US Military Policy Is Stoking the Risk of Nuclear War on Korean Peninsula

U.S. politicians can’t stop talking about Kim Jong Un. The two major party conventions have come and gone, with both presidential candidates mentioning the North Korean leader by name. At the Republican National Convention (RNC), Donald Trump claimed Kim had endorsed him, adding, “He misses me.” Just weeks later at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Kamala Harris alluded to her opponent’s claims, declaring before an enraptured audience that the “tyrant” Kim is “rooting for Trump.”

Neither candidate told the truth. The North Korea’s state news agency was swift to respond to Trump back in June, clarifying the position of the government with characteristically pointed remarks: “No matter what administration takes office in the U.S., the political climate, which is confused by the infighting of the two parties, does not change and, accordingly, we do not care about this.”

The fact-free treatment of North Korea by both parties is a sign of how the electoral cycle has reduced the Korean crisis to a political football. This is especially dangerous in a time when the risk of war in Korea is at its highest in decades. Significantly, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem interested in a public discussion about the concrete situation in Korea, or the major escalations the U.S. is undertaking there.

While the news cameras and the eyes of the electorate were trained on the DNC in Chicago, the U.S. military executed one of the largest war games on Earth in Korea: Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS). UFS is the latest name for an annual series of military exercises conducted by the Combined Forces Command, the command structure under which the military of South Korea answers to U.S. generals. (The U.S. has had operational wartime command of South Korea’s armed forces since 1950.) Originating in 1976, UFS and its predecessors routinely deploy tens of thousands of troops, along with U.S. “strategic assets” such as aircraft carriers, heavy bombers and nuclear submarines.

This is a major, and widely misunderstood, component of the unfinished Korean War — that for over half a century, some of the largest military maneuvers on Earth are conducted on an annual basis in Korea within sight of the border bisecting the peninsula. Although the U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK), South Korea’s official name, insist these exercises are defensive, many of them rehearse the invasion and occupation of North Korea. These “war games,” by their very nature, look identical to the first steps of a real invasion. This year’s UFS featured a whopping 48 individual war drills, deploying 19,000 South Korean troops, 200 military aircraft and an unknown number of U.S. soldiers. What’s more, this year’s war games took place in the context of another significant escalation: emergent plans to potentially redeploy U.S. nuclear weapons to Korea.

Killing Peace

The Korean War was concluded with a ceasefire rather than a permanent peace treaty, making it the longest war in U.S. history. For over 50 years, relations between North and South Korea were structured through the paradigm of independent, peaceful reunification — a mutual commitment to nonviolently end both the Korean War and the division of the Korean people. And since the late 1980s, relations between the U.S. and North Korea were also based on the framework of denuclearization. Both of these diplomatic paradigms have now crumbled. In 2022, North Korea declared its nuclear status “irreversible,” and at the start of this year, it made the momentous decision to abandon the strategy of peaceful reunification with South Korea, now identified as an enemy state. Consequently, the risk of war on the peninsula has skyrocketed. In spite of this, the U.S. and South Korea remain committed to the same strategy of aggression and intimidation responsible for the current impasse.

The situation today is markedly different than just a few years ago. At the start of 2019, a long-awaited resolution to the Korean War seemed within reach. After North Korea’s 2017 nuclear weapons test, Trump responded with bellicose threats to unleash “fire and fury” on the peninsula. However, in 2018, the governments of North and South Korea signed two agreements to reduce tensions, seek peace and move towards reunification. Then came the historic summit between President Trump and President Kim Jong Un in Singapore, after which the U.S. agreed to pause war games like Ulchi Freedom Shield (then called Ulchi Freedom Guardian), and North Korea agreed to freeze further nuclear weapons tests — a promise it still has yet to break.

But this progress did not last. The second summit in Hanoi between the U.S. and North Korea in 2019 fizzled in a matter of minutes. For all the fanfare, the parties could not overcome a contradiction: For Pyongyang, the objective of negotiations with the U.S. was to achieve a mutual reduction of threats; for Washington, the goal has always been to achieve the unilateral disarmament of North Korea without complementary concessions. When the U.S. rejected North Korean requests for a partial reduction in sanctions, the North Korean delegation walked out.

Since Hanoi, the situation has spiraled. The Ulchi war games resumed that summer, rehearsing a South Korean occupation of the north. In 2020, Pyongyang demolished its liaison office with Seoul and stopped answering the hotline set up to facilitate contact between the two governments. Then came the election of Joe Biden in 2020, and in 2022, the election of conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol in South Korea.

Together, the U.S. and South Korea under Biden and Yoon have demolished the paradigm of independent, peaceful reunification of Korea. Here, Yoon has played the role of attack dog: Upon entering office, he announced South Korea’s right to launch preemptive strikes against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the official name of North Korea). In February 2023, his government declared North Korea its “main enemy,” a designation Pyongyang has now reciprocated. This summer, Seoul scrapped the 2018 Inter-Korean Military Agreement, which halted military activity along the border and established new buffer zones; held live fire drills along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) for the first time in six years; and resumed propaganda broadcasts at the border. In an August speech given for Liberation Day, which marks Korea’s independence from Japan, Yoon unveiled a new “unification doctrine” that amounts to little more than a thinly veiled plan for regime change in North Korea. These provocations have taken a wrecking ball to the inter-Korean relationship, but largely escaped the scrutiny of international mainstream media, which remain stuck on a one-note narrative of North Korean aggression.

In 2023, the U.S. and South Korean militaries conducted more than 200 days of war games in Korea.

Where Yoon has played the part of the U.S.’s lapdog in Korea, the Biden administration has focused on pulling South Korea by the leash into a maze of new alliances in the Pacific, sometimes referred to as “Asian NATO.” Since President Barack Obama’s Pivot to Asia in 2012, the U.S. has spearheaded a number of new alliances in an attempt to form a tightly integrated military bloc dominated by Washington: the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the QUAD), the Australia-U.K.-U.S. security partnership (AUKUS), the new U.S.-Japan-Philippines alliance, and crucially, the Japan-Korea-U.S. (JAKUS) trilateral security cooperation. JAKUS is a creation of last year’s Camp David meeting between Tokyo, Seoul and Washington. It is the first direct military alliance between South Korea and Japan in history, and it was explicitly created to tighten military coordination against North Korea. To make JAKUS possible, Seoul trampled over the survivors of Japanese wartime forced labor (and its own Supreme Court) to mend fences with Tokyo. As a result, the rapidly expanding Japanese military, which is set to become the world’s third-largest by budget in 2027, is now in play on the peninsula for the first time since WWII, tightening the noose around North Korea.

The second pillar of the Biden-Yoon agenda has been an escalation in the strategy of maximum pressure against North Korea. During the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. and South Korea refrained from large-scale field exercises, opting instead for “discussion-based” and “tabletop” war games. Beginning in 2022, live war games resumed — and rapidly expanded in frequency and scope. In 2023, the U.S. and South Korean militaries conducted more than 200 days of war games in Korea. This spring, the militaries of 12 nations, including a number of NATO countries, joined the Freedom Shield war games in Korea. (Freedom Shield is a separate series of exercises than Ulchi Freedom Shield.) Following the formation of JAKUS, Japan has joined the U.S. and South Korea for a number of trilateral military exercises, with a particular focus on the interoperability of the countries’ navies and air forces. This summer, the three countries agreed to annual trilateral war games.

New Paradigms and Perils

All this provides the essential context for North Korea’s changes in position. After slaughtering millions in the Korean War, the U.S. ignored North Korean overtures for diplomacy until the 1980s, when Pyongyang’s burgeoning nuclear program caught Washington’s attention. Since then, North Korea engaged the U.S. in three separate, multiyear dialogue processes. At various points, Pyongyang took clear, measurable steps to demonstrate sincerity toward the diplomatic process, including the freezing operation of the Yongbyon reactor and opening the site to international inspectors in the 1990s. Yet at every turn, the flexibility of the North Korean government was met by U.S. intransigence. After a generation of attempts, North Korea has closed the door on denuclearization. This does not signal a permanent end to dialogue, but an attempt to reset the terms of engagement as those between equals rather than between the conqueror and conquered.

The move away from peaceful reunification amounts to an even greater shift than the denuclearization question. Independent, peaceful reunification was the guiding framework governing inter-Korean relations since the 1970s. As it did with Washington, Pyongyang engaged in serious attempts at reconciliation with Seoul on numerous occasions over the past half-century. These attempts were always stymied by political reversals in South Korea, but the stark changes brought on by President Yoon have pushed relations to a point of no return. Yoon’s naked aggression toward North Korea is unlike anything seen in generations.

Beyond that, the JAKUS alliance in particular has reconfigured the balance of power, further polarizing the region, while betraying generations of Koreans who have fought for justice and recognition for Japan’s colonial crimes. Crucially, Kim Jong Un referred to South Korea as a “colonial stooge” in his speech at the start of 2024 announcing the end of peaceful reunification. Like many in South Korea, Pyongyang sees Yoon’s alignments with Washington and Tokyo as permanently compromising Seoul’s sovereignty. As a result of U.S.-South Korean escalations, North Korea now no longer sees the situation in Korea as one where peaceful reconciliation is possible, instead recognizing a new paradigm of hostility.

Seoul and Washington are now building a plan to collaborate on a nuclear strike on the Korean Peninsula. This dangerous escalation ought to make U.S. priorities clear.

These changes in Korea have given rise to a horrifying possibility: the return of U.S. nukes to the Korean Peninsula. Since relations began to break down after 2020, calls from the right wing in Washington and Seoul for South Korea to nuclearize have grown ever louder. While elite consensus on this question is far from assured, figures like Trump’s expected National Security Advisor Elbridge Colby and South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun have come out in favor of the idea. Others, like Sen. Roger Wicker of the Armed Services Committee, have advocated for the return of U.S. tactical nukes to the peninsula.

For its part, the Biden administration has evaded calls for South Korea to nuclearize, but has also taken steps to assuage these demands. In 2023, Seoul and Washington established the Nuclear Consultative Group, an intergovernmental agency created to develop guidelines for strategic nuclear and conventional military integration. In layman’s terms, this is a body tasked with creating the process by which U.S. nukes could be transferred into South Korean hands for use in warfare. This July and August, top military officials from both governments met for the first military exercise reviewing these guidelines. Seoul and Washington are now building a plan to collaborate on a nuclear strike on the Korean Peninsula. This dangerous escalation ought to make U.S. priorities clear.

For the past four years, Washington refused to take steps that would bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table, yet it is all-too-wiling to pursue measures to further nuclearize the Korean Peninsula and push the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict. While the U.S. has imposed crushing sanctions against North Korea in the name of protecting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, little outcry over U.S. proliferation can be found in the domestic body politic. The point is far greater than pointing out U.S. hypocrisy; in a twisted display of its affinity for nuclear war, the federal government is now using the heightened situation in Korea to justify a push to expand the U.S.’s already staggering nuclear arsenal, as revealed in a recent New York Times article exposing a leaked Biden administration document known as the Nuclear Employment Guidance.

For the past 79 years, the fate of Korea has been determined by U.S. interests in the region. Americans remain generally ignorant of their government’s role on the peninsula, or the extent of its historical atrocities there. Grave threats to the Korean people, and to the world, are flowering in the soil of this ignorance. While many voters view the current election as a referendum on the future of the U.S., very few grasp just how short that future could be without a serious challenge to the dominant perspective on Korea in Washington, which views the peninsula as a place where endless escalation is both possible and desirable — consequences be damned.

There is another way for the U.S. to approach Korea: leave. The U.S. retains 28,500 troops across 62 military bases in Korea; it spends billions annually on hundreds of war games that keep tensions high and endanger, rather than protect, Koreans and Americans alike. This demand has already been raised by Koreans on either side of the peninsula for generations, and it is now echoed from within the U.S. by Nodutdol’s US Out of Korea campaign. The time has come for Americans to embrace this demand as their own. U.S. imperialism is eating the world, and it will not be challenged from within the U.S. political system. That challenge must come from below — not just as a demand to end U.S. wars, but to fundamentally change who holds political power in the U.S. Let’s shift power from the minority who benefit from U.S. domination of the world, to the majority whose basic interests are at odds with a political system that expends $1.5 trillion annually on war.