{"id":1913,"date":"2018-06-20T14:29:38","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T18:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/susanwright\/?p=1913"},"modified":"2018-06-20T14:29:38","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T18:29:38","slug":"who-advised-trump-to-stop-joint-military-exercises-with-south-korea-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/susanwright\/2018\/06\/who-advised-trump-to-stop-joint-military-exercises-with-south-korea-surprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Advised Trump to Stop Joint Military Exercises With South Korea (SURPRISE)?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This should come as no shock to anyone who has been paying attention for the last couple of years, actually.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit this, upfront, when this story quietly seeped out last week, I missed it. Why it didn\u2019t make more of a splash than it did is beyond me.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it was buried by all the noise surrounding the child detainment at the border, and that\u2019s understandable, but we shouldn\u2019t forget that there are multiple issues going on with this administration.<\/p>\n

So while Trump prepares an executive order to reunite immigrant children with their illegal immigrant parents, we shouldn\u2019t forget that there are still shady dealings with a dangerous rogue nation, ruled by a murderous tyrant.<\/p>\n

One of those issues that went down in the \u201cagreement\u201d between Trump and North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un was that the United States would stop joint military exercises with our allies, South Korea.<\/p>\n

It was a concession made where North Korea got exactly what they wanted and the United States got nothing to show for it (unless you count Donald Trump\u2019s photo-op).<\/p>\n

There was no good reason to allow for that. What\u2019s more, it was a unilateral decision on Trump\u2019s part, it seems. He made no prior announcement. He did not notify the Pentagon, leaving the Department of Defense to scramble. And most egregiously, he did not notify South Korea, the ones who would be most affected by the decision.<\/p>\n

Good question.<\/a><\/p>\n

So why in the world would Trump do this? His first stated reason was that canceling the military exercises would save us money, which\u00a0isn\u2019t altogether true<\/a>, and which is an argument officials from both parties\u00a0found bizarre<\/a>. Trump also argued that the exercises were overtly \u201cprovocative\u201d \u2013 which represented an exceedingly rare instance in which an American president\u00a0echoed the talking points<\/a>\u00a0of North Korea\u2019s communist dictatorship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah. He\u2019s been doing that a lot, lately. That\u2019s a big change from the whole, \u201clittle rocket man\u201d social media shtick. It\u2019s also a big change for our nation.<\/p>\n

So why the big change? Who is putting these ideas into Trump\u2019s head? It would have to be somebody he listens to, because he consulted no one else.<\/p>\n

Well, again, if you\u2019ve been paying attention\u2026<\/p>\n

But to fully appreciate the oddity of the circumstances, it\u2019s worth understanding where Trump apparently got this idea in the first place. The\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0in January:<\/p>\n

Around the same time, Mr. Trump had an idea about how to counter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, which he got after speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin: If the U.S. stopped joint military exercises with the South Koreans, it could help moderate Kim Jong Un\u2019s behavior\u2026. Mr. Trump dropped the idea, although he has ordered aides to give the exercises a low profile, eliminating press releases and briefings about them.<\/em><\/p>\n

In context, \u201caround the same time\u201d refers to the period last summer after Trump met with Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There were reports of phone conversations between Trump and the Russia president since the January summit, actually. Earlier this month, the Russian strongman and former KGB agent said in an Austrian interview that he and President Trump speak by phone \u201cregularly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why would it be necessary to carry on regular conversations with Vladimir Putin, and why does President Trump\u2019s turnabout on North Korea seem to follow Putin\u2019s script?<\/p>\n

For someone who likes to scream about the Russia probe \u201cwitch hunt,\u201d he sure seems to be caught in a lot of situations where he\u2019s acting as Vladimir Putin\u2019s dancing monkey.<\/p>\n

And those situations are not always beneficial for our nation.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This should come as no shock to anyone who has been paying attention for the last couple of years, actually. I\u2019ll admit this, upfront, when this story quietly seeped out last week, I missed it. Why it didn\u2019t make more of a splash than it did is beyond me. Perhaps it was buried by all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3473,"featured_media":1916,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41,173,599,521],"class_list":["post-1913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-donald-trump","tag-north-korea","tag-south-korea","tag-vladimir-putin"],"yoast_head":"\nWho Advised Trump to Stop Joint Military Exercises With South Korea (SURPRISE)?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"President Trump has an unofficial consultant on North Korea.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/susanwright\/2018\/06\/who-advised-trump-to-stop-joint-military-exercises-with-south-korea-surprise\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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