Mind games? Trump U-turns on South Korea war games U-turn

Donald Trump has suggested that the US is willing to suspend war games in South Korea, one day after his defence secretary insisted they would go ahead.

The US president acknowledged that talks with Pyongyang are stalled just months after his historic summit with Kim Jong Un, but insists that his relationship with the North Korean leader remain “very good and warm”. There is “no reason” to resume military drills with South Korea and Japan “at this time”, Trump continued.

His remarks, in a series of Tweets yesterday, appear to contradict the stance taken by Defence Secretary James Mattis, who said this week that there were no plans to cancel future exercises with South Korea.

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Trump’s latest take on events also “falls out of step with the Pentagon, which has maintained that the joint exercises are routine, purely defensive and vital to maintaining readiness on the Korean Peninsula”, says news site CNBC.

A Pentagon spokesperson said this week: “Routine planning continues for major ROK-US exercises on the Peninsula in accordance with the normal exercise programme planning cycle.”

No further details were offered.

During the June summit, the first meeting between a serving US president and a North Korean leader, Trump agreed to halt the joint exercises as part of a wider plan to work towards denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. But “North Korea has given no indication it is willing to give up its weapons unilaterally as the Trump administration has demanded”, says Reuters.

A follow-up trip by a US delegation trip headed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was cancelled last week, on the grounds that there hadn’t been enough progress in talks and that he would probably return to the region once US trade disputes with China were resolved.

Trump announced his apparent war games U-turn in a series of comments in which he also took a wider broadside aimed at Beijing. The president accused China of trying to undermine efforts to denuclearise North Korea, marking a hostility that experts fear may herald the dawn of a new geopolitical cold war.

“North Korea is under tremendous pressure from China because of our major trade disputes with the Chinese Government,” Trump said in his tweets, which he described as a White House statement. “At the same time, we also know that China is providing North Korea with considerable aid, including money, fuel, fertilizer and various other commodities. This is not helpful!”

The US has leaned heavily on China, which shares a border with North Korea and is its largest trading partner, to help enforce tougher sanctions imposed last year against Kim Jong Un’s regime. China “is the route to North Korea”, Trump said on Wednesday.

His stance deepens concerns that the trade spat with China “will morph into a protracted conflict that looks similar to last century’s rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union”, says Bloomberg. Suspicions have risen in Beijing “that Trump’s tariffs are part of a wider strategy to thwart China’s rise as a global power”, the news site adds.