President Donald Trump has given skeptics of his Indo-Pacific policy more ammunition to pronounce dead the U.S. pivot to Asia, this time by calling war games with ally South Korea "inappropriate and hostile" to the North and its strongman leader Kim Jong Un. Kim has been "unthreatening and respectful" during his presidency, Trump said on Truth Social, in an announcement to scale down annual preparedness drills just hours before they were scheduled to begin. He also took a swipe at his South Korean counterpart for declining to join his war in Iran.
North Korea, which flouted multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions only last week by testing more ballistic missiles, is learning the utility of its rhetorical threats against the United States. And if it wasn’t clear already, America’s enemies are understanding the true value of even a modest nuclear arsenal like the one held by Pyongyang.
Observers expecting consistent U.S. policy are feeling another round of Trump-induced policy whiplash this week, but the failure in Washington to rebalance to the world’s most consequential region has been the surest bet in town for over a decade. Trump’s intervention at the 11th hour will be welcome news for North Korea, not least because it had only just finished railing against the planned military exercise, warning in a recent state media release that the drills and others like them were "a rehearsal for an aggressive war" that threatened its existence. Foreign policy circles are dismayed at what appears to be yet another concession to an adversary at the expense of an ally, and so soon after Trump had publicly declared his "great respect" for Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing.
Longtime Trump watchers will recognize in his social media platitudes the beginnings of his carrot vs. stick approach to diplomacy and may remember that he similarly canceled war games with South Korea to facilitate three rounds of ultimately fruitless summitry in 2018 and 2019. Is another meeting between Trump and Kim on the horizon? But the U.S. now has worse cards than it did eight years ago, according to "BBC Dad" Robert Kelly, a political scientist at South Korea’s Pusan National University.
In addition to Beijing, Pyongyang now has a second patron in Moscow, which is paying well—and in U.S. dollars—for the soldiers and weapons North Korea is sending to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, Kelly said on X. "Trump himself is even more erratic and checked-out than last time…. He’ll be even more inclined this time around to just give stuff away to get the Nobel Prize he so desperately wants," Kelly wrote.
Kim’s allies in Tehran know all too well that Trump’s mood can flip overnight if negotiations go south. Thankfully (for Kim, that is), North Korea is far more resilient now than it was during Trump 1.0. In a speech in January, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby called South Korea a "model ally," but in a short Trump post on Sunday, it was relegated to a free rider benefiting from costly exercises paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.
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