WASHINGTON \u2014 South Korea\u2019s defense ministry acknowledged today that an ongoing exercise with the US will be sharply curtailed, after US President Donald Trump said the drills were unnecessarily \u201chostile\u201d toward the autocratic regime in North Korea.<\/p>\n
The ongoing exercise, dubbed Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS), was expected to run from Aug. 17 through Aug. 27 but will now end on Friday, Aug. 21, South Korean officials said today, according to South Korea\u2019s Yonhap News Agency<\/a> and international reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media site<\/a> Truth Social that the exercises \u201care not only costly [\u2026] but send a signal that is completely inappropriate and hostile,\u201d adding that he had a \u201cvery good relationship\u201d with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, \u2018No thanks!\u2019\u201d Trump wrote. Trump further said he ordered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to \u201csubstantially reduce\u201d the scope of the exercise.<\/p>\n At the White House this week, Trump also criticized Seoul for not paying enough money for \u201cprotection\u201d<\/a> provided by the US. <\/p>\n The broadside took officials in South Korea, a decades-long ally of the US, by surprise. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun told South Korean lawmakers<\/a> today that \u201cneither our government nor US officials knew what President Trump wrote on his Truth Social [platform],\u201d according to Yonhap. \u201cWe were not notified in advance.\u201d<\/p>\n The Pentagon told The Associated Press that the \u201cadjustments preserve essential readiness and training objectives. There will be no degradation to U.S. training objectives.\u201d<\/p>\n Shortening the exercise does not seem to have appeased North Korea, which today reportedly<\/a> continued to condemn it, threatening to \u201ccompletely neutralize the enemies [sic] military threat.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s embrace of North Korea \u2014 a continuation from his first administration<\/a> \u2014 drew criticism from political opponents<\/a>, especially as North Korea has been sending troops<\/a> to aid Russia in its long-stalled invasion of Ukraine. His Truth Social post also happened to come a day before the 50th anniversary of the deaths of two American servicemembers<\/a> at the hands of North Korean troops along the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.<\/p>\n Ashley Roque contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 South Korea\u2019s defense ministry acknowledged today that an ongoing exercise with the US will be sharply…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125055,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8011,519,2672,8013,31,34,33,3190],"class_list":["post-125054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-north-korea","tag-army","tag-asia","tag-global","tag-indo-pacific","tag-korea","tag-north-korea","tag-south-korea","tag-trump-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}