“Unthreatening and respectful.” That is how the president of the United States described North Korea on Aug. 16, 2026, in his social media post ordering his secretary of defense to scale back joint exercises with South Korea. Two years earlier in Seoul, the U.S.-South Korean alliance agreed that South Korea’s role in an American nuclear operation would involve exercises and training, formalizing those guidelines at a Nuclear Consultative Group meeting co-chaired by Vipin Narang, then-acting assistant secretary of defense for space policy.Three weeks before the president’s post, on July 24, Narang spoke at the second Deterrence Symposium hosted by South The post The Goldilocks Fallacy: The Undefined Limits of Korea’s Nuclear Role appeared first on War on the Rocks .