Progressives Shouldn’t Call on Trump to Restore Military Exercises in Korea
Por Ju-Hyun Park — Truthout
More than 20 Democrats signed a letter calling on Trump to maintain escalatory policies against North Korea.
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The Korean Peninsula was thrust back into the spotlight this August following a surprise announcement from U.S. President Donald Trump that the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises would be partially cancelled. In his typical meandering style, Trump simultaneously claimed the decision stemmed from his “very good relationship” with Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) President Kim Jong Un, and his growing frustration with the Republic of Korea (ROK), which he said had rebuffed his calls to join the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. While politicians and the media clamored over whether the decision was justified, few questioned the basic assumption that the U.S. military protects the Korean people or regional stability.
Trump’s up-and-down engagement with the DPRK has been a recurring story throughout his political career. It is one of the most ridiculed aspects of his presidency, and also one of the most misunderstood. At the root of this is a persistent ignorance concerning the true nature of Washington’s history and interests in Korea.
Democrats soon moved to convey their disapproval. DropSite News leaked a letter signed by 22 Democratic members of Congress expressing “alarm” at Trump’s decision, essentially urging the president to maintain a commitment to a cycle of military escalation and brinksmanship in Korea. “This decision has strained a 73-year alliance and risks undermining readiness, security, and deterrence on the Korean Peninsula,” the signatories warned. The letter was quietly published by House Democrats after the leak.
To be sure, there is much to criticize about the manner and purpose for why the Trump government made this choice to scale back these war drills in August. But it is important to recognize that Trump’s decision had little effect on the military situation. Ulchi Freedom Shield is a significant series of war drills, but it is far from the only one. In 2025, U.S. Forces Korea conducted 274 days of similar war exercises. Cancelling just a few is a drop in the bucket, and did nothing to meet his stated goal of advancing dialogue with the DPRK — which would have required stepping back from the prevailing framework of denuclearization.
So what was Trump’s purpose? In the weeks since, it has become apparent that Trump’s decision was a maneuver to pressure Seoul to concede on other matters: deliveries on the ROK’s promised $350 billion in tariff-related investments to the U.S., and joining the war on Iran. Today, South Korea is seeing a growing protest movement to prevent Seoul from capitulating to this pressure. The real issue is not Trump’s reduction of military drills; it is the U.S. war machine in Korea, and Democrats are part of this problem.
Calls for elected Democrats to drop their hawkish rhetoric on North Korea have gone unheeded. At a time when Washington is engaged in numerous destructive wars around the world, many of them escalated under Trump 2.0, the old guard of the Democratic Party is stubbornly clinging to a Cold War vision of the Korean Peninsula that can only lead to further escalation and instability.
A History of Occupation
The U.S. military has occupied Korea since 1945, when Washington made the decision to divide the peninsula into separate occupation zones, rather than permit the Korean people to organize an independent government. The U.S. military occupation in the south waged a brutal counterinsurgency war to crush a series of popular rebellions, and established the Republic of Korea (ROK) under the lead of Syngman Rhee, a staunchly pro-U.S. and anti-communist political figure. Even before the official start of the Korean War in 1950, the U.S. and ROK killed over 100,000 Koreans in the south alone.
Opposing war drills in Korea is fundamentally about opposing the violence of military occupation and Washington’s role in prolonging the Korean War.
The war itself brought only further destruction. In the south, the U.S. designated civilian refugees as enemy combatants, leading to atrocities like No Gun Ri, in which U.S. soldiers massacred hundreds of Korean refugees after evacuating them from their homes south of the 38th parallel. The U.S. backed the ROK state in its extermination campaign of political enemies, known as the Bodo League Massacre. In the north, the U.S. Air Force pursued a relentless bombing campaign that expunged the landscape of virtually all civilian structures. By the signing of the armistice in 1953, the U.S. had dropped 635,000 tons of explosives and over 37,000 tons of napalm in Korea — more than was used in the entire Pacific Theater of WWII.
A peace agreement has never formally concluded the Korean War. This makes the Korean War the longest-running overseas conflict in U.S. history. The war has left deep scars on the Korean people, but also upon U.S. politics. It was an undeclared war — a “police action” undertaken solely by executive fiat, a reverberating backdrop to all U.S. politics since 1945. Korea became the lab from which the U.S. could test its ideologies, technologies, and geopolitical maneuvers, executing heinous atrocities and setting the stage for countless Cold War interventions to come. To fight the Korean War, the U.S. quadrupled its military spending, directing much of it toward the restoration of military industry and the construction of overseas bases.
From the Cold War to the “war on terror,” the U.S. has continued to structure its economy and politics through permanent war on the Global South. If U.S. progressives today wish to dismantle the machine of endless war that dominates Washington, the legacy and present reality of Korea today must be confronted honestly.
U.S. intervention and occupation are far from being guarantors of democracy in Korea. This was made evident on the night of December 3, 2024, when then-President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, to the complete surprise of the South Korean public. Yoon’s failed self-coup revived the traumatic memory of Chun Doo Hwan’s 1980s martial law regime which, under the aegis of the ongoing U.S. war against North Korea, used martial law to enforce anticommunism in South Korea through the policing and repression of everyday life, including the massacre of civilians. (Independent journalist Tim Shorrock has exposed the U.S. role in the most infamous atrocity of the 1980s, the Gwangju Massacre, in which ROK paratroopers deployed from the DMZ massacred up to 2,000 people.) Yoon and his co-conspirators planned similar atrocities against the people of South Korea, and have even been accused of attempts to restart the Korean War through a series of drone incursions into the DPRK’s airspace in late 2024. While Washington claimed it had no prior knowledge of his plans, it is unlikely that Yoon would have acted if he felt it threatened U.S. patronage.
Elected officials of any party will not change their tune without pressure. That pressure must begin from the grassroots.
In Korea, the U.S. military presence is woven into the fabric of everyday life. Communities living near the 80 different U.S. military bases and facilities in Korea contend with the daily realities of environmental pollution, military accidents, and violence against civilians. For more than 80 years, the U.S. military has exploited access to Korean land, oceans, women, markets, and technology. The occupation manifests as oil leaks, noise pollution, stray bullets, and drunk drivers. At times, more severe incidents also occur. In 2025, the ROK Air Force accidentally bombed the city of Pocheon during a U.S.-led war drill. Pocheon sits in the vicinity of multiple U.S. firing ranges, and this was the 30th major military accident in the city since 2000.
The U.S. military occupation does not protect the Korean people, and U.S. military activity there is not undertaken as a favor to an ally of equal standing. The U.S. holds operational wartime control of the ROK Armed Forces, and dangles the possibility of eventually returning military sovereignty as an incentive to keep Seoul engaged in war drills. Both governments claim the drills are strictly for defensive purposes. Yet in reality they rehearse Washington’s aggressive military doctrine for Korea, which includes the deployment of nuclear weapons against the Korean people and plans for regime change in the DPRK.
These are the realities behind the bipartisan rhetoric surrounding the U.S.-ROK relationship. Opposing war drills in Korea is fundamentally about opposing the violence of military occupation and Washington’s role in prolonging the Korean War to justify its permanent, destructive, and wasteful military occupation of the peninsula and the Western Pacific.
Elected officials of any party will not change their tune without pressure. That pressure must begin from the grassroots. In 2024, Nodutdol, a grassroots anti-imperialist diaspora organization, launched the US Out of Korea campaign for precisely that purpose. We have since mobilized and educated thousands of people, and garnered the support of hundreds of organizations.
An international progressive movement for Korea is already rising, driven by the long struggle of the Korean people themselves. The question U.S. progressives face is whether to embrace this cause as their own.
This summer, Nodutdol took an international delegation of 26 progressive activists from six countries and territories to bear witness to the U.S. occupation firsthand. We visited communities struggling to preserve the local environment and their homes from U.S. base expansion. We spoke to activists fighting to preserve the historical memory of U.S. military sexual violence and femicide. We marched alongside nearly 10,000 protesters in Seoul on the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan under the banner of a familiar slogan: U.S. out of Korea.
An international progressive movement for Korea is already rising, driven by the long struggle of the Korean people themselves. The question U.S. progressives face is whether to embrace this cause as their own.
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This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the following terms:
Ju-Hyun Park is an organizer with Nodutdol for Korean Community Development and the campaign lead for US Out of Korea. They are also the web editor at BreakThrough News.
Minju Bae is an activist, scholar and educator. Her work examines Asian diasporas and American histories. Minju is a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development. Follow her on Twitter: @mnj_b.
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Fonte: Truthout
