There is a familiar rhythm to these moments, and Washington’s foreign policy establishment keeps forgetting the tune:
A president tires of an alliance relationship that isn’t paying the dividends he expected, reaches for the most disruptive lever available and the commentariat responds with alarm about “chaos” and “unpredictability” rather than asking the more interesting question: What did the old arrangement actually accomplish, and for whom?
President Trump’s decision to order the Pentagon to scale back the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises with South Korea, paired with his claim that Kim Jong Un has responded “very positively” to renewed outreach, is being read in most of the trade press as a nostalgia play — a sequel to the Singapore-Hanoi-DMZ trilogy of his first term.
That reading misses the actual mechanics of what’s happening. This is not primarily a North Korea policy. It is a South Korea policy, wearing North Korea’s clothes.
The alliance as leverage, not commitment
Trump has been explicit, if characteristically indirect, about the connective tissue here: his irritation that Seoul declined to lend support during the Iran episode, his framing of the drills as “costly” and “inappropriate” and his broader argument — repeated across multiple theaters, from NATO to Japan — that the United States has been subsidizing the security of wealthy allies who then decline to reciprocate when Washington wants something.
Whatever one thinks of the tactic, the underlying diagnosis is not crazy. South Korea is a developed, technologically formidable state with a GDP many times North Korea’s, fielding a capable military, sitting under an extended-deterrence umbrella that was designed for a 1953 balance of power and never seriously renegotiated for a 2026 one.
Treating the drills, and by extension the alliance, as a bargaining chip rather than a sacred commitment is jarring to the foreign policy establishment precisely because that establishment has never wanted to ask what these commitments cost relative to what they buy.
Engagement doesn’t require illusions
None of this requires believing Kim Jong Un is a reformed actor or that a summit forecloses the North’s weapons programs. It doesn’t. Pyongyang used the intervening years to expand its arsenal, deepen its dependence on Moscow and Beijing and, per its own recent congress, commit explicitly to further nuclear buildout.
Foreign Minister Cho Hyun’s framing of the overture as a “turning point” is the kind of hopeful language governments produce when they need domestic cover for an ally’s unilateralism — worth noting, not worth believing outright.
But the standard Washington critique — that talking to Kim “legitimizes” him, that drills reduction is “unilateral concession,” that only maximum pressure works — has been tested for three decades against a regime that has only grown stronger, more nuclear, and more entrenched with its patrons in Moscow and Beijing.
Sanctions regimes and joint exercises did not stop a single warhead. If the alternative to periodic, transactional, low-expectation dialogue is permanent stalemate plus an unexamined subsidy to Seoul’s defense budget, the case for trying something else is not radical. It’s just adult accounting.
The real audience is Beijing
The more revealing detail in this episode is not Pyongyang’s coyness but Wang Yi’s trip to Seoul — China inserting itself into the North Korea file just as Washington signals openness to bypass the pressure track. That is the actual chessboard. North Korea’s utility to Kim, to Xi, and to Putin has increasingly been as a wedge issue among Washington’s Asian commitments, not as a negotiating partner desperate for sanctions relief.
A Trump-Kim meeting on the sidelines of APEC in Shenzhen — should it happen — would occur inside China’s diplomatic space, which ought to unsettle Seoul and Tokyo rather more than a truncated set of joint drills does. Analysts quoted this week captured the asymmetry well: Kim has “nothing to lose” from engaging Trump precisely because he no longer needs American goodwill to survive. Moscow and Beijing already provide the insurance.
What realism actually counsels
A genuinely realist posture toward the peninsula doesn’t romanticize engagement or treat drills reduction as betrayal. It asks what a still-dominant but increasingly overextended power should prioritize.
The honest answer is that North Korea, absent an actual crisis, is a second-order problem next to the structural competition with China — and that treating every regional ally relationship as an immovable tripwire, rather than a negotiable partnership subject to burden-sharing, has left Washington with commitments it can’t easily scale to its actual interests.
Trump’s method is transactional to the point of crudeness, and his rhetoric about Kim’s “respect” reliably substitutes for substance. But the impulse to treat the drills, the alliance and the diplomacy as variables rather than constants is closer to how a great power in relative decline ought to be thinking than the reflexive alarm it has generated.
The question worth asking isn’t whether Trump is “cozying up” to a dictator. It’s why so few in Washington ever ask whether the alternative — permanent confrontation with no leverage to show for it — was ever a strategy at all.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
