Trump Orders Pentagon to Cut South Korea Drills
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- Trump ordered the Pentagon to "substantially reduce" joint military drills with South Korean forces, announcing the move Sunday on Truth Social and citing his "very good relationship" with Kim Jong Un and Seoul's refusal to join the US-Israel push to "denuclearise" Iran.
- Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the decision "inane," warning that "China and Russia are watching how easily this president abandons America's allies."
- Republican Senator Thom Tillis broke ranks, arguing the cut frees up "thousands of North Korea's troops to support Putin's systematic kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of innocent Ukrainian citizens."
- Senator Andy Kim said joint-exercise decisions "need to be made jointly – and not announced unilaterally by social media," while Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal called the move "dangerous" and accused Trump of ditching South Korean democracy for North Korean authoritarianism.
- The drills fall under the 1953 Mutual Defence Treaty, which the State Department says makes the US-South Korea partnership a "linchpin for security and stability in the Indo-Pacific."
- Trump's National Security Strategy last year already called for shifting resources to the Western Hemisphere, and the Iran war has strained US military and diplomatic bandwidth — context Democrats cited in arguing the alliance is being deprioritized mid-conflict.
Why it matters: The rare GOP defection from Tillis — tying the cut to North Korean troops bolstering Russia in Ukraine — gives bipartisan traction to a critique Trump cannot dismiss as partisan. Trump is effectively trading exercises that deter Pyongyang (a state whose soldiers Tillis says are killing Ukrainians) for symbolic courtship of Kim, while the Iran war consumes the bandwidth needed to sustain the 70-year South Korean alliance.
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