The military has no idea what to do with Trump's promise to end 'war games' in Korea


Among the conclusions reached at Tuesday's summit in Singapore, President Trump said, is that the U.S. will cease its "provocative" and costly "war games," the joint military exercises with South Korea that North Korea has long condemned as practice for conflict. But like the denuclearization pledge signed by Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, details on what this promise means functionally are sparse.
So sparse, in fact, that the military does not know what to change. U.S. troops in South Korea have "received no updated guidance on execution or cessation of training exercises — to include this fall's scheduled Ulchi Freedom Guardian," said a military representative, Lt. Col. Jennifer Lovett, in a Tuesday statement. For now, Lovett added, business will proceed as usual until new instructions are provided.
South Korea also expressed some confusion about what to expect moving forward. President Moon Jae-in's administration said it needs "to find out the precise meaning or intentions" of Trump's statement and will "explore various measures to help the talks move forward more smoothly."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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