The United States and South Korea as allies have been practicing for a long time several training drills. Most important are the two large-scale joint military exercises known as Key Resolve and Foal Eagle, which usually include thousands of ground, naval, air, and special operations troops from those two nations. However, two U.S officials said last Friday that, as part of president Trump’s efforts to maintain the trust of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s president, those two large-scale exercises will be suspended for this spring. However, they will still run a limited version of the training drills. The decision to reduce the scale of military exercises is the result of this last meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, in which an agreement failed to be reached, due to the lack of specifics about how or whether North Korea would shut down its nuclear weapons program. Despite this, Trump’s administration is still hopeful about further negotiations in the future. Furthermore, Mr. Trump referred to those exercises as “too expensive war games” with little reason for continuing them.
Moreover, this program cancelation is the latest in a series of planned military exercises that Washington and Seoul have already canceled in the past year, in order to show good faith to Mr. Kim. However, there are some Pentagon officials who believe that the suspension of military exercises is a disadvantage for their troops, in terms of readiness, in case of an attack.
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