Forget all the talk about denuclearization on the Korean peninsula following the Trump-Kim Summit in Singapore, the biggest news for me is President Trump announcing the stopping of joint military exercises:
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference in Singapore on June 12, 2018, in this photo captured from the website of The Straits Times. (Yonhap)
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will stop “provocative and expensive” war games with South Korea in a surprise reference to the joint military exercises Pyongyang has criticized as a rehearsal of invasion.
Trump made the remarks during a press conference that followed his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on the Singaporean resort island of Sentosa.
“War games are very expensive,” he said, raising the issue of their cost.
“I think it is very provocative … You have a country that is right next door,” he added, referring to the communist state. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but President Moon has previously said that UFG would be scaled down and now President Trump has used to word stopped. I guess we will see what this all means, but for now it is pretty clear that the August UFG exercise will not happen the way it is normally executed.
If the joint exercises are stopped this is a big win for President Moon. His left wing base does not support the exercises while the political opposition conservative party does. So Moon’s base gets what it wants, for now and Moon can tell his political opposition that he was not the one that cancelled the joint exercises, President Trump did.
These joint exercise are important for USFK due to the high change over in personnel on the peninsula which these exercises help to keep personnel trained with their ROK military counterparts. However, just like everything that North Korea has committed to cancelling joint exercises are easily reversible from the US perspective. I don’t see President Trump committing to something non-reversible like troop withdrawals from the peninsula until the Kim regime does something non-reversible such as removing nuclear material to a third country for disposal.
It should continue to be an interesting year to see how this all plays out.
