Trump's gift to Kim Jong Un

Yesterday, Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would be scaling back its participation in major military drills with South Korea. Such drills have been held annually for about 70 years in order to deter North Korea from attacking the South and to increase the readiness of U.S. and South Korean forces. Trump says that they “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful”.

This message comes as somewhat of a surprise, given that the “unthreatening and respectful” country of North Korea has recently carried out missile tests and sent tens of thousands of troops to fight with Russia against Ukraine. Oh, and it’s also running an industrial-scale program to defraud U.S. employers in order to raise some cash.

By pretty much any definition, North Korea is a hostile state, and it’s not like it has been tamping down its hostility in recent years. It has deepened its alliance with Russia and China and become part of their shared military-industrial complex, exporting not only troops but also vital munitions and hardware to Russia for use in Ukraine. At the same time, South Korea is not just some random country - it’s a nation with which the U.S. has a mutual defense treaty and which tens of thousands of U.S. troops died to defend in living memory.

So why on earth would Trump do this? Let’s listen to the stable genius himself.

Trump’s public explanation contains unsurprising themes. Firstly, he complained that South Korea has not done enough to help with the war in Iran, although quite what he wants or expects it to do, I’m not sure. Secondly, he says that the military exercises cost a lot of money. Thirdly, he says that he has a “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un.

One of my favorite games to play is “what if a Democratic president did it?”. All you have to do to play the game is look at something that Trump has done and imagine how the Republican Party, conservative media and even Trump himself would react to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris making a particular decision.

Here you have the U.S. president unilaterally scaling back military training exercises that make U.S. troops safer by strengthening deterrence and upholding readiness. You also have him giving a completely unreciprocated concession to North Korea, which has been trying to force the cancellation of joint U.S.-South Korea training exercises ever since they started. And he’s doing it because he apparently trusts North Korea’s leader to be “respectful” and continue to uphold their “very good relationship”.

I’m pretty sure that if a Democratic president made such a bizarre concession to a major U.S. adversary, Republican members of Congress would already be drafting articles of impeachment. But this is Trump, so instead they pretend that there is some method to the madness - that it really does make sense to save a few dollars by scaling back these exercises, even if the result is a greater risk of armed conflict in Korea (which, by the way, would be pretty expensive).

We don’t actually know yet what the “scaling back” of these exercises is going to look like, but any scaling back at all is unwelcome. The U.S. military is currently racing to adapt to the drone era. In a recent training exercise in Europe, a force of Ukrainian drone operators decimated U.S. forces. North Korean soldiers who have been to Ukraine have more direct combat experience of the drone-circled battlefield than U.S. forces do. The joint U.S. exercises with South Korea would not have been a way to prepare for potentially facing them, but also provide more general lessons that can be used elsewhere.

But Trump doesn’t care about that - most likely doesn’t even know about it. He just doesn’t think in that register. He focses on the perceived “respect” he gets from foreign leaders and how to blame other people for his own mistakes, like launching a war with Tehran that no sensible foreign country wants to be a part of. He’s both dangerously out of touch and, frankly, dangerously weak - willing to give things away to enemies without even thinking about the consequences, or even patting himself on the back.

What with the strategic disaster that has been his war with Iran, the misstep here might seem small. But I worry that Trump is teaching U.S. adversaries that he will always give them what they want, especially if they make threats. Weakness invites war, especially when you pair it with incompetence.

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