OPINION — “President Donald Trump’s decision to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea,” Matthew Lee and Ben Finley write for the Associated Press, “does not just slight a longtime ally but raises broader concerns about the security interests of the United States in Asia and elsewhere.”
Trump’s reason for supposedly, and in unspecified ways, downsizing the annual “Ulchi Freedom Shield” exercise is that South Korea has been insufficiently supportive of his war against Iran. That doesn’t seem like a very good reason … but there are good reasons, and it’s a tiny move in the correct direction of drawing down U.S. military entanglement on the Korean Peninsula.
The history, in brief:
