SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - Hours before South Korea and the United States opened their largest annual exercise, United States President Donald Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce joint military drills on the peninsula, pointing to his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was not happy the U.S. had agreed long ago to take part in the exercises, which he called costly and largely paid for by Washington. He said the drills send a signal that is "totally inappropriate and hostile" to a country that has been unthreatening and respectful during his presidency.
"Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises," he wrote, using the title Secretary of War for the Pentagon chief.
The post went up at 5:04 p.m. Sunday in Washington, 6:04 a.m. Monday in Seoul, the morning the exercise began. It was the first time in his second term that Trump had publicly faulted the combined drills and ordered them cut.
Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) runs from Aug. 17 to Aug. 27. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Forces Korea said at a joint briefing on Aug. 10 that UFS 26 is a defensive annual exercise involving about 18,000 South Korean troops, a scale similar to previous years. This year's exercise also carries part of the full operational capability assessment for South Korean forces, a step toward the transfer of wartime operational control, while the field training component was cut sharply. The reduction has been read in Seoul as the Lee Jae Myung government managing military tension with Pyongyang.
North Korea has spent decades describing the exercise in the language Trump echoed. North Korea's Foreign Ministry, in a statement carried by state media on Friday, called the combined training a rehearsal for an aggressive war that was driving a different level of instability in the region. The statement threatened that the North would exercise its right to self-defense and said this year's drills are more provocative than last year's. North Korea fired ballistic missiles into the East Sea on Aug. 6 and again on Aug. 12. Pyongyang has not commented on the launches, which outside analysts assess were meant either to protest the exercise or to advance weapons systems.
The framing has held for years. In 2024, North Korea's Institute for American Studies, which sits under the Foreign Ministry, called the exercise preparation for aggression and described it as the most offensive and provocative in the world. In 2016, the Korean People's Army, North Korea's military, threatened a preemptive retaliatory strike against forces taking part.
The exercise grew out of an attempt on a South Korean president's life. North Korean commandos raided the Blue House in January 1968, prompting a government mobilization exercise that was renamed Ulchi the following year after Eulji Mundeok, the Goguryeo commander who turned back a Sui invasion. It merged in 1976 with Focus Lens, a command post exercise the U.N. Command had run since 1954, and the combined drill was renamed Ulchi Freedom Guardian in 2008.
Seoul and Washington suspended it in June 2018 after Trump's first summit with Kim in Singapore, where he called the drills expensive and provocative. The allies restored large-scale field training in 2022 under the name Ulchi Freedom Shield, after a four-year suspension imposed while the two sides tried to negotiate away the North's nuclear weapons. North Korea later said Trump had personally committed to halting the exercises and cited their resumption as evidence Washington had broken faith.
Trump's reference to Kim follows a year of open signaling. He met Kim three times in his first term, in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019 and briefly at the Demilitarized Zone that same year, and since returning to office he has raised the idea of another meeting repeatedly. He told Lee on the sidelines of the Group of Seven (G7) meetings in France in June that he would restart diplomacy with North Korea, then posted a photograph of his walk with Kim at the Capella Hotel in Singapore. On Saturday he posted another picture of the two of them, writing that they get along well. Kim has said he holds fond memories of Trump while ruling out any discussion of surrendering his nuclear arsenal.
Trump closed the post with a line he flagged as unrelated, writing that he had asked South Korea's president to join U.S. efforts on the denuclearization of Iran and was told, "No thanks!" He did not say what he had asked of Seoul.
South Korea's presidential office and its Ministry of National Defense had not commented as of Monday morning, and no change to the exercise schedule had been announced.
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