By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, August 20, 2026
President Trump, speaking to reporters yesterday:
Now, I didn’t like
the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North
Korea. It was, you know, an exercise against North Korea. When I’m friendly
with him, when we have — I don’t see anything happening for certainly two and a
half years, it’s not going to happen with me, but I don’t see anything
happening.
And I was not
happy when South Korea said, no, they’re not interested in helping us with the
Hormuz Strait, and yet they get 60 percent of their oil from the Hormuz Strait.
I said would you like to help us. He said, no, thank you. I said that’s nice,
please, thank you. He made us a lot of money; I didn’t like that.
So, I felt that to
do a massive — we were doing a massive war exercise. I thought that was very
insulting to somebody that frankly has been, during my term at least, very
well-behaved yeah.
Got that? Joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises,
which have occurred in some form or fashion every
year since the end of the Korean War in 1953, are “very insulting” to North
Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.
Oh, no! Heaven forbid that the U.S. ever insult a
man who boasted a
couple of years ago, “The whole of [the United States] mainland is within
the range of our nuclear strike and the nuclear button is on my office desk all
the time.”
Trump says that there’s no chance of North Korea doing
anything provocative or aggressive while he’s president. Here’s how the administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy characterizes
North Korea and its regime:
The DPRK
[Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a.k.a. North Korea] poses a direct
military threat to the Republic of Korea (ROK) as well as to Japan, both of
which are U.S. treaty allies. Although many of North Korea’s large conventional
forces are aged or poorly maintained, South Korea must stay vigilant against
the threat of a North Korean invasion. North Korea’s missile forces are also
capable of striking targets in the ROK and Japan with conventional and nuclear
weapons as well as other weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, the
DPRK’s nuclear forces are increasingly capable of threatening the U.S.
Homeland. These forces are growing in size and sophistication, and they present
a clear and present danger of nuclear attack on the American Homeland.
Back in June, I wrote that the now dead-as-a-doornail
memorandum of understanding represented a series of immediate U.S. concessions
in exchange for vaguely worded Iranian promises — promises that the mullahs in
Tehran started breaking almost immediately.
The pattern continues in Asia. Here’s how the North
Korean regime demonstrated its appreciation for Trump announcing the U.S.
would “substantially reduce” its role in the joint military
exercises:
Pyongyang fired
off a barrage of short-range ballistic missiles on Thursday, Tokyo and Seoul
said, just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump claimed he would meet North Korean
leader Kim Jong Un later this year.
The South Korean
military said it had detected the launch of around 10 short-range missiles from
the Pyongyang area toward the Sea of Japan, which Seoul calls the East Sea, the
Yonhap news agency reported.
The Defense
Ministry in Tokyo, meanwhile, said the North had fired off “multiple” ballistic
missiles, with all traveling an estimated 320 kilometers and hitting a maximum
altitude of 90 km before splashing down in waters outside Japan’s exclusive
economic zone.
President Trump said Wednesday that he would meet with Kim Jong-un this year. Here’s what the North
Koreans said about that:
The sister of
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has denied any ongoing communication between US
President Donald Trump and her brother, maintaining that the US continues to
engage in a “hostile” policy towards her country.
“Regarding the
recent news from Washington about communication between the leaders of North
Korea and the United States, I am completely unaware of it, and it is likely
the only matter concerning our top leadership’s foreign policy that I am
unaware of,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement published by the state-run Korean
Central News Agency on Wednesday.
I wish I had something more optimistic to write than the
fact that our president is a doddering octogenarian who just blurts out the
first thing that pops into his head, and who ardently believes that dictators
of hostile states are not so threatening to the U.S. and its allies because
they personally flatter him. But that is where we are.
Does the U.S. have some fair gripes with the South Korean
government? Absolutely. (Read our Abigail Anthony for an eye-popping recent
example.)
After the extremely messy end of right-of-center South
Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol — remember the whole “declaration of martial
law” and impeachment and removal from office — left-of-center Lee Jae Myung
took over. The Center for Strategic and International Studies summarizes that Lee has “pursued a nuanced strategy with
China, one that evades regional security issues (e.g., Taiwan and the South
China Sea), while maintaining ‘neighborly’ relations and acknowledging the
importance of soliciting Chinese cooperation on issues ranging from North Korea
to stable supplies of critical minerals.”
But as the Hudson Institute’s Patrick Cronin observes, punishing South
Korea doesn’t make sense on any level. In fact, Lee, like Trump, has been eager
to restart a dialogue with the North Korean regime:
Despite South
Korea’s sharp political shift from Yoon Suk-yeol to Lee Jae-myung, and
President Lee’s recent calls for renewed inter-Korean dialogue, Kim remains
resolutely uninterested in serious engagement. . . .
Washington may
disagree with some of President Lee’s policies, but it should not fault his
government for failing to contribute to the alliance. South Korea carries a
substantial defense burden and possesses industrial capabilities increasingly
vital to American security. Few major U.S. allies devote a larger share of
their economy to defense, and South Korea is indispensable to revitalizing the
U.S. defense industrial base, particularly in shipbuilding, while remaining a
critical partner in technologies such as semiconductors.
As for not helping the U.S. in its war against Iran, yes,
the South Korean navy could have been an asset. South Korea has run the
Cheonghae Unit — a rotating anti-piracy/escort deployment of roughly 260
personnel, a destroyer, small boats, and helicopters — since 2009. Back in 2020, during the first Trump administration, South
Korea deployed the Cheonghae Unit to the Strait of Hormuz. But antipiracy and
escort duties are a different task from deployment into an active war zone.
Of course, President Trump didn’t consult South Korea
before launching the war against Iran, which set off a major energy crisis, the biggest stock market drop in South Korean history, a huge drop in the value of the South Korean won currency,
and a spike in inflation in that country.
Let us also recall that, roughly a month before launching
the war against Iran, Trump announced that the United States would “increase its
tariff on imports from South Korea from 15% to 25% and also hike levies on the
country’s automobiles, lumber and pharmaceutical goods.” If you take the most
aggressive and combative stance on trade possible, you cannot be surprised that
the same country you’re hitting economically doesn’t want to put its soldiers
and sailors in harm’s way to help you militarily.
Hard to believe the government in Seoul wasn’t eager to
help the Trump administration, huh?
America’s Continued Global Withdrawal
I know it sounds bizarre to level the charge of
isolationism at an administration that launched a unilateral war against Iran.
But look around the world, and you’ll see a recurring pattern.
One of the key
areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from
the Persian Gulf, where America’s large overseas military bases have been
battered by months of Iranian strikes, two people familiar with the ongoing
analysis said.
The damage to
these facilities has prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to
reconsider its presence in the region. The Defense Department has already
signaled that it might not rebuild its bases as they were before the conflict.
The Pentagon is
planning to withdraw about 5,000 American forces from Germany, senior defense
officials said Friday.
The officials
characterized the move as a signal of President Trump’s discontent with the
level of assistance that European allies have offered in the U.S.-Iran war. Mr.
Trump has publicly criticized German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the leaders
of other NATO member states for not getting directly involved in the U.S.’s
military campaign against Iran.
That rotation of additional U.S.
troops to Poland, announced in May to the elation of the Poles, has been very slow-moving.
The only remaining
U.S. aircraft carrier patrolling the Pacific departed Asia through
Singapore last week en route to the Middle East, marking the latest step in a
steady drawdown of American military assets across the region.
An armada of naval
forces, alongside a constellation of air-defense and missile capabilities, has
been removed from a theater the Trump administration said just last year would be the battleground of the coming
century.
And now, President
Trump’s surprise decision this week to curtail military exercises with South Korea has further
fueled anxiety across Asia, where Washington’s closest allies fear violent
consequences from a vacuum of American power. . . .
The Australian
government said it remained “deeply concerned” with North Korea’s nuclear
weapons and ballistic missile programs, while Japan’s defense minister,
Shinjiro Koizumi, warned of historic stakes.
“As Japan faces
the most severe and complicated security environment in the post-war era, the
cooperation among Japan, the United States and South Korea is critical to the
peace and stability of the region,” Koizumi said in a statement.
Trump isn’t an openly declared isolationist; he appears
to genuinely love meeting and schmoozing foreign leaders. But he has no respect
for, nor appreciation of, America’s alliances and insults our allies regularly.
Most Americans have already forgotten that in January, Trump blithely asserted during an interview with Maria
Bartiromo that our allies in NATO had never been useful and had never made any
sacrifices. “We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of
them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or
that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the frontlines.” NATO
fatalities in Afghanistan included 457 British; 158 Canadians; 90 French; 60
Germans; and 44 Danes, the most per capita outside the United States.
(Similarly, President Trump asserted Monday: “The
[aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham] Lincoln has been out there for a period of
time, good period of time. But over the years we’ve had them out there much
longer.” That is completely wrong, and it’s not even close. The previous record
for consecutive days at sea for a U.S. aircraft carrier was 206,
set by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in 2020. The USS Abraham
Lincoln is now past 260 days.)
President Trump rarely knows what he is talking about and
just blurts out whatever sounds good. He is incontrovertibly wedded to a
narrative that all of America’s allies are useless mooching freeloaders, while
he keeps getting charmed and flattered by some of the worst and most dangerous
men on the planet, and downplays the threat they present to U.S. interests. He
is an easy mark, a sucker, easily captivated and fooled, all the while
convinced that he is, in the official words of the U.S. State Department, “the
greatest dealmaker in the world.”
The president may not intend to leave America weaker on
the world stage than when he found it. But that is the course we are on, with
his accumulated erratic decisions, fits of pique and spite, and dumb and
insulting comments.
ADDENDUM: Our Jeff Blehar looks at the pollsters you’ve never heard
of before. These are ones that seem to show up out of nowhere with numbers that
alter the perception of a particular race:
But even when
these lesser-known pollsters — with their generically coded, anonymous names
like “Florida Values” or “Progress America, Etc.” — aren’t just making up the
numbers wholesale in a vain attempt to slant expectations, they’re usually just
chumps: bad at polling, bad with statistics, cheaply run, and little better
than a front for all the same impulses that inspire the pure frauds. Witness
the tale of The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI), a startup pollster who
rather clearly entered the race for ideological reasons: as friends of
antisemitic bugman candidate James Fishback.
Fishback received 10 percent of the vote in the Florida
Republican gubernatorial primary. The bad news is that this was about 177,000
votes. The good news is that more than 1.5 million Florida Republicans voted
for the other candidates, Byron Donalds (who won the nomination) and Jay
Collins.
In May, Fishback was the subject of a nearly 10,000-word profile in the New Yorker magazine,
an article that asserted, “With voters under thirty-five he was beating Donalds
by a factor of four — an indication, perhaps, of one direction the post-Trump
right might take.”
(You’re seeing online
comments like, “Fishback won 89 percent of the vote in the Florida State
University precinct.” Yes, but that precinct had 28 total votes, and classes don’t start at FSU until next Tuesday, August 25.
The only students who voted were A) registered Republicans and B) students who
were already back for the fall semester on Tuesday.)
Gee, do you think the mainstream media wanted to hype up
Fishback to demonize Republicans as a whole?
