirements of collective defense remain firm.

At the same time, the Korean government should strengthen its own military capabilities and reduce vulnerabilities created by overdependence on decisions made in Washington.

The Korea-US alliance remains indispensable. Its durability, however, cannot rest on personal rapport between leaders. A security partnership that can be recalibrated by a single social media post needs stronger institutional foundations.

Seoul's task is to reinforce those foundations while developing sufficient independent deterrence to hedge against future shifts in Washington's strategy.

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