I’m not one of those people who treats every American deployment abroad as sacred. The joint exercises with South Korea are expensive. Seoul is a rich country with a shipbuilding industry that embarrasses ours and it can carry more of the bill. Alliances should be audited like anything else, and the ones that never get audited are the ones that rot. If the argument were that the drills cost too much for what they buy, I’d sit down and listen.
That isn’t the argument.
The argument, delivered on Truth Social hours before the exercises were due to start, is that the drills send a signal that is “totally inappropriate and hostile” to a country that has been “unthreatening and respectful.” The country in question is North Korea. The offense being avoided is bad manners. We are scaling back the defense of a treaty ally because the neighbor with the nuclear weapons might feel spoken to rudely.
Not a budget decision dressed up in diplomacy. Not a negotiation with something asked in return. A courtesy.
Ask Which One Has the Bomb
Read the same post twice and the whole thing falls apart on its own.
In one paragraph, the president says he asked South Korea’s president to help denuclearize Iran, and got “No thanks!” for an answer. In the next, he scales back the exercises that exist because of a state that already finished the job Iran hasn’t. Pyongyang has warheads. It has intercontinental missiles. It tested a ballistic missile into the sea days before the drills, which is the sort of thing an unthreatening neighbor does when he wants to say hello.
So the sequence is: help us disarm the country without the weapon, or we’ll reduce your protection from the country with it.
Lee Jae Myung declined a war. For that, Seoul loses a live-fire exercise, a wet gap crossing and the movement of prepositioned equipment, which are the unglamorous mechanics of whether an army can actually fight on the day it has to. Kim gets all of it for free. He didn’t negotiate for it, didn’t freeze a program, didn’t return remains, didn’t sit through a summit. He got it because a photograph exists in which the two men are smiling.
Somebody Is Going to Have to Tell Him
Here is what respectful looks like in the country being protected from an inappropriate signal.
The United Nations put an estimate of eighty to a hundred and twenty thousand people in political prison camps, where starvation is not a supply problem but a management tool. The same inquiry catalogued extermination, forced abortion, infanticide, torture, and prisoners used as practice dummies. One defector who testified had been born in a camp and lived on rodents and grass. He watched his mother executed. The commission’s chairman made a point of saying the world can no longer claim it didn’t know.
Then there’s the famine, and the part nobody wants in a headline. Defectors have described it. Researchers spent years collecting the accounts and cross-checking them. People ate people, and the state shot them for it, which is a sentence you can only write about one government on earth.
That’s the record of the party being handled gently here. Not a difficult ally. Not a prickly rival with a bad press operation. A famine state with a gulag and a dynasty, currently renting soldiers to Russia and getting paid in military technology for the trouble.
Unthreatening and respectful. To whom, exactly? He’s been respectful to Donald Trump. That’s the whole sample size. Everyone else in the transaction, including twenty-six million North Koreans and fifty-one million South Koreans inside artillery range, apparently isn’t in the room where politeness is measured.
What I’d Still Concede
Talking to dictators isn’t a scandal. Nixon went to Beijing. Reagan sat down with the Soviets while calling them what they were, and the calling-them-what-they-were part is what made the sitting down worth something. There’s nothing wrong with a president who wants a deal with Pyongyang, and if a smaller exercise is the price of a real freeze, that’s a trade a serious person can argue for.
But that trade requires the other side to hand something over. This one didn’t. And there’s a version of the burden-sharing complaint I’d sign tomorrow, because Seoul does free-ride at the margins and Washington has been slow to say so out loud.
That’s not what happened here. What happened is that the reason given wasn’t cost or strategy. It was feelings, and they were Kim’s, and he didn’t even have to ask.
Nobody is going to tell him.