US, South Korea end military drills after summit collapse

Bloomberg

The US and South Korea agreed to end their biggest annual joint military drills in a bid to ease tensions with North Korea, a move that comes just days after Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un failed to reach an agreement on denuclearization at a summit in Vietnam.
US Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan and South Korea’s Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo decided to conclude the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle series of the exercises, the Pentagon said on Saturday. They will be replaced by a modified exercise called “Alliance” running from March 4 to March 12 that will focus on “strategic, operational, and tactical aspects of general military operations,” the Combined Forces Command said in a separate statement.
The move “reflected our desire to reduce tension and support our diplomatic efforts to achieve complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a final, fully verified manner,” the Pentagon said. South Korea’s defense ministry confirmed the decision, saying it was done to pursue “permanent peace on the Korean peninsula.”
Ending the military drills meets a longstanding demand of North Korea and reflects skepticism on behalf of Trump, who questioned their price tag in comments after the Kim summit collapsed. In Vietnam, North Korea had demanded that some sanctions be lifted in return for its moves to halt nuclear and missile tests, while the US sought more action on dismantling its enrichment facilities and weapons systems.
“North Korea will likely use this as something they earned from the recent negotiations with the US,” said Baek Seung-joo, a South Korean lawmaker and former vice defense minister. “This clearly shows a weakened US-South Korea military readiness when you are not conducting these drills, as the Foal Eagle was a practice of how the US forces would be deployed to South Korea in the situation of a crisis on the peninsula.”
Kim pledged to meet Trump again in a statement released through North Korea’s state-run news agency KCNA, a report that offered a more optimistic outlook than the regime’s top diplomats gave in a rare news conference hours earlier. Kim expressed appreciation for Trump’s “active efforts toward results” and called the summit talks “productive.”
Trump similarly struck an optimistic tone after their meeting, calling his relationship with Kim “very strong” even though they couldn’t strike an agreement. The president also questioned the usefulness of spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” on joint military exercises, particularly if South Korea wouldn’t pay more for them.
“Those exercises are very expensive,” Trump said on Thursday. “And I was telling the generals — I said: Look, you know, exercising is fun and it’s nice and they play the war games. And I’m not saying it’s not necessary, because at some levels it is, but at other levels it’s not.”
Trump has strained US ties with South Korea, along with other longstanding American allies, over demands for greater payments for military assets. Last month, the countries reached a one-year cost-sharing deal for maintaining about 28,500 American troops in South Korea, setting up another round of negotiations this year.
In an interview last week, Shanahan told Bloomberg News the Defense Department has found the “right mix of readiness exercises” to keep US forces prepared, adding that the smaller joint exercises are set to continue “per plan.”