THE military exercise is called Freedom Shield 2025. But the name is misleading. It suggests that the United States military – including its nuclear assets – provide a shield for its allies (mainly South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines). Yet, the biggest impediment to peace and stability in the region, the biggest destabiliser and contributor to regional tensions is the United States. A Korean proverb is apt here: the US gives the disease and then the medicine. In fact, the actual basis of this exercise is to poke at the territorial waters of North Korea, China, and Russia.

The host of the exercise is formally the United Nations Command, which was established on  July 24, 1950 by UN Security Council resolutions 83 (1950) and 84 (1950). The first resolution (no. 83) asks the members of the United Nations to provide ‘assistance’ to South Korea to ‘repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area’. The second resolution (no. 84) asked the United States to ‘designate the commander of such forces’ and allows the US-led forces to ‘use the United Nations flag in the course of operations against North Korean forces’. That the United States, seventy-five years later, uses these resolutions to assemble its United Nations Command, a fig leaf for US provocations, is an insult to the United Nations Charter. This is not a UN operation at all. This is part of the US-imposed New Cold War on Asia.

Which countries will participate in this operation in Asia? First, there are the main North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, established in 1949) countries with a military force: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Second, they are joined by NATO ‘partners across the globe’ (a NATO project), such as Australia Colombia, and New Zealand. Most of these countries have sent only small contingents, but they nonetheless have given their flags over to what had begun as a US-South Korea annual military exercise in 1968. Only three of the countries involved in this exercise have no direct connection to NATO: the Philippines, South Africa, and Thailand. In other words, Freedom Shield 2025 is a NATO military exercise in Asian waters off the coast of Korea.

Freedom Shield 2025 is a multidomain military exercise that includes computerised warfare, space warfare, rehearsals for an occupation of North Korea, and nuclear drills. It follows an enormous escalation of military exercises in and around the Korean peninsula by the United States and South Korea. For instance, in 2024, the militaries of the United States and South Korea held 275 days of war games (75 per cent of days in the year), up from 200 days of war games in 2023. While framed by mainstream media as routine exercises, for North Korea the largest of these military exercises are a major provocation that disrupt its economy and society by putting its military and civilians on high alert.

In August 2024, the US and South Korea conducted a ‘table-top’ exercise called Iron Mace 24, which integrated South Korea’s conventional forces with the nuclear force of the United States. The two countries signed a document on ‘extended deterrence’, which means that the United States pledges to defend South Korea with all of its military assets. Since the US has now adopted a ‘counterforce’ strategy with its Iron Dome missile defence system and its rejection of ‘no first use’, this means that if South Korea feels threatened by North Korea, the US can use this ‘extended deterrence’ doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon at North Korea. This is most chilling especially given growing suspicions that South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol attempted to provoke a conflict with North Korea to justify declaring martial law to overcome his political crisis.

Meanwhile, the US has increased its military presence in South Korea. In October 2024, then US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin told the press, ‘We are increasing the regular deployment of US strategic assets on the Korean peninsula’. This was around the time that the two countries signed a five-year defence agreement that included a large increase in spending for the forces on the peninsula. In November 2024, the South Korea assembly passed a bill with an overwhelming majority voting for it that increased the South Korean contribution to pay for the 28,000 US troops that are stationed in South Korea; they are housed in Camp Humphreys, a hundred kilometres south of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) and, most importantly, behind the Seoul metropolitan area that houses 50 per cent of Korea’s population. In fact, the move by these troops south of Seoul is part of a shift in the US Forces in Korea’s military posture from serving as a tripwire against an attack from North Korea, towards strategic flexibility, where US troops are housed and fed in Korea but deployed regionally. The US Forces Korea includes the US Eighth Army and the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, although other forces – including the marines – are frequently stationed there. Last year, US strategic assets (from nuclear submarines to aircraft carriers) docked in South Korea twenty-two times, much more frequently than in most other places.

All of this comes at a time of great instability in the region. South Korea does not have a stable political environment. In December 2024, its president, Yoon Suk-Yeol, attempted a coup against the legislature, which failed, but which continues to have major consequences. Yoon was impeached by the legislature, then he was arrested, and (due to legal technicalities) only recently released as he awaits the constitutional court’s verdict on his impeachment. Furthermore, suspicions are arising that the Yoon administration was trying to provoke North Korea to create the conditions for martial law. Currently, the government is in disarray, with the liberals and conservatives preparing for the presidential election that will follow (within 60 days) in the very likely verdict of impeachment. The contenders are the Democratic Party’s Lee Jae-myung (who faces a legal challenge but is currently appealing the verdicts) and the right-wing People Power Party of Yoon which has three contenders, Hong Joon-pyo, Oh Se-hoon, and Kim Moon-soo. The three men from the People Power Party are not peace candidates. As far their histories are concerned, none of them favour the Sunshine Policy of negotiation that was South Korea’s approach at the highest level of presidents Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003), Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008), and Moon Jae-in (2017-2022). It was President Moon who set the terms for US President Donald Trump’s handshake with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in 2018 and 2019. Lee Jae-myung is a wildcard. Unlike the other three who are not peace candidates, Lee made the suggestion that Trump should get the Nobel Prize for his efforts at peace on the Korean peninsula. This appears to show that Lee might follow Moon, but more pragmatically into a kind of modest negotiation with North Korea.

The military build-up in the absence of any political opening to Pyongyang is of serious concern. Anything like Freedom Shield 2025 and the nuclear deterrence agreement will create further distrust and division across the DMZ. Sitting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in March 2025, Trump said, ‘I have a great relationship with Kim Jong-un, and we’ll see what happens, but certainly he’s a nuclear power’. The recognition of North Korea as a nuclear power is significant. It means that there is a possibility that Trump – who has surrounded himself with foreign policy realists and not idealists – might acknowledge the reality of the North’s nuclear weapons and engage Pyongyang from that standpoint. After all, North Korea’s path towards nuclearisation reveals how the US pushed it towards developing nuclear weapons as deterrence. This could help reduce tensions and provoke dialogue. But, this is part of the unpredictability of the Trump government: one minute telling the press that the US recognises North Korea as a nuclear power and the next minute sending a massive military force to conduct an aggressive military exercise on the edge of Korea.