Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Wednesday that no decision has been made about the future of U.S.-South Korea military exercises.
The official statement from the Pentagon’s press office came a day after Mattis made several comments during a rare press conference that seemed to indicate the exercises would be resume as talks with North Korea over its nuclear arsenal hit turbulence.
“The Department of Defense suspended three individual military exercises in order to provide space for our diplomats to negotiate the verifiable, irreversible, and complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Mattis said in the new statement. “Our military posture has not changed since the conclusion of the Singapore summit and no decisions have been made about suspending any future exercises.”
Trump committed to suspending some large-scale U.S. exercises with ally South Korea in June after his summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, calling the operations provocative and expensive.
The move was meant to jumpstart negotiations with the regime after it tested intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. But last week, Trump abruptly canceled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s trip to North Korea because negotiations had not made enough progress.
On Tuesday, Mattis told reporters in the Pentagon briefing room that suspensions were a good-faith measure and that “we have no plans at this time to suspend any more exercises.”
He later went on to say no decisions had been made for further suspensions and that he did not “have a crystal ball” to know what might happen.
The comments appeared to confuse even the Pentagon’s own press service, which published and then pulled a news story saying exercises were set to resume on the Korean Peninsula.
