The drills, involving thousands of troops and state of the art military hardware, don’t go down well with North Korea.
“Each year, Pyongyang complains and demands a stop to these annual exercises, which it claims to be offensive in nature,” said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at Tufts University. “North Korea has complained vociferously at least over the past quarter century.”
So what’s at stake? We take a closer look at the drills and the tensions that surround them.
Why does North Korea get so worked up?
The United States and South Korea stress that the exercises, named Foal Eagle and Key Reserve, are defensive and non-provocative in nature. The North Korean regime, however, doesn’t see it that way, and its state media has characterized the drills as rehearsals for an attack.
“The North Koreans, being paranoid in their own way, have always had this concern: ‘If there is going to be an invasion, this would be the time,'” said Philip Yun, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, a group that advocates nuclear disarmament. “But that’s not the intent on the U.S.-South Korean side.”
In March 2013, the North Korean military went as far as claiming that the United States was carrying out the drills with the aim “to mount a preemptive nuclear strike together with its South Korean puppet forces.”
READ: For South Koreans, a familiar tone from Pyongyang
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Some of the techniques seen under Kim Jong Un certainly recall those employed during his father’s rule.
During the tensions in early 2013, North Korea declared that the armistice agreement that halted the Korean War in 1953 was no longer valid.
The announcement sounded unsettling, but North Korea had already said in 2009 that its military was no longer bound by the armistice because South Korea was joining a U.S.-led anti-proliferation plan.
In 2013, the North also tried using the silent treatment, cutting off a military hotline with the South. That was similar to an approach it had adopted in 2009 when it stopped responding to calls after the military exercises started.
But during 14 years of Kim Jong Il’s rule, the United States and South Korea “had a track record of what North Korea would do and a sense of what to expect,” Yun said. “Kim Jong Un was new, you didn’t know how far he would go, which added to the uncertainty.”
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