President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to curtail military exercises with South Korea. In their place, defense officials announced a pivot to trauma-informed readiness. The armed forces will stop rehearsing war and start rehearsing vulnerability.
Officials stressed that the Korean peninsula has been holding seventy years of unprocessed conflict in its body. The DMZ will be reframed as a boundary, which clinicians agree is actually very healthy. Boundaries are not walls. They are invitations to do the work.
"You cannot deter what you have not first validated," said one senior Pentagon empathy strategist, lighting a candle in the tank simulator.
North Korea's participation is unconfirmed. Kim Jong Un once called the president a "mentally deranged dotard," language the working group now codes as a bid for connection. Hurt regimes hurt regimes. I want to hold space for that.
