South Korea’s annual joint military drills with the US will be cut short by six days at the request of Washington, its defence ministry has announced.
Seoul said that the “period and scale” of the 2026 Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise had been adjusted due to a “proposal of the US side”.
The drill will now conclude on 21 August, rather than 27 August as planned.
President Donald Trump, who has accused Seoul of refusing to take part in action against Iran, told reporters on Wednesday that he expects to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this year.
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun told a parliamentary hearing that neither South Korean nor US officials had been aware in advance about Trump’s plans to scale back joint military drills with Seoul.
The combined field training exercise component of the drills would also be “partially reduced in scale”, Seoul said, noting that the “specific details” of that reduction are still under discussion.
The unprecedented curtailing shakes South Korea’s confidence in America’s commitment to come to its aid, under a defence pact that is the foundation of their relationship.
It also sends a similar signal to other US allies in the region like Japan and Taiwan.
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that he gets along very well with Kim Jong Un and “will be” meeting him later this year.
“The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing,” Trump said. “I know Kim Jong Un very well. And he’s going to be fine. As long as we have a smart president, he’s going to be fine. If we have a dumb president, then he’s probably not going to be so fine.”
Details of the potential meeting are unclear, but one likely option could be the sidelines of an economic forum in China in November, reports suggest.
Pyongyang has not officially commented but the North Korean leader’s sister Kim Yo-Jong said on Wednesday, “There is nothing I know about the news from Washington that there was communication between the leaders of DPRK and the US”.
She also added that the reduction of the drill was not “something that merits comment”.
“Just because the scale or the length is reduced, [this] does not mean that the hostile and aggressive essence of the drill changes,” she was quoted as saying in state media.
While she admitted her brother personally had “good memories and view of Trump” and the relationship between the two was “firmly sound”, she stressed the US had not shifted its “hostile policy” against North Korea.
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Over the weekend, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile.”
He added: “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks!'”
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, the president again explicitly linked his decision to South Korea’s refusal to “give us a little hand” with Iran.
“We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next door neighbour, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran,” he said. “That’s strange”.
US and South Korean military leaders announced the Ulchi Freedom shield in a joint press conference last week.
At the time, they said the event would be similar in scale to previous years, with about 18,000 South Korean soldiers participating. About 28,500 American military personnel are stationed in South Korea.
During the news conference, military leaders also mentioned North Korea’s deployment of troops to aid Russia’s war against Ukraine.
US military spokesperson Ryan Donald said “our training accounts for that threat”, referring to North Korean soldiers returning from the battlefield.
Following that press conference, North Korea’s foreign ministry condemned the joint military drills as “a rehearsal for an aggressive war”.
