Donald Trump Cut Drills With an Ally Because a Brutal Dictator Was Respectful to Him

It is not treason, and calling it that gets you dismissed. The problem is worse: no law prevents a president from setting alliance posture by how a nuclear-armed adversary makes him feel.

At 2:04 on Sunday afternoon, hours before the exercises were due to begin, the President of the United States posted that he had instructed the Secretary of War to substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea.

The exercise is called Ulchi Freedom Shield. It runs eleven days, from August 17 to August 27. It involves eighteen thousand South Korean soldiers, and it was scheduled to include live-fire drills, joint precision targeting, a wet gap crossing, and the distribution of prepositioned military equipment.

The stated reason was his relationship with Kim Jong Un.

First, the thing everyone is saying

By Sunday evening the word going around was treason, and I understand the impulse, and you should not use it.

Treason is the only crime the Framers defined in the Constitution itself, and they defined it narrowly on purpose, because they had watched the English Crown use treason charges as a general-purpose weapon against political opponents. Article III, Section 3 says treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Conviction requires two witnesses to the same overt act, or confession in open court.

Reducing the scale of a military exercise is a decision squarely inside the Commander in Chief’s authority. There is no court in the country that would entertain the charge, and no serious lawyer who would bring it.

I am starting here because the accurate version of this story is worse than the viral one, and because the moment you write traitor, the first competent reply in your comments is somebody explaining Article III, and the argument dies there instead of where it should.

The same goes for the meme circulating with the photograph of the two men, which says he announced the United States will now be siding with North Korea. He did not say that. He said he was cutting an exercise. That is bad enough to state accurately.

What the post actually says

Read the standard he applies, because it is in writing and it is the entire story.

The exercises, he wrote, send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.

Not unthreatening to South Korea. Not to Japan. Not in any general sense, and not across any period longer than his own tenure.

Respectful to him.

That is the metric now governing the posture of American forces on the Korean Peninsula. Whether a hostile nuclear state has been personally courteous to the President of the United States during the years he has held the office.

And the factual claim inside it did not survive the weekend it was written in. Days before the post, North Korea launched a ballistic missile toward the sea, in what analysts read as protest of the coming drills. On Friday, Pyongyang threatened unspecified stern steps and described the exercises as a rehearsal for an aggressive war.

That is the country he describes as unthreatening.

The parenthetical

The second half of the post is where the actual mechanism is, and he flagged it himself.

While somewhat unrelated, he wrote, and then he put a question mark in parentheses, because he knew it was not unrelated. He had recently asked the President of South Korea whether they would like to join in the denuclearization of Iran, and they had said no thanks.

So the sequence is this. A treaty ally declined to join an American war. The response was to reduce the military exercises that ally depends on, and to justify the reduction by reference to the good manners of that ally’s principal adversary.

The punishment for declining a war is a concession to the country pointing artillery at Seoul.

Seoul’s answer

South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense responded that the exercises would proceed as previously notified and scheduled.

Consider the position that leaves the United States in. The President announced a change to a joint exercise, and the joint partner announced that the exercise is going ahead as planned. Whatever reduction occurs will now be an American reduction inside an operation the ally is running at full strength.

This is not the first time Seoul has learned about American policy on its own defense from a broadcast.

The precedent, which he set himself

After the Singapore summit in June 2018, Trump announced that the United States would be stopping what he called the war games. He said they would save a tremendous amount of money and added that he thought they were very provocative.

Provocative is Pyongyang’s word. It has been Pyongyang’s word for the annual exercises for decades. He adopted it at a press conference in Singapore hours after meeting Kim, and used it to describe a training program his own military runs.

Seoul had not been told. The South Korean Defense Ministry’s public statement was that there was a need to discern the exact meaning and intent of President Trump’s comments. A spokesman for United States Forces Korea said the command had received no updated guidance.

In March 2019, after the Hanoi summit collapsed without an agreement, the Pentagon and the South Korean military confirmed they were ending Key Resolve and Foal Eagle, the large-scale spring exercises, replacing them with smaller mission-specific training.

Trump then posted that the military drills, or war games as he called them, were never even discussed in his meeting with Kim.

So this is not an impulse. It is a nine-year position, applied twice, and the denuclearization it was traded for never happened. North Korea’s arsenal is larger now than it was in 2018.

What is actually at stake

There are roughly twenty-eight thousand five hundred American service members stationed in South Korea.

The exercises exist because a combined command of two militaries, speaking two languages, using different equipment and procedures, cannot function under fire unless it has practiced functioning together. Wet gap crossings and prepositioned equipment distribution are not ceremonial. They are the specific things that go catastrophically wrong when nobody has rehearsed them, and the people they go wrong for are the ones holding the rifles.

This is the same administration that has kept five thousand sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln at sea for more than 260 days, that is rationing air defense interceptors in the Iranian theater, and that removed the judge advocates general of three services in a single afternoon. The readiness of American forces has not been the organizing principle of any of it.

The finding

Nothing here is illegal. That is the entire point and it is the reason the treason framing does more harm than good.

There is no statute requiring a president to maintain a joint exercise. There is no provision compelling him to consult Seoul, or the Pentagon, or Congress before announcing on a social platform that an allied training program will be curtailed. The North Atlantic Treaty has an Article 5 and the Korean alliance rests on a mutual defense treaty, but neither one prescribes an exercise schedule, because nobody who wrote them imagined the schedule would need protecting.

The mechanism that would have stopped this was never in the law. It was the expectation that a president would not do it, held in place by advisors who would object, service chiefs who would push back, and a party that would break with him over an ally.

Every one of those has been removed, deliberately, over eighteen months, in public.

He told you the standard. A country that has been unthreatening and respectful, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President.

He is not measuring the threat to the United States. He is measuring the courtesy shown to him, and he has adjusted the defense posture of two nations accordingly, and there is no law against it.