Korea alliance strained by lack of ‘war games’

The U.S. and South Korea have spent almost seven decades honing their preparedness for war. Now fears are growing among the alliance’s proponents that extended peace talks are eroding that advantage.

Defense chiefs from the two nations will gather for an annual meeting in Washington on Wednesday facing a radically changed landscape after President Donald Trump’s decision to restart nuclear negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. While those discussions put off the prospect of a conflict, Trump has also canceled major military exercises to facilitate the detente.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and his South Korean counterpart Jeong Kyeong-doo must now find a way to maintain a robust defense without providing regular, real-world simulations for troops that tend to rotate through every couple of years. Trump’s statements calling the exercises “war games” and echoing Kim by calling them “provocative” makes them harder to restart as long as nuclear talks drag on.

“Without the joint military training, there will be an alliance, but a much weaker one,” said Kim Ki-ho, a defense professor at Kyonggi University and a former colonel who oversaw military operation planning at Combined Forces Command. “It’s a North Korea strategy to dissolve the alliance.”

Even before Trump canceled the so-called Vigilant Ace exercises planned for December, his nominee to lead U.S. Forces Korea acknowledged during Senate confirmation hearings that the freeze had caused a “degradation to the readiness” of forces. “This will be one of my top priorities when I get on the ground,” Gen. Robert Abrams told senators on Sept. 25.

The drills are just one of several challenges to the alliance under Trump’s “America First” policies. He has threatened to withdraw from their two-way trade deal, pressured South Korea to halt oil imports from Iran and tussled with President Moon Jae-in over whether to ease the U.S.’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Kim Jong Un.

Trump has more openly questioned the value of keeping roughly 28,500 American troops on the Korean Peninsula than any president since Jimmy Carter, saying after meeting with Kim Jong Un in June that he would “like to bring them back home, but that’s not part of the equation right now.” The administration is pushing South Korea to increase the more than $800 million it pays for the U.S. presence, with the Yonhap News Agency reporting Trump wants Seoul to offset the cost of bombers and aircraft carriers based elsewhere.

Although Trump is pushing to arrange a second summit with Kim Jong Un early next year, working-level negotiations between the U.S.’s nuclear envoy and his North Korean counterpart haven’t yet started. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo will probably meet with top North Korean official Kim Yong Chol next week in New York, Yonhap reported Tuesday.

Mattis and Jeong also were expected to discuss the issue of which side would retain supreme command in the event of a war, a responsibility that has thus far been maintained by the U.S. Seoul has been pushing for greater control, something that could raise political questions in Washington.

Officials on both sides insist the alliance remains “ironclad” and say the troops can maintain readiness, at least in the shortterm, through smaller-scale exercises less likely to provoke Kim Jong Un.

AL DRAGO / BLOOMBERG Jim Mattis, the U.S. secretary of defense, is working with his counterpart in South Korea to keep the alliance prepared in the absence of traditional joint military exercises.