After the summit meeting, Mr. Trump characterized the annual exercises as “very provocative” — a description that aligns with North Korea’s views and sharply deviates from his own Defense Department. The Pentagon has long insisted that the exercises are not meant to provoke North Korea; rather, military officials said, they underline American commitment to its allies in the region and seek to ensure that South Korea, in particular, will be able to defend itself. 
 
 Defense Department officials said on Friday that they expected an announcement, most likely next week, that the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise will either be canceled or be scaled back sharply. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and his South Korea counterpart, Song Young-moo, discussed canceling the exercises during a telephone call on Thursday, said a Defense Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made. 
 
 Officials in Seoul have also strongly indicated that the exercise will be suspended, with President Moon Jae-in agreeing to be “flexible” as long as North Korea stays engaged in dialogue and starts moving toward dismantling its nuclear weapons program. That comment was widely taken as endorsing Mr. Trump’s decision to end the exercises on the same conditions. 
 
 Publicly, the Pentagon has said only that Mr. Mattis reaffirmed the “ironclad” alliance with South Korea. Pentagon officials said Mr. Mattis made similar reassurances by phone on Thursday to Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori Onodera. 
 
 Mr. Pompeo was returning to Washington on Friday after nearly a week of clarifying Mr. Trump’s intentions after the Singapore meeting. In Seoul on Thursday, for example, Mr. Pompeo played down the president’s claim that North Korea no longer represented a nuclear threat. 
 
 “When he talked about the reduction in nuclear threat,” Mr. Pompeo said, “it was with eyes wide open.” He added that “it could be the case that our effort will not work, but we are determined to set the conditions.” ||||| SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea and the United States are expected to announce the suspension of “large-scale” military drills this week, with the provision that they would restart if North Korea failed to keep its promise to denuclearise, news agency Yonhap said on Sunday. 
 
 FILE PHOTO: Amphibious assault vehicles of the South Korean Marine Corps throw smoke bombs as they move to land on shore during a U.S.-South Korea joint landing operation drill in Pohang March 30, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/File photo 
 
 Citing an unnamed government source, the South Korean news agency said the suspension was likely to affect only major joint exercises, not more routine military training. 
 
 U.S. President Donald Trump surprised officials in Seoul and Washington when he pledged to end “war games” after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore last week. 
 
 Immediately after the announcement, U.S. forces in Korea said they had received no guidance on stopping any drills, and South Korean officials said they were trying to figure out which exercises Trump was referring to. 
 
 However, in a sign Seoul may be open to suspending drills, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday his government would need to be flexible when it came to applying military pressure on North Korea if it was sincere about denuclearisation. 
 
 Moon said South Korea would carefully consider joint military drills with the United States and he asked his officials to cooperate with the United States on the issue, his office said in a statement at the time. 
 
 Yonhap also reported on Sunday that during military talks between the two Koreas on Thursday, South Korean officials asked their northern counterparts to relocate artillery 30 to 40 kilometres away from the heavily fortified military demarcation line that divides the two countries. 
 
 The South’s defense ministry denied it made such a request, Yonhap said. 
 
 The talks, the first in more than a decade, held in the border village of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone (DMZ), followed an inter-Korean summit in April at which leaders of the two Koreas agreed to defuse tensions and cease “all hostile acts”. 
 
 North and South Korea failed to reach any concrete agreement during those talks, officials said. 
 
 North Korea proposed to Seoul to disarm, on a trial basis, the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom, the only site in the DMZ where both countries’ soldiers stand almost face to face, the South’s presidential spokesman said on Friday. 
 
 About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the Korean War, which ended in 1953 in an armistice that left the two Koreas technically still at war. 
 
 Trump said via Twitter on Sunday that it was his initiative to suspend the military drills - a step North Korea has long sought. 
 
 “Holding back the ‘war games’ during the negotiations was my request because they are VERY EXPENSIVE and set a bad light during a good faith negotiation,” the U.S. president wrote. “Also, quite provocative. Can start up immediately if talks break down, which I hope will not happen!” 
 
 At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to South Korea, retired Admiral Harry Harris, backed the idea of a “pause” in major military exercises. He said his understanding was that any suspension would involve only major military exercises and that regular training of U.S. forces in South Korea would continue, although final decisions were up to the Department of Defense. 
 
 FILE PHOTO: South Korean marines take part in a U.S.-South Korea joint landing operation drill as a part of the two countries' annual military training called Foal Eagle, in Pohang, South Korea, April 2, 2017. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji 
 
 The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every year with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. 
 
 The next major drill, Ulchi Freedom Guardian, is planned for the end of the summer. 
 
 Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerised simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft.
– Seems the US and South Korea really are on the verge of stopping "large-scale" military exercises, Reuters reports. Per Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, the two nations will announce the move this week with the stipulation that exercises with resume if Pyongyang fails to denuclearize as promised. "It costs us a lot of money," Trump said Friday of the military drills, per the New York Times. "I save [a] lot of money. That's a good thing for us." Meanwhile, Yonhap says South Korean officials have asked North Korea to move its artillery 20 to 25 miles away from the military demarcation line between the two nations, but South Korea denied making the request.