President Donald Trump at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 24, 2025 (Jonah Elkowitz/Shutterstock.com)
President Donald Trump’s recent decision to pull back American military support for South Korea may just be an attempt to “change the subject” from his ongoing failure to wrap up the Iran war, at least according to one conservative newspaper.
“President Trump is nothing if not impulsive, and his latest brainstorm is to rekindle his courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote on Monday. “He announced Sunday evening on—where else?—social media that he had ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ U.S. military exercises with South Korea that were set to begin on Monday.”
The editorial board added that Trump says he has a “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un and criticized him for saying that the military exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”
“To the contrary, pulling back from the exercises sends a message of weakening deterrence and readiness against a regime that has a history of threats and aggression against the South,” the Journal argued. “The North had protested, as usual, ahead of the routine exercises, and Mr. Trump’s order is an act of appeasement toward Mr. Kim.”
It continued, “Mr. Trump might be trying to change the subject from the stalemate with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Or he might be trying to appease Mr. Kim at a moment when U.S. weapons stocks and deployments are stretched.”
Ultimately they expressed worry that as a result of Trump’s pulling back from South Korea, “China may not use this opportunity to move against Taiwan, but it has been ratcheting up its aggressive moves against Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines in the East and South China Seas.”
The Journal is not alone among conservatives in slamming Trump’s decision toward South Korea. Miles Taylor, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during his first term,
“Start with Korea,” Taylor argued on Monday. “On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is ‘inappropriate and hostile’ to our friends in North Korea, which he called ‘unthreatening and respectful.’ Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so ‘unthreatening’ that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so ‘respectful.’”
He concluded, “By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.”
Taylor was joined by a foreign policy expert from a top think tank.
“It is equally true that America’s partners should expect the global hegemony to act predictably in its own interests,” Michael Sobolik, a Senior Fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), posted on X. “Regardless of Seoul’s behavior, Washington benefits when Pyongyang is hemmed in and deterred from adventurism and belligerence. More broadly, America’s interests demand that North Korea never unify the peninsula. For these reasons alone, military exercises with South Korea should persist.”
Similarly conservative MS NOW host Joe Scarborough denounced Trump for sending "love letters" to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a man the former Republican lawmaker characterized as the "worst, most repressive tyrant on the face of the earth."
As far back as his first term, observers have worried that Trump is too close to the North Korean despot.
“When I was in North Korea [President] Kim Jong-il, the father of the current president there, said that he didn’t have any problems with us having our troops in South Korea,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this journalist for Salon in 2019.
She concluded, “I do think that what is worrisome to me is, in an effort to be flattered by Kim Jong-un, that he gives away something that might have a longer term effect for the next administration.”