브런슨 사령관 “대통령 트위터 봤지” 국방부 방문 논란

General Xavier Brunson, commander of United States Forces Korea, made an unannounced visit to South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense on the afternoon of August 18, canceling a scheduled public appearance to head to the ministry’s headquarters in Yongsan instead. When reporters caught him at the entrance and asked why he had come and whether the joint exercise was proceeding as planned, Brunson replied, “Haven’t you seen the president’s tweet?” and added that he had come to discuss it. The remark referred to a directive President Trump issued two days earlier on Truth Social ordering a sharp reduction in the scale of the US-South Korea joint military exercise. The visit lasted only about twenty minutes, but its consequences were not small. The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, already underway, was in fact cut nearly in half, confirming that the Trump directive on cutting the joint drills had moved from a social media post to an order carried out on the ground.

Brunson arrived at the Ministry of National Defense headquarters at around 3:25 p.m. on August 18 and met with Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-baek for roughly twenty minutes. The visit came two days after Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 16 that, given his good personal relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he did not like that the United States had long agreed to participate in joint drills with South Korea, adding that the drills were costly and that Washington bore most of the cost. He said it was too late to cancel the exercise outright and so he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to sharply cut its scale. Ulchi Freedom Shield, originally scheduled to run for eleven days from August 17 to 27, was shortened to just five days, from the 17th to the 21st, cutting six days from the original plan. Counterattack drills against North Korea that had been part of the exercise were canceled outright, leaving only defense-oriented training in place. A US defense official said that, following guidance from the president and the defense secretary, Ulchi Freedom Shield had been sharply reduced while training to enhance tactical capability continued, and that there would be no degradation in training objectives. The South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said the two sides had discussed and agreed on various measures to achieve the exercise’s goals and to establish a solid combined defense posture — an explanation that, however carefully worded, cannot conceal the fact that a joint exercise underpinning deterrence on the peninsula was cut by more than half in the middle of its run.

This should not be read simply as Washington growing indifferent to the alliance. Trump has long treated defense costs and burden-sharing as central themes of his negotiating style — he called the joint drills a waste of money after his 2018 Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un, and some exercises were in fact suspended or scaled back afterward, but that did not amount to an American retreat from the alliance. What is different this time is that scaling back the exercise coincides with a moment when Washington is pressing allies harder than ever on defense cost sharing and expanded roles in confronting China. Read together with Trump’s earlier remark that Lee Jae-myung had declined a request to help with Iran’s denuclearization, the reduction in joint drills looks less like an abandonment of the alliance than a pressure card aimed at extracting more from Seoul — in defense spending, in host-nation support, and in a broader security role — before deciding how far it will keep shouldering the drills’ cost.

What is more troubling is the absence of any clear message from the Lee Jae-myung administration setting out how it will respond to this pressure. Facing a reduction in joint training that bears on deterrence, the administration has offered no concrete plan for strengthening self-reliant defense capability, nor delivered a clear public reaffirmation of the alliance directed at Washington. Concerns about a security gap should not be exaggerated, since a six-day reduction in one exercise does not immediately mean deterrence has collapsed. But if the administration keeps simply watching how a training schedule set by Washington unfolds, without visibly building up its own defense capacity or making its voice heard on burden-sharing negotiations, the perception that South Korea is a junior partner being pulled along by the ally will only deepen. The government needs to present clear, concrete steps — improving its own precision-strike and surveillance capabilities, and articulating a firm position in host-nation support talks — rather than treating the exercise reduction as someone else’s business.

The scene of a four-star general standing at the gates of the Ministry of National Defense, telling reporters to check the president’s social media post, that day symbolized this alliance’s current position. A reduction in Ulchi Freedom Shield does not stop at a training schedule; it is a signal bound up with the cost and role South Korea will be asked to bear going forward. The Lee Jae-myung administration should treat this moment not as pressure to be endured passively, but as an occasion to reaffirm the alliance and strengthen self-reliant defense in a way it initiates on its own terms.