Donald Trump’s move to gut Washington’s 73-year-old military alliance with Seoul has been called “inane” and “shortsighted” as lawmakers warned it risked strengthening Russia’s hand in Ukraine.
The US president abruptly ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint exercises with South Korea just days after North Korea test-fired ballistic missiles, justifying the decision by citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong-Un, the nuclear-armed dictator such exercises exist to deter.
Trump announced the order on social media, directing the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to scale back Ulchi Freedom Shield, an 11-day exercise due to run from 17 to 27 August involving about 18,000 South Korean troops rehearsing scenarios including missile strikes, drone incursions and cyber-attacks.
Trump framed the decision as a courtesy to Kim, writing that the drills “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to a country he described as “unthreatening and respectful”, despite North Korea’s continued missile testing and its expanding nuclear arsenal.
Democrats in Congress said the move handed Kim a propaganda win for nothing, while an ally was left paying the price for a war in the Middle East it never agreed to fight.
Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, called it “another inane, haphazard decision by President Trump and his chaotic administration”.
“When President Trump cuts military exercises to flatter a dictator or punishes South Korea for declining to join a war he started, all of our allies – and adversaries – think that America’s commitments are negotiable,” Reed said in a statement, describing the move as punishing Korea “for no reason beyond Trump’s ego”.
Reed’s warning was echoed by Mark Kelly of Arizona, who sits on the same committee, and argued that the drills were not symbolic but the basis of the alliance’s ability to function in a crisis. “North and South Korea are still technically at war,” Kelly said. “Our ability to help defend our ally against the North Koreans is because our forces are well trained and able to coordinate with the South Koreans. Hollowing out these joint exercises is shortsighted and a mistake.”
The alliance Trump is now unwinding dates to the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty signed after the Korean war armistice. Roughly 28,500 American troops remain stationed in South Korea, backed by a combined US-South Korean command structure and Washington’s pledge to extend its nuclear umbrella over Seoul.
Despite Trump calling North Korea “unthreatening”, his own administration’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment describes an “increasingly confident North Korean regime”, warning that its weapons of mass destruction, conventional forces and cyber operations threaten the US, South Korea and Japan. His former director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified in March that “North Korea’s ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] can already reach US soil”.
Trump also tied his decision to the Iran war, saying he was unhappy that Seoul had declined to join the US military campaign against Iran, a campaign that has drained US missile stockpiles and, after Tehran shut the strait of Hormuz, helped push up prices at home. He acknowledged the two issues had little to do with one another, even as he punished Seoul over both.
“While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks’!” Trump wrote.
Andy Kim, the New Jersey senator who sits on the Senate foreign relations committee, said linking the exercises to that refusal exposed a troubling attitude toward a key partner.
“Our alliance with the Republic of Korea is critical for US security and prosperity – and I am concerned that President Trump’s post today suggests a disregard for this relationship,” Kim said. “South Korea is an essential partner in peace and security in a part of the world filled with risk; we should treat them that way instead of venting frustration on social media.”
It is not the first time Trump has treated the drills as a bargaining chip. After his 2018 summit with Kim in Singapore, he suspended major exercises outright, calling them costly and provocative, before they were quietly restored once nuclear diplomacy with Pyongyang broke down.
The dispute comes as Seoul has spent much of the past year charting its own path on the Middle East. In February, South Korea’s government said it had “grave concern” over Israeli measures expanding control in the occupied West Bank and urged Israel to “reverse its decisions immediately”.
In April, Seoul’s ambassador to the United Nations told the security council that any unilateral annexation of Palestinian territory “should be revoked”. Lee Jae-myung, the president of South Korea, has twice clashed publicly with Israel: in April over remarks he made comparing footage of an Israeli soldier’s treatment of a Palestinian man’s body to the Holocaust, and in May after two South Korean activists were detained on a Gaza-bound aid mission.
Thom Tillis, the outgoing Republican senator from North Carolina, chimed in making the point that the butterfly effect of Trump’s decision would inadvertently benefit Russia.
“South Korea has been a solid military ally for over 70 years that possesses exquisite military capabilities,” Tillis wrote on social media. “Reducing joint exercises with South Korea does nothing more than free up thousands of North Korea’s troops to support Putin’s systematic kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of innocent Ukrainian citizens.”
