Toggle Daily

Trump scales back Korea drills as Seoul looks to talks

August 17, 2026

Trump orders the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises with South Korea scaled back, and Seoul's presidential office says it hopes for US talks with North Korea.

AP News reports that Seoul's presidential office answered on Monday by saying the government hopes the friendly footing between Trump and Kim Jong Un leads to dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang and to discussions on peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. The same account reports the announcement baffled many in South Korea, where a nuclear armed North keeps security at the top of the national agenda. AP News also reports the exercises had been planned at their usual size, about 18,000 South Korean soldiers, and that Trump has sought to suspend them before. President Lee Jae Myung, a liberal who favors warmer ties with the North, has already switched off the front line loudspeakers that blared K-pop and world news, and the conservative People Power Party accuses him of looking past public anxiety about security while he banks on American and North Korean diplomacy.

CNN reports that scaling back the exercises while faulting Seoul for not paying more continues a pattern from Trump's first administration of berating longtime allies who stood with the United States through the Cold War and in places like Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and of threatening to seize their territory, as in Greenland, part of NATO ally Denmark. AP News and The Atlantic carry the same account. CNN also reports Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praising South Korea on precisely that measure at the Shangri La Dialogue defense conference in Singapore: "They live on the front lines, and so they build real combat power," he said. The Atlantic, corroborated by CNN, reports Trump left the region last week on a backup plane because of a possible assassination threat from Tehran. The New York Times reports the alliance with Seoul under strain from the opening to Kim. AP News and NBC News report a second drawdown in the same theater, the pullout of the last US aircraft carrier in Asia as attention turns to Iran and the Western Hemisphere.

Two points stay contested. One account ties the decision to Trump's own account of his relationship with Kim and treats it as a bid to reengage a leader who sees the joint exercises as rehearsals for invasion, and another account contradicts that. The stated reason divides the same way. One account has the order landing just as the exercises were due to begin, on the grounds that North Korea has been "unthreatening and respectful" toward his administration, and another disputes that account of what was said and when. What holds across the record is the cut itself, Seoul's public appetite for talks, and the freeze since nuclear diplomacy collapsed in 2019, years in which the North has accelerated weapons testing.

Still developing

The reason Trump gave for shrinking the exercises is contested across accounts, along with the timing of the order against the start of the drills. North Korea's answer to the smaller exercises is absent from the record so far, which carries a Foreign Ministry vow of "a new level of a deterrent" and two ballistic missiles fired into the sea earlier this month.

How settled the reporting is

Reported 90% · Contested 2% · Developing 8%

Sources