US President Donald Trump ordered a sharp reduction in the Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercise on the very day it began, prompting the People Power Party to accuse South Korea of being sidelined and to call for the restoration of the combined defense posture. Trump walks to Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey on Sunday. [Reuters]
US President Donald Trump ordered a sharp reduction in the Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercise on the very day it began, prompting the People Power Party to accuse South Korea of being sidelined and to call for the restoration of the combined defense posture. Trump walks to Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey on Sunday. [Reuters]

US President Donald Trump ordered a sharp reduction in the Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) joint military exercise on the very day it began, prompting the People Power Party to accuse South Korea of being sidelined and to call for the restoration of the combined defense posture.

PPP chief spokesperson Park Sung-hoon said Monday that "a security disaster has unfolded in which the Korea-US joint exercise beginning today has been drastically scaled back by President Trump's unilateral order," warning that "core pillars of national defense in a contingency — combined precision strikes, maneuver training, river-crossing drills and pre-positioned equipment deployment — are at risk of being gutted."

Park placed the blame squarely on the current administration, saying the grim reality of a defense exercise "reduced to an empty shell" — one that should have tested real combat readiness against North Korean threats — was "entirely the result of the Lee Jae Myung government's impoverished security outlook and its irresponsible amateur diplomacy."

He said Trump's citing of cost alongside the argument that the drills send "a completely inappropriate and hostile signal to North Korea" "carries significant implications for the Lee Jae Myung government." Park said the root cause of the distorted perception that "the Kim Jong-un regime is not threatening and has respected the United States" lay in the Lee government's "submissive North Korea policy, which abandoned alliance trust and became consumed solely with managing Pyongyang's sensitivities."

"Because we ourselves first loosened the bolts of our own security, even our ally has used that as a pretext to justify scaling back the exercises and to thoroughly sideline South Korea," Park said.

Park also cited reports that Trump had asked President Lee whether South Korea would join efforts toward Iran's denuclearization, only to be told "No thanks." While noting that Trump had not directly linked that exchange to the exercise cuts, Park called it "a painful moment that the diplomatic discourtesy of rejecting a blood-ally's significant request for global security cooperation has been made public," adding that "the Lee Jae Myung government's arrogant attitude has planted deep distrust in the mind of an allied head of state."

He urged the government to "sincerely apologize to the people for the current disaster of shaking the foundation of the Korea-US alliance and pushing South Korea's security to the brink with a narrow-minded diplomatic and security outlook," and called on it to "immediately abandon its dangerous ideological diplomacy, restore the broken Korea-US coordination and normalize a substantive combined defense posture."

Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday (local time) that he has a very good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and that he has long disliked US participation in the Korea-US joint exercises.

Trump claimed the drills are costly and that the United States bears a significant share of the expense. He also revealed that, because it was too late to cancel them outright, he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to sharply scale back the exercises.

Trump's post went up at 5:04 p.m. Sunday Eastern time — 6:04 a.m. Monday Korean Standard Time — the opening day of UFS, which runs through Aug. 27.


shindw@heraldcorp.com