President Donald Trump’s sudden announcement the US is scaling back major military drills with South Korea risks renewing concerns US forces are too stretched to support crucial Western allies or maintain deterrence against autocracies that threaten them.
It’s also a gift to North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un at a time when he has ramped up his own nation’s threat to global stability –– and offered no concessions in return.
Just as the 10-day Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises involving tens of thousands of troops were set to begin, Trump said he had ordered the war games scaled back because North Korea has been “unthreatening and respectful” to his administration.
“These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile,” Trump posted on Truth Social over the weekend.
Trump’s statement is hard to reconcile with Kim’s actions.
The North Korean leader has significantly built up his nation’s armed forces and illegal nuclear weapons program during the past several years, even sending his soldiers to get real-world combat experience on the battlefields of Ukraine and providing Moscow with missiles that have killed Ukrainian civilians.
That help for Russia now comes with a mutual defense treaty inked two years ago with Vladimir Putin. Kim also solidified a three-way partnership with Russia and China almost a year ago in Beijing, as the three autocrats put on a very public show watching some of China’s most modern military hardware roll through Beijing in a World War II victory 80th anniversary celebration.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin walks with China’s President Xi Jinping and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un before a military parade in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on September 3, 2025.Alexander Kazakov/AFP/Getty Images
All the while, North Korea has been upgrading its arsenal, and Kim is frequently portrayed in state media, flanked by his teenage daughter and likely successor, overseeing military milestones –– like the activation earlier this year of a new guided-missile destroyer.
Meanwhile, in a world where the Trump administration has frequently complained about allies, especially those in Europe, not sharing in the cost of their own defense, as recently as late May it was holding up South Korea as its ideal ally.
“If you want to see what burden sharing looks like, consider the Republic of Korea. South Korea has invested consistently in its own defense, … because it does not have the luxury of treating war like an academic exercise. They live on the front lines, and so they build real combat power,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegesth said in a speech to the Shangri La Dialogue defense conference in Singapore.
Hegseth is correct. South Korea is acting out of necessity, and the Iran war has served as a reminder that the US will always move its assets to where it needs them most. The Pentagon has had to call on forces and hardware from around Asia as it has built up forces in the Persian Gulf, during a conflict that has festered for nearly half a year.
Earlier in the war, Washington moved missile interceptors from the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East. And just last week, it announced its only Western Pacific-based aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, was headed to waters near Iran to relieve the beleaguered USS Abraham Lincoln, its sister ship that has been plagued by reports of low morale after more than 200 days without a port call.
“Bilateral exercises with South Korea unnecessarily burn US resources and readiness at a time when the United States is running low on both,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis for Defense Priorities, a Washington, DC-based think tank that advocates for restraints on foreign policy spending.
But others take issue with her premise the exercises are unnecessary, arguing that scaling them back puts US forces –– almost 30,000 of them stationed in South Korea and over 50,000 more in nearby Japan –– in a more dangerous situation.
President Donald Trump disembarks Air Force One, Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
Trump’s move “lowers coalition readiness and puts US forces at risk with no real tangible benefit to the United States,” said retired US Navy Adm. Mark Montgomery, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank based in Washington, DC.
Indeed, most of the costs for Ulchi Freedom Shield have already been incurred and whatever training is curtailed will have to be made up somewhere or US readiness will suffer, said Carl Schuster, a former director of the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
Scaling back the drills and criticizing South Korea for not paying more –– something he also did in his first administration –– continues a pattern for Trump, berating longtime US allies who’ve had America’s back during the Cold War and in places like Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and even threatening to seize their territory, as in Greenland, part of NATO ally Denmark.
Meanwhile the US president refuses to criticize Kim, who is helping prolong Russia’s illegal war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Ukraine, while using that war to refine North Korea’s arsenal, which puts nearby US troops at risk.
“What you’re seeing is the North Koreans are getting an advantage, really an unforced error on our part,” said CNN military analyst Cedric Leighton, a former US Air Force colonel.
A US Stryker infantry carrier vehicle (C) crosses a river over a floating bridge during a South Korea-US joint river-crossing drill as part of the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercise in Yeoju on August 27, 2025.Jung Yeon-je/AFP/Getty Images
How far Kim can now press that advantage remains to be seen.
Trump frequently changes course on a dime and as all the elements for the Ulchi Freedom drills are in place, scaling them back may not amount to much on the ground.
But North Korea has also long pursued an end to US military exercises with South Korea. On Monday it woke up to the US commander in chief saying he was ordering a drawback.
Trump, who is believed to have long coveted another meeting with Kim, may see this gesture to pave the way towards that. But his sudden about face has consequences for the US and its allies.
Few can argue that the US military can bring to bear on North Korea in 2026 what it could during Trump’s first term. When Kim tested ballistic missiles in 2017, Trump sent three US aircraft carriers to patrol the waters around the Korean Peninsula while threatening Pyongyang with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Those threats would eventually get Kim to engage in three face-to-face meetings with Trump. But those meetings ultimately failed to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, which Kim has only grown. He’s now estimated to have dozens of nuclear warheads and has vowed to build more.
Washington’s air campaign against Iran has not seen Tehran backing down. And the only thing really falling seems to be US military readiness, as key arms stockpiles are rapidly depleted.
Scaling back the currents drills may do long-lasting damage, too, analysts warn.
F/A-18 fighter jets on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson were prepared for patrols in the waters off the disputed South China Sea, in March 2017Bullit Marquez/AP
Whipsawed by praise one month and criticism the next, allies may decide to leave Washington out of their long-term military planning. There’s already been a push in South Korea for Seoul to have its own nuclear weapons and not rely on Washington for deterrence.
Japan is, meantime, growing and modernizing its military at pace not seen in modern times as the post-Cold War stability ensured by the US military frays.
And multiple European nations who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the US since the Second World War are now asking real questions about whether the NATO alliance will ultimately survive Trump’s “America First” approach to global security.
That makes the world a more dangerous place, where a mistake by just one actor could ignite a regional firestorm, with a US military weakened by Iran unable to ensure American security.
“The things that we do in those exercises are critical for the joint defense not only of South Korea and Japan but also for defense of the United States as well,” Leighton said.
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