Fresh on the heels of President Trump controversially ordering scaled-down US-South Korea military drills last week, there are emerging reports of more canceled plans for joint exercises.
South Korean and American force were going to hold large-scale maritime drills focused on amphibious landing exercises in September, but Seoul has said the Pentagon had to back out related to constraints due to Iran war deployments.
"The US Marine Corps formally notified our forces in June that its ability to deploy forces during this year’s Ssangyong exercise would be constrained due to the situation in the Middle East," Han Seung-jeon, a spokesman for the South Korean Marine Corps, said in a press briefing Monday.
After this month's Ulchi Freedom Shield were halted early so as not to provoke North Korea (as indicated by Trump), these next exercises - dubbed "Twin Dragons" - have apparently been canceled entirely.
The Twin Dragons exercise has previously featured thousands of American and South Korean forces practicing beach front landings.
At its height years ago, it included over 20 navy vessels, 30 warplanes - and 40 amphibious-assault vehicles transporting, and well over 10,000 personnel.
"Now it is the most recent example of Asian pullbacks from the U.S. More than 2,000 U.S. Marines stationed in Japan were transferred to the Middle East in March," The Wall Street Journal reports.
"South Korea’s president publicly opposed the withdrawal of U.S. air defense assets this spring from his country. A Pacific-based American aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, just replaced in the Middle East the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been deployed for more than 250 days," the report adds.
All of this is likely to strain tensions further between Washington and Seoul, something which has alarmed lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
"Both Democrats and Republicans have warned that the pullback on Ulchi Freedom Shield drills risked undermining the alliance with South Korea, calling for the exercises to be restored," observes WSJ.
But it's clear that Trump is pushing for a new opening with Kim Jong Un, hearkening back to the two leaders' historic face-to-face meetings which marked a foreign policy high-point of Trump's first administration. So far, Pyongyang has not backed off its condemnations of Seoul and Washington's ongoing close cooperation.