President Donald Trump said Wednesday that joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises are an insult to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, and confirmed he plans to meet with Kim later this year. The comments came after the Pentagon confirmed the exercises would be cut short by a week, ending Friday rather than on August 27 as originally scheduled.
Trump indicated earlier this week that he and Kim had been in contact after he ordered the exercises scaled back. When pressed by reporters Wednesday about whether he had been exchanging letters with Kim, he declined to answer directly.
"Well, I don't want to talk about that. But I do have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un," Trump said. He went on to add: "But he likes me, and I like -- I, you know, I just got along with him very good."
Trump also addressed his reasoning for cutting the exercises short. "Now, I didn't like the fact that we're doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea," he said. "I felt that to do a massive -- we were doing a massive war exercise. I thought that was very insulting to somebody that, frankly, has been, during my term at least, very well-behaved."
North Korea pushed back. Kim Yo Jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un, issued a statement through state media saying the shortened timeline changed nothing. "We think it's not worth making comments on that and we have no interest in it at all," she said. "The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won't change even though their duration and size were reduced."
North Korea conducted two ballistic missile tests in August ahead of the joint exercises. The most recent launch last Wednesday was detected by South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and Japan's Defense Ministry. North Korea is also widely believed to be sending arms to Iran and troops to support Russia's war in Ukraine, according to ABC News.
Trump met with Kim three times during his first term, including two summits, but those meetings did not produce a denuclearization agreement. When reporters asked Wednesday whether he was still pursuing denuclearization given his earlier suggestion that North Korea had 57 nuclear weapons, Trump declined to elaborate. He did say other countries in the region were safer with him in office. "We had -- we had great meetings. We speak, and I think our nation and I think other nations, frankly, whether it's Japan or South Korea, they're a lot safer if I'm president than if somebody else is president," he said.
No date or location for a meeting between Trump and Kim has been announced.
