Trump Is Choosing the Wrong Korea

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Add South Korea to the list of allies dumped on by President Trump.

 

In a Truth Social post over the weekend, he wrote that “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea.” He criticized the cost of the exercises and added that the maneuvers “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile.” The president then informed the public that he had directed his defense secretary to “reduce Joint Military Exercises!” and ended his post with the stinger that South Korea refused to join U.S. efforts to denuclearize Iran.

 

He followed up with comments to reporters at the White House about his anger that South Korea wasn’t helping in Iran (and mentioned that they’d also stopped paying the U.S. a fee for U.S. troops stationed in the country during the Biden years).

 

It’s worth remembering when considering this fracas that nearly 150,000 Americans gave their lives and limbs defending South Korea after North Korean forces, backed by Communist China and Soviet Russia, crossed the 38th Parallel on the morning of June 25, 1950. In the 76 years of unresolved cease-fire since, a South Korea has been established that is free, functional, and under threat of nuclear annihilation every day from its neighbor to the north. It’s been an official American ally since 1953. No worse friend, no better enemy — to borrow and bowdlerize General James Mattis, paraphrasing Lucius Sulla.

 

The president can be upset that South Korea isn’t materially contributing to the campaign against Iran (it’s generally been good about chipping in to other, past major U.S. military operations), but asking South Korea to denuclearize authoritarians thousands of miles away while in the same breath praising the nuclear authoritarian in its backyard is perverse.

 

There is a decade of history here, between Trump and Kim. The first Trump administration vacillated between fraternal overtures on the one hand, and the 2017 reroute of the USS Carl Vinson strike group from Australia to the Korean peninsula, joined by Japanese assets, for a potential beheading action against the Kim regime on the other. No doubt the president thinks this latest episode will further the diplomacy he’s employed in the past, but it lacks any sense of calibration. Consider, he is ordering his defense secretary to reduce joint exercises with South Korea at a time when North Korean forces are learning next-generation warfare on the Russian frontlines.

 

A serious U.S. distancing from South Korea would not only increase the likelihood that the country grows closer to North Korea and China but also remove the possibility that South Korea’s maritime heavy industry, one of the greatest outside of China, will build the fleet we need to restrain China’s advance on Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan.

 

Now, when American carriers are pulled from the West Pacific to support efforts near Iran, the president should be doing all he can to reassure allies of our steadfastness while communicating to our foes that we remain vigilant in the lands and waters that provide Americans and the world the means to advance human flourishing.