Trump Scales Back South Korea Drills, Courts Kim Ahead of APEC
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises with South Korea and claims Kim Jong Un has responded "very positively" to renewed outreach
- The piece frames the move as leverage against Seoul, citing Trump's irritation that South Korea declined to lend support during the "Iran episode" and his labeling of the drills as "costly" and "inappropriate"
- South Korea sits under a US extended-deterrence umbrella designed for a 1953 balance of power that was never seriously renegotiated for 2026, the article notes, with a GDP many times North Korea's
- North Korea used intervening years to expand its arsenal, deepen dependence on Moscow and Beijing, and at its recent party congress commit explicitly to further nuclear buildout, per the source
- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to Seoul just as Washington signaled openness to bypass the pressure track — what the piece calls "the actual chessboard"
- A potential Trump-Kim meeting on the sidelines of APEC would unfold inside China's diplomatic space, the article argues, noting Kim has "nothing to lose" because Moscow and Beijing already insure his regime
- South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun framed the overture as a "turning point" — language the author reads as domestic cover for an ally's unilateralism rather than substance
Why it matters: By recasting the US-South Korea alliance as a negotiable bargaining chip — anchored in Seoul's refusal to back him during the Iran episode — Trump reframes three decades of American Asian commitments around burden-sharing, a posture the piece argues better fits structural competition with Beijing than the stalemate on Pyongyang's nukes.
Ask SkimNews
