South Korea is the latest in a string of close U.S. allies President Donald Trump has threatened to penalize since the United States went to war with Iran.
Trump defends North Korea ties
President Trump denied claims that he is prioritizing North Korea’s interests over regional allies.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is putting another U.S. ally he says was insufficiently supportive of the Iran war on notice, directing the Pentagon to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea, a country he has pressed to pay more for its defense.
“We can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us,” Trump said on Aug. 17 in the Oval Office.
South Korea is the latest in a string of close U.S. allies that Trump has threatened to penalize with reduced American military support since the United States and Israel went to war with Iran earlier this year. He’s ripped nations such as the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain and said he’s reexamining the U.S. relationship with the NATO alliance, which he’s long criticized as a laggard over some members’ lackluster defense spending.
Over the last several days, he’s lobbed similar allegations at South Korea and made public overtures to Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader with whom he tried to negotiate a nuclear deal in his first term. A day before his missive on the joint military exercises, he posted a photo of himself and Kim, standing together inside the demilitarized zone, the 160-mile-long barrier that divides the two countries in half.
The actions toward South Korea, and the accompanying outreach to Kim, prompted some regional experts to ask why now.
Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, called it “befuddling and illogical for the president to be reaching out to North Korea with at least partially the intent being to punish South Korea, who is our ally and partner.”
“He’s not going to be able to convince Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons. There’s no Nobel Prize waiting at the end of this rainbow. So I don’t know what the president’s up to,” said Montgomery, a coauthor of the book “Axis of Aggressors: Countering the Cooperation of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”
Reengaging North Korea
Sydney Seiler, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies focused on Korea, said that Trump has thought of ways to reengage Kim for some time and appeared to be signaling his desire to jumpstart denuclearization talks with the hermit nation in his social media posts.
As part of the 2018 negotiations, Seiler said, Kim demanded that the United States roll back the joint exercises. In return, North Korea was expected to refrain from nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile launches.
“Some messages have been sent in. Pyongyang has not replied. But Trump’s had a lot of other things on his plate. He’s not necessarily interested in aggressively chasing after Pyongyang when there’s no evidence that they’ll be receptive,” said Seiler, the intelligence officer for North Korea at the National Intelligence Council during the Biden administration.
Trump said on Aug. 17 that Kim had responded. He did not say when or how those communications had occurred, and White House officials did not offer additional details.
The president repeatedly expressed a desire last year to meet with Kim while he was in South Korea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit or during a visit to China, where he was a guest of President Xi Jinping this spring.
South Korea’s then-Prime Minister Kim Min-seok told Trump during the APEC CEO Summit last October, “I believe that we’ve been planting good seeds for a better future.”
The two countries are technically still at war over the Korean Peninsula, with neither side declaring defeat since a 1953 armistice. South Korea’s constitution claims the entire peninsula as its own, while North Korea’s newly amended constitution categorizes South Korea as a “hostile state.”
Over the weekend, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for talks to end the war. Not long after, Trump posted a photo of himself with Kim and said: “Despite the unfriendly look on this particular picture, there are many where we’re smiling, Kim Jong Un and I get along GREAT!”
Then on Aug. 16, Trump said the United States was dialing down military exercises with South Korea, which he said was too late to cancel.
“These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!),” he wrote on Truth Social, adding “but 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.”
Trump has always felt that the relationship he built with Kim in his first term, and the United States’ alliance in the region, would make it uniquely possible for him to lead some sort of groundbreaking negotiation, said Alexander Gray, chief of staff at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term.
“The president has never changed or deviated from his desire to broker a historic deal that could potentially bring peace to the Korean Peninsula,” Gray said. “The question is, when would he have the bandwidth, the opportunity, when would the stars align for him to pursue that?”
In a statement to USA TODAY, the South Korean embassy in Washington said it was coordinating closely with the United States on the exercises.
It further expressed a desire that “the friendly relationship between the leaders of the United States and North Korea will lead to meaningful dialogue between them, paving the way for discussions aimed at advancing peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.”
Trump believes resolving the isolation of North Korea, and North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons would be a feather in his cap, Montgomery said.
“We have failed in negotiating in Ukraine. We failed in negotiating with Iran. I think we’re going to find the Gaza deal falls apart,” he said. “The last thing we need is to begin serious negotiations, bilateral US-North Korean, serious negotiations, that put the security of Japan and South Korea at risk.”
Cost of helping South Korea
Asked about Kim in the Oval Office on Aug. 17, Trump brought up the amount of money the United States spends on protecting South Korea, and his earlier allegation that South Korea refused to help him with Iran.
“I called him, I said, ‘Would you like to give us a little hand? We don’t need help with Iran, but if you’d like, give us a hand with Iran.’ He said, ‘No thanks,'” Trump said of South Korea’s president.
Trump said he told Lee, “We have 39,000 soldiers over there, guarding you, from Kim Jong Un, your next door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? That’s strange.”
Trump charged that during his first term, South Korea committed to paying $3 billion a year for its protection, and the Biden administration rescinded the demand. “All I want is fairness,” he said.
Under an agreement made by the Biden administration, South Korea is obligated to pay the United States $1.19 billion in 2026 to help support the roughly 28,500 American troops stationed there. That amounts to an increase of roughly 8.3% above what it was paying before, according to the Congressional Research Service.
According to a Center for International Policy study released in July, the U.S. government currently spends $5.5 billion to $6 billion annually on bases and forces in South Korea.
Gray, the former chief of staff to the NSC, said that whether it’s in Europe, Asia or the Middle East, the framework is changing for what American allies should expect to put into the partnership in order to receive heavy U.S. military support and favorable trade terms.
“If you’re going to get all those things, there needs to be an expectation that when the United States undertakes a major military campaign or undertakes a major initiative globally, that the allies who are supposedly closest to us and benefit the most from the security umbrella step up and contribute, even in small ways,” he said.
In its statement, the South Korean government said it had actively participated in discussions aimed at securing a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz and was in close consultation with the United States on ways to make military contributions.
As of 2024, South Korea spent roughly $47.6 billion, or 2.6%, of its GDP on defense. It has committed to boosting that amount to 3.5%.
Last year, South Korea also committed to spending $25 billion on U.S. military equipment purchases by 2030 and pledged to spend $33 billion to support American forces stationed on the peninsula.