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South Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong attends the virtual Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum on Friday. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi is pictured on the screen. (provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

A quiet tussle is underway over the South Korea-US joint military exercises scheduled for August, which are likely to be a watershed in affairs on the Korean Peninsula in the second half of this year. North Korea and China are calling for the exercises to be halted, while South Korea and the US are hesitant to stake out a clear stance on the issue.

While the exercises are likely to be scaled down considerably because of the ongoing spread of COVID-19, there are growing concerns that North Korea and China’s increasingly overt demands might circumscribe South Korea’s options for making a political decision, potentially inciting unnecessary conflict.

While attending the ASEAN Regional Forum Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on Friday, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi was quoted as saying the South Korea-US joint military exercises “are not constructive under the present circumstances, and if the US truly wants to restore dialogue with North Korea, it should not do anything whatsoever that creates tensions.”

His remarks showed China’s support for the message of pressure from Workers’ Party of Korea Deputy Director Kim Yo-jong, who said on Aug. 1 that North Korea’s “government and army will closely follow whether the south Korean side stages hostile war exercises in August or makes other bold decision.”

The South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs tried to avoid unnecessary controversy over Wang’s remarks, adding that the South Korean government was “not preparing any position” in response. This reflected Seoul’s perception that the overt demands from Pyongyang and Beijing are not helpful in keeping the Korean Peninsula situation on a stable footing.

The Ministry of National Defense (MND) avoided comment Sunday on whether the South Korea-US joint military exercises would be going ahead. But sources reported that preparations were being made for combined command post training to begin on Aug. 16, with reduced participation by South Korean troops, overseas US reinforcements, and US Forces Korea compared with the exercises held for the first half of the year in March.

“My understanding is that the exercises will be held at a minimized scale,” another South Korean senior government official said.

The exercises were originally intended as command post training conducted via computer simulation, without actual troop movements. South Korea and the US plan to hold “crisis management staff training” as a kind of rehearsal from Tuesday to Friday, after which the main exercises are to take place from Aug. 16 to 26.

While attention had been focusing on the question of testing the future Combined Forces Command’s full operational capability ahead of the return of wartime operational control to South Korea, that testing is not to take place this time.

“While the specifics cannot be disclosed as a matter of military secrecy, these exercises will include practice of normal wartime transfer operations,” an MND official said. According to this explanation, the training will be based on the same “defense” to “counterattack” scenario that South Korean and US military officials have normally adopted.

The US also avoided specifics about whether the exercises would be going ahead, saying only that it was in close discussions with South Korea.

But in a press briefing on Tuesday, Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby hinted that the exercises would go ahead. When asked if South Korea had requested a suspension of the exercises, he said, “That hasn’t happened.”

If the clash over the August exercises intensifies between South Korea and the US on the one side and North Korea and China on the other, the situation could turn into a repeat of the worst-case scenario in August 2019, when the Korean Peninsula situation began deteriorating rapidly in the wake of a failed North Korea-US summit in Hanoi.

Two years ago, the South Korean government ignored strong opposition from Pyongyang to proceed with joint military exercises with the US on Aug. 5, 2019, followed by its announcement of an intermediate-term defense plan (2020–2024) the following Aug. 14 with plans for large-scale increases in military fighting power.

This prompted an emotional response from the North, which said that “even a boiled cow’s head would burst out laughing.” The situation left the two sides’ relationship on the brink of complete disintegration.

But today, North Korea faces a worse economic situation amid the COVID-19 pandemic and long-term economic sanctions. And with Pyongyang having already moved to mend ties with Seoul by restoring inter-Korean hotlines, things may not escalate to the same kind of extreme confrontation seen in 2019.

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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