President Trump is scaling back joint military exercises with South Korea, and the threat-inflation choir is warming up — which means it's time to ask who profits from keeping Americans frightened of Pyongyang and on the hook for the bill.
The Deseret News reports that North Korea has issued another round of belligerent threats over the U.S.-South Korea exercises — the same kind of threats Pyongyang has made for decades. What's actually new is Trump's decision to draw down the exercises, citing his relationship with Kim Jong-un and Seoul's refusal to back the current posture against Iran.
That's the news that matters: an American president choosing de-escalation over the usual cycle of provocation and spending. Naturally, the infrastructure that feeds on perpetual crisis isn't pleased.
The Deseret News piece, to its credit, acknowledges that North Korea's rhetoric is nothing new. The regime declared a "state of war" with South Korea in 2013 and abrogated the 1953 armistice — then followed up with accommodation moves. As the outlet notes, "unpredictability is the norm," driven by factional infighting and collective insecurity at the top, not some coherent march to war.
But the piece then shifts into a familiar catalog of hardware: the Obama-era THAAD anti-missile deployments, expanded ballistic missile defenses on the West Coast, THAAD batteries sent to Guam and Hawaii. Each deployment is presented as prudent. Left unasked: what all that hardware costs, who builds it, and whether the threat justifies the price tag. THAAD alone runs into the billions, and Lockheed Martin — the prime contractor — has spent millions lobbying to keep those systems funded and deployed.
China, predictably, objected to THAAD — not because of the interceptors, but because the system's radars double as intelligence-gathering tools. Beijing also worked to restrain Pyongyang, suspending flights between the two countries. The Deseret News notes that North Korea is a "costly dependent" for China, a drain that produces "growing well-founded anxiety." That's an admission that Beijing has its own reasons to keep Pyongyang in check — reasons that don't require American taxpayers to foot the bill.
North Korea's economy, meanwhile, has been in freefall. COVID-19 cratered its trade with China, and long-standing sanctions block any recovery. The regime is weaker now than it has been in years — which makes this an odd moment for the threat chorus to hit crescendo.
The Deseret News frames the situation as requiring U.S. "commitment to defense of South Korea" and coordination with allies including Japan. That's the bipartisan consensus position — the same one that has kept 28,500 American troops stationed on the peninsula for over seventy years at American expense. South Korea, for its part, has grown into a wealthy nation with substantial trade ties to China. Yet American taxpayers are still expected to underwrite its defense.
The second outlet assigned to this story, the Auburn Pub, ran a piece about a prison theater program — nothing on North Korea whatsoever. Draw your own conclusions about local news capacity to cover foreign policy.
Here's the open question: if North Korea is erratic but economically broken, if China has its own incentives to restrain Pyongyang, and if South Korea is rich enough to fund its own defense — why are Americans still paying for THAAD batteries and joint exercises? Trump's instinct to scale back is right. The war machine's instinct to panic is telling.
