Trump says he will halt Korea war games
SINGAPORE (Reuters/AFP) — US President Donald Trump made a stunning concession to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday about halting military exercises, pulling a surprise at a summit that baffled allies, military officials and lawmakers from his own Republican Party.
At a news conference after the historic meeting with Kim in Singapore, Trump announced he would halt what he called “very provocative” and expensive regular military exercises that the United States stages with South Korea.
Japan’s defense minister Itsunori Onodera raised concerns and said US military drills with South Korea and Washington’s troop presence there are “vital’’ for regional security.
“The drills and the US military stationed in South Korea play a vital role in East Asia’s security,’’ Onodera said when asked about Trump’s surprise announcement.
Onodera said Japan’s policy remained unchanged after the TrumpKim summit.
“There is no change in our policy of putting pressure’’ on North Korea, he said, adding that Japan wanted concrete action from the North over its nuclear and missile ambitions, as well as on the issue of Japanese abducted by Pyongyang decades ago.
Trump and Kim promised in a joint statement to work toward the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, and the United States promised its Cold War foe security guarantees. But they offered few specifics.
The summit, the first between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader, was in stark contrast to a flurry of North Korean nuclear and missile tests and angry exchanges of insults between Trump and Kim last year that fueled worries about war.
In statements relayed by North Korea’s state-run news agency, Kim called for Pyongyang and Washington to end “irritating and hostile military actions” against each other. But it made no mention of North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons program.
If the United States takes genuine measures to build trust with North Korea, the North will take additional goodwill measures, Kim said, according to a Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report.
If implemented, the halting of the joint military exercises would be one of the most controversial moves to come from the summit. The drills help keep US forces at a state of readiness in one of the world’s most tense flashpoints.
“We will be stopping the war games which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should. But we’ll be saving a tremendous amount of money, plus I think it’s very provocative,” Trump said.
His announcement was a surprise even to President Moon Jae-in’s government in Seoul, which worked in recent months to help bring about the Trump-Kim summit.
The presidential Blue House said it needed “to find out the precise meaning or intentions” of Trump’s statement, while adding it was willing to “explore various measures to help the talks move forward more smoothly.”
There was some confusion over precisely what military cooperation Trump had promised to halt.
US Senator Cory Gardner told reporters that Vice President Mike Pence promised in a briefing for Republican senators that the Trump administration would “clarify what the president talked about” regarding joint military exercises.