Trump Halts Korea Drills, Raising Fears of North Korean Gains

It was announced, with the sort of ceremony that generally accompanies a man reversing himself while insisting he has done nothing of the kind, that the joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea would be scaled back at the President’s personal instruction. One wonders what a soldier training on the peninsula this month is meant to make of an order that arrived the way weather arrives - sudden, unexplained, and blamed afterward on nobody in particular.

Here is the plain restatement, for those of us slow enough to need it written twice. Seventy-three years ago the United States and South Korea signed an alliance meant to outlast the men who signed it, on the theory that a promise renewed by successive administrations carries more weight than a promise made once and left to rot. That alliance has survived Presidents who disliked each other’s parties, Presidents who disliked each other’s countries, and at least one President who disliked the concept of alliances generally but signed the paperwork anyway because his generals told him to. It has not, until now, had to survive a President scaling back its central exercise on his own say-so, with lawmakers on his own side of the aisle calling the decision inane and haphazard in the same week it was made - which is Washington’s way of saying the thing was done before anyone bothered to ask whether it should be.

Now, the contested part - the part everybody is arguing about instead of the part everybody should be arguing about. Some say the decision was meant to flatter North Korea’s dictator, a gesture of the kind one makes to a difficult neighbor when one would rather not mow around his fence line. I find this theory almost comforting, because it assumes a plan. A plan is a thing you can criticize, amend, or abandon with dignity. What I suspect actually happened is smaller and stranger: that the exercises were scaled back the way a man cancels a dinner reservation he only half remembers making, because keeping it seemed like more trouble than it was worth on that particular Tuesday.

This is the part the alliance experts miss, being professionally obligated to assume strategy where there is only mood. An alliance built on treaties and shared decades can absorb a great deal - bad Presidents, bad years, bad allies. What it cannot absorb, indefinitely, is being treated as optional by the one country whose seriousness the whole arrangement depends on. North Korea does not need to be flattered to benefit from this. It only needs to notice, correctly, that the exercises meant to deter it are now subject to the same weather patterns as everything else in Washington, and that weather, unlike treaties, requires no signature to change.

South Korea, for its part, gets to discover which promises made to it in 1953 are load-bearing and which were merely decorative - a fact nations generally prefer to learn before the roof comes down, not while standing under it. And somewhere in Pyongyang, I imagine, a man who has spent his whole career being lectured by American Presidents about resolve is taking careful notes on how little of it survives a bad mood.