Trump is reviving an old idea for a new North Korea

On Sunday night, in an unexpected announcement, US President Donald Trump said that, given his “excellent relationship with Kim Jong Un”, he was unhappy with the joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea – namely Ulchi Freedom Shield, one of the most important annual events in the Indo-Pacific – which began yesterday and will continue until next week. Given that it was now “too late to cancel them”, Trump added that he had instructed the Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “substantially” scale back the operations, which would send “an inappropriate and hostile signal” to the North Korean regime, which “has always proved to be non-threatening and respectful”. For America’s Asian allies, who are working to contain North Korea and China in the region, such a statement is a distortion of reality: for at least two years, the Pyongyang regime – thanks to the treaty signed with Vladimir Putin’s Russia in June 2024 – has not only changed and become more aggressive, but has also lost all interest in dialogue, whether with America or South Korea. Just last Sunday, a number of North Korean soldiers crossed the Military Demarcation Line on the eastern front, forcing the South Koreans to fire warning shots. 

Trump is reviving a tactic he had already used during his first term, when he ordered the suspension of joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea following the first summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore in 2018. Not only did those attempts to negotiate the country’s denuclearisation fail a few months later, but today Pyongyang has no interest in returning to the negotiating table with Washington – as demonstrated by the various unsuccessful attempts by the new Trump administration to establish contact with the regime, revealed by the South Korean press in recent months. It is possible that Pyongyang might now agree to talk, but on condition that denuclearisation is not discussed: the bomb is, in fact, the regime’s only guarantee of survival. In the same message on Sunday, Trump accused South Korean President Lee Jae-myung of withholding South Korean support for the denuclearisation of Iran, suggesting a hostile stance on the part of Seoul (and there is also talk of a diplomatic crisis between the two countries due to certain crucial leaks concerning North Korea). In reality, the US President’s determination to open new talks with the North can only help Lee politically, as he is a Democrat and supports a conciliatory stance towards Pyongyang. Last Saturday, the day on which Korea marks the anniversary of the end of Japanese occupation, South Korean President Lee made an equally significant announcement, proposing – six years after Kim Jong Un blew up the Kaesong liaison office, the symbolic site of inter-Korean dialogue – direct talks with North Korea to transform the 1953 armistice into a peace treaty.

In the meantime, however, the world has changed: Kim Jong Un has learnt the lessons of Iran and Venezuela; he has amended the Constitution to reclassify South Korea from a ‘brother’ to be reunified as a separate and hostile state; and, above all, he has two increasingly active protectors, in Moscow and Beijing. For weeks prior to Trump’s announcement, there had been talk of a completely different edition of Ulchi Freedom: because, as well as having a vastly improved weapons production capacity, North Korea is actively learning how to wage war thanks to its collaboration with Russia. The most recent military exercises are no longer merely for deterrence, but to conduct operational training against a regime that is learning tactics on the ground and which may have no qualms about launching an attack. Whilst Trump’s strategy in Iran is becoming more complicated, the president wants to return to tackling a problem that he may even have exacerbated during his first term.