Donald Trump picked up his phone on a Sunday and told Pete Hegseth to cut the joint military exercises with South Korea down to size. Just like that. One Truth Social post and the entire foreign policy blob started reaching for the smelling salts.
Here is what the man actually said: the drills are “costly,” they send a “totally inappropriate and hostile” signal to North Korea, and since Kim Jong Un has been “unthreatening and respectful” while Trump has been in office, maybe we stop pretending we need to rehearse for a war nobody wants. He said it was too late to cancel the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise outright, which was set to start August 17, so he ordered Hegseth to “substantially reduce” it instead. Common sense from the top down. Watch how fast that gets called dangerous.
Now here is the part the talking heads on CNN will not tell you. We have been running these war games on the Korean Peninsula for decades, and what exactly have they produced? A bill. A very large bill, paid by you and me, while South Korea chips in whatever they feel like. Trump called it out in the post: “much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!).” That parenthetical “(as usual!)” is doing about ten years’ worth of work in two words. Every time some four-star gives a press conference about “readiness” and “deterrence,” what he really means is the contractor pipeline stays open and the troops keep rotating through at taxpayer expense. The Pentagon does not run drills to keep peace. It runs drills to justify its own budget. Hegseth knows it. Trump knows it. And the people screaming about “appeasement” today know it too, they just hope you do not figure it out.
The establishment line is already forming. Yonhap, the South Korean wire, dutifully noted that Pyongyang has been “ratcheting up tensions” with missile launches this month. So let me get this straight. North Korea fires some missiles, and the answer from the geniuses who brought you Afghanistan is to run a bigger, louder military exercise right on their border? That is not deterrence. That is poking the bear and then acting shocked when the bear growls. Trump looked at that playbook and said no thanks. Good.
David Eerdmans~commonswiki (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsHe also dropped a detail that nobody is talking about. He said he recently asked South Korean President Lee Jae Myung whether Seoul would join the U.S. in denuclearizing Iran. Lee’s answer: “No thanks.” So the country we are supposedly protecting with these exercises will not lift a finger to help us on Iran. We carry the water, they drink it. That is the alliance the experts want you to believe is worth billions of your dollars every year.
Trump posted a photo on Saturday of his 2019 meeting with Kim at Panmunjom, the one where he stepped across the demilitarized zone and shook the man’s hand. The media called it a stunt then. Three meetings with Kim during his first term, and not a single new war on the Korean Peninsula. Funny how that works. Biden could not manage a press conference without someone handing him a note card, and we are supposed to believe Trump’s instincts on Korea are the problem?
The real story here is not that Trump is soft on North Korea. The real story is that the military-industrial gravy train just got a red light, and every lobbyist within ten miles of the Potomac is having a bad afternoon. Hegseth has his orders. Let us see if the Pentagon actually follows them, or if some deputy undersecretary buries the cut in a footnote until the news cycle moves on. That would not shock me. Nothing these people do shocks me anymore.
But for one Sunday, the president did something the swamp hates more than anything. He listened to his gut instead of the briefing book. And his gut said: stop paying to provoke a country that is not currently threatening us. You can call that naive. I call it the first honest thing to come out of Washington in a long time.