Trump's vow to end military drills with Seoul stuns a region
President
Donald Trump rocked the region with the stunning announcement Tuesday that he was halting annual U.S.-South Korean military drills — and wants to remove the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in the South as a deterrent against North Korea.
Trump's surprise, almost offhand comments, made during a news conference after his summit with North Korean leader
Kim Jong Un, seemingly upended decades of the U.S. defense posture on the Korean Peninsula.
The remarks contradicted countless previous declarations by U.S. political and military officials over the years that the drills are routine, defensive and absolutely critical.
Trump has now essentially adopted the standard North Korean line, calling the military exercises a "provocative" drain of money and announcing they would stop while he continues talks with Kim, whom he repeatedly praised as a solid negotiating partner.
His statement was quickly portrayed by critics as a major, unreciprocated concession to a country that only last year was threatening Seoul and Washington with nuclear war.
It also seemed to leave officials completely off guard in South Korea, where the presence of U.S. troops has long been described as necessary to maintaining peace on the peninsula.
Moon Seong Mook, a former South Korean military official, said Trump's comments on the drills confirmed what many in South Korea had feared all along — that North Korea would attempt to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul and gain substantial concessions from an unconventional U.S. president who thinks much less of the traditional alliance than his predecessors.
"The core of the U.S.-South Korea alliance is the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and the joint U.S.-South Korea military drills, but the American military presence in South Korea wouldn't mean much if the militaries don't practice through joint drills," said Moon, now a senior analyst for the Seoul-based Korea Research Institute for National Strategy. "I am concerned that the summit between Trump and Kim will prove to be a setback in the global efforts to denuclearize North Korea and also introduce instability in the alliance between Seoul and Washington."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-trump-kim-summit-south-korea-20180612-story.html
Trump is fucking clueless and he is destroying our country. Anyone still supporting this nut job has lost their minds.
