President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon on Sunday to substantially reduce planned joint military exercises with South Korea, saying the drills were costly and sent a signal that was “totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea. He said he had told Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to act even though the exercises were set to begin this week.
The decision immediately changes an 11-day exercise built around 18,000 South Korean soldiers and a major readiness test between the United States and the Republic of Korea. Trump, speaking from his social media account while boarding Air Force One at Morristown Airport, said North Korea had been “unthreatening and respectful” while he has been in the White House.
That message landed just days after North Korea threatened unspecified stern steps against the U.S. and South Korea and called the drills a rehearsal for an aggressive war. The U.S. military had said the exercise would reinforce the alliance as the linchpin for regional peace and security, language that underscored how much weight the drill carried even before Trump moved to shrink it.
Trump has made this argument before. He met Kim Jong Un three times during his first term and most recently in 2019, and he posted a photo of himself standing next to Kim one day before the announcement. After his 2018 meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Trump told reporters, “We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should.”
He also folded South Korea into a separate pitch, saying he recently asked its president to join the U.S. effort to denuclearize Iran and that the answer was, “No thanks!” The comment added a fresh diplomatic jab to an already sharp shift in military policy, but Trump did not explain what specific help he had sought.
What remains unclear is how far the reduction will go. Trump said the Pentagon should “substantially reduce” the Joint Military Exercises, but he did not spell out whether that means fewer troops, shorter training, or a narrower scope. For now, the order is the change itself, and it arrives just as one of the year’s biggest U.S.-South Korea drills was about to start.
