Former Pacific Command leader Admiral Harry Harris, President Trump’s nominee to be the next ambassador to South Korea, endorsed the idea of a pause of US war games in South Korea as a way to improve ties with the North.
“The whole landscape has shifted,” Harris said, adding it was worth a pause to see if Kim Jong-un is serious about diplomacy. Before this pause, the US had multiple large war games with South Korea annually.
The reason this was an issue is that the joint war games almost exclusively were built around simulating an invasion of North Korea. Attempting to assure North Korea that a US invasion isn’t imminent means such exercises are counterproductive.
The Pentagon had long been presenting these war games as necessary for “readiness.” They now say they are going to have to come up with other things for the large US deployment in South Korea to do that would maintain that level of readiness but which don’t involve war games targeting North Korea.
US testing undiplomatically to find out if Kim’s diplomacy was serious. Turned out, i think, that Kim tested US diplomacy diplomatically and had to have found it massively undiplomatic.
And to boot, while aware of the twelve-step he had to do ere US would give an inch in return.
Strange, but what is it that US wants? Setting up negotiations that have to fail and put the entire blame on NK for their failure, but only after Trump gets Nobel Prize?
Seriously? Is envoy’s role to have his own policy to be then announced? How about his driver’s opinion on war games? It is hopefully his jib to execute not to have a position of his own.
Clever how a policy change is snuck into the news cycle: “Ending the war games” becomes “Pausing the war games”.
“Readiness” to invade/destroy a country which has already decided, with Pres. Moon of South Korea, NOT to invade each other? It appears the USA
can’t bear the thought of peace.