Trump's cut to US-South Korea drills 'transactional,' not fatal to alliance: analysts

Donald Trump's order to scale back joint US-South Korea military exercises — and his criticism of Seoul for refusing to back the United States against Iran — may not fatally undermine stability on the Korean Peninsula, analysts say.

Politico reported Tuesday that Trump's directive to reduce the drills is less about signaling a diplomatic opening with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, as the public rhetoric suggests, and more about pressuring South Korea to deliver on its investment pledges to the United States.

"The Korean Peninsula is a case study in mutually assured destruction between a nuclear-armed North Korea and South Korea, a US ally," Politico said, adding that US forces have worked closely with South Korean troops for decades and operate as a combined force integrated at every level. A single reduction in exercises, Politico argued, is unlikely to significantly upset that balance.

Sidney Seiler, a former national intelligence officer for North Korea at the National Intelligence Council — the body that oversees intelligence gathered by US agencies — said he does not consider the cutback "a catastrophe." Victor Cha, Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), agreed, saying it is "clearly a rough period" but that the alliance "will get through this."

Some analysts also suggested that even after a formal reduction in exercises, training could continue in some form — combining tabletop exercises, virtual simulations and live maneuvers.

Analysts also suggested Trump views the drill reduction not as an overhaul of the defense architecture against North Korea's nuclear threat, but as leverage to push Seoul to accelerate its investment commitments to the United States. In an earlier report, Politico said the directive stemmed from the Trump administration's frustration with the pace of South Korea's follow-through on those pledges. One source told Politico that negotiations with South Korea are "moving more slowly than the Trump administration expected" and are "the slowest of any counterpart seen so far."

Cha partly agreed that some of Trump's motivations for cutting back the exercises are financial. "The hallmark of Trump is that everything is very transactional," he said, adding that once South Korea announces the first phase of its investment commitments, "he'll be fine with it."