On March 20, US Forces Korea command announced in a press release that they had "successfully" concluded along "with the Republic of Korea (ROK)" their annual war exercises "Freedom Shield 2025" on the borders of the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK). The statement said these war exercises were "conducted from March 10-20, 2025", yet already on March 6 it was reported that in preparations for "Freedom Shield 2025" two South Korean Air Force KF-16 jets, where the US occupier of South Korea holds the prerogative of command, "negligently dropped a total of eight Mark-82 bombs on a south Korean civilian-populated area in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province, injuring 43 people". This was 16 miles from the DPRK border using the same bombs that the US is sending to Israel for its genocide in Gaza. While Freedom Shield 25 has concluded, the Korean Marine Exercises Program (KMEP) under the leadership of the US forces Korea will continue throughout the year.

Workers' Weekly is publishing extracts from an interview made with Dr Dermot Hudson, Chair of the Korean Friendship Association UK (KFA UK), posted on March 30 by the YouTube channel Flame of Liberation. In this interview Dermot spoke about these US exercises and his thoughts on what the return of Trump means for the DPRK.

Exercise "Freedom Shield 2025"

Asked to comment on these exercises Dermot Hudson said: "I can talk about that in fact Freedom Shield 2025 has actually been held for a slightly longer period than last year. It is also on a bigger scale than last year. Trump did not cancel the exercise and, as I'm sure you're aware, Trump is someone who can actually move very fast. He can sign presidential orders at the drop of a hat. He is not like sleepy Joe [Joe Biden - Ed.] and he can react to situations very quickly, but he chose not to do so. I think this is proof, if any proof was really needed, that he is continuing the hostile policy of US imperialism towards the DPRK."

Dr Dermot Hudson, Chair of the Korean Friendship Association UK

Dr Hudson went on to speak about the dangerous threat and scale that the exercises held for the DPRK and how they were changing under Trump's diktat as US President. He said: "Now these exercises are very big in scale and I think that one thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is that it's not just the US, or South Korea, but it's actually nations from the so-called 'United Nations Command' [2] in South Korea. Now that was originally the United Nations Command in Korea but it's really a US-controlled entity. And for many years it was described as a body that had no real meaning and its function was ceremonial, or even people didn't realise it existed. But it is basically composed of those satellite countries of the US, like Britain, France, Philippines, Thailand, Colombia, just to name a few countries. Also, Australia and New Zealand not to forget those that all fought against the DPRK with the US imperialists in the last Korean War - the Fatherland Liberation War. These were part of the so-called UN forces which were basically a coalition that was cooked up by the US because they were able to railroad a resolution through the UN Security Council in the absence of the Soviet delegate."

Dermot Hudson continued: "So this structure was created, the UN command, and for many years it wasn't very obviously active but in the last 15 years the US has been moving to revive it and this is quite sinister because what they're really trying to do is to create a multinational force to fight against the DPRK. The aim is to intervene against the DPRK like they did in Iraq and also like is being vaguely talked about in creating another 'Coalition of the Willing' to fight against Russia in Ukraine and the Donbass. So you've also got this entity that exists on the Korean Peninsula."

Dermot continued: "With 'Freedom Shield 2025' you've actually got more than a dozen armed forces involved in it, so it's quite big in scale and quite deep in scope. And of course as I've always argued and we've always said in KFA UK to people who say, 'oh but it's just an exercise, or it doesn't matter, or they always do this', well, the point of holding military exercises which cost money - and of course with the Trump regime and his acolyte Musk where finance has become a very important subject, you know they are not holding these exercises for fun. They are being held with real reason and the whole point of such exercises is to rehearse for war, to practise the invasion of the DPRK and regime change. Last year these exercises included the so-called decapitation strikes aiming at taking out the supreme leadership of the DPRK as well as strikes on its nuclear facilities. So these so-called exercises are very real aggression."

Protests against the US and internal crisis in South Korea

9th Plenum of the Workers' Party of Korea, Pyongyang, Korea

Asked to comment on the huge protests against the government and against the US in South Korea, Dr Hudson talked about the fact that "South Korea is in a state of very deep internal crisis, an incredibly deep internal crisis. This of course makes the situation even more dangerous because they could try to launch a war to distract people from the very deep contradictions in South Korea."

He continued: "These contradictions were ripped open last December when the puppet ruler Yoon Suk Yeol took it upon himself to declare martial law and this to a lot of people came out of the blue - it was a shock." Dermot Hudson went on to explain that this fight between the liberals [represented by the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) - Ed.] and the conservatives [led by the People Power Party (PPP) - Ed.] was not that one faction was democratic and the other was fascist, and that the liberals had stopped martial law. They both "supported US imperialism in South Korea", he said, and the liberals had never "repealed a very repressive law that makes it illegal to support the DPRK, or to advocate communism, and this was kept in force. And of course very significantly they never demanded that the US troops leave South Korea which they could have done but they did not."

Dermot Hudson commented on why Yoon was immediately forced to reverse his decision to impose martial law. He said that "the real reason was that he (Yoon) hadn't asked his real masters the US whether he could declare martial law" and that "Trump might take a different line but I think Biden thought that there would be no advantage of having an old fascist regime in South Korea that would actually end up creating more problems for the US than it would solve and in fact it would have ruined the very carefully crafted and carefully engineered image of South Korea that's been built up by the US and corporate propaganda machine over, many years of the image of prosperity of a liberal democracy." For this reason, he said, "Biden was I think more than happy to throw Yoon under a bus and after reversing martial law Yoon found himself impeached and even arrested."

Dr Hudson said that "with regard to the mass protests, I think that they reflect the anger of the South Korean people against US domination" and "that the South Korean people don't want another sort of military fascist regime in power in South Korea. I think those big protests reflect that." He later emphasised: "With the situation in South Korea there's a tremendous amount of turmoil there were just seeing massive demonstrations in South Korea with I believe it was two million people protesting. There is huge opposition to Yoon and what he represents and moving the country back into a more openly authoritarian direction but there's also major opposition to the US occupation."

What Does the Return of Trump Mean for Korea

Countering US-ROK military provocation

Asked about the significance of Trump's previous meeting in his first US Presidency with Kim Jong Un, Workers' Party of Korea General Secretary, and now Trump's new intentions towards the DPRK in his second term of office, Dermot Hudson started by saying that, on the first meetings with Trump, "I think it's one that ultimately only future historians will be able to answer. I think there's a number of interpretations. One of them was that it was just simply a photo-op for Trump, showmanship and that he was trying to make himself look very important and big - that I am the first US President to actually meet a DPRK leader. However, I think there are other explanations. I think it was very much the case that he was trying to trick the DPRK, to lure them into unilateral disarmament." He continued, "In fact, I believe in second summit the demand was put forward for the DPRK to dismantle all its nukes and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and not just that but basically to open up and reform and introduce the capitalist system in into the DPRK. I think Trump thought he could sell capitalism to the DPRK. That is how I see it."

"Another factor," he said, "is that he could have also been trying to use this to frighten the South Korean puppets into paying more for the US forces in South Korea, because what a lot of people don't realise is South Korea is not only occupied by US troops, but they pay for the privilege of having US troops on their soil. They pay, I think about $1 billion a year. One of the things when Trump became President for the first time is he thought South Korea did not pay enough, that they should be paying more for it, and he could have been seeing this as a way of panicking the South Korean puppets into paying more. I think what would have gone through their heads - and in fact a lot of people's heads - was will the US troops be pulled out of South Korea, will South Korea itself be thrown under a bus by the US because of the negotiations with the DPRK. So I think that's one aspect to it."

"Then of course," Dr Hudson said, "there is the theory that the Deep State sabotaged Trump's engagement with the DPRK and that peace with the DPRK was blocked. But I think it was more likely that Trump himself did not have an honest purpose in engaging with the DPRK and I think you can actually see today with his stance on a lot of different questions, for instance the negotiations with Russia, that he is quite capable himself of putting forward very stringent and drastic demands on a negotiating partner. I think Bolton [John Bolton, former national security advisor - Ed.] was just there to reinforce it so I don't see Trump's engagement with the DPRK as particularly sincere. I think the main change he brought about was to cancel the bigger exercises in South Korea, but as he said at the time they are expensive. In fact the smaller scale exercises continued. It wasn't the case that all exercises were halted, and of course US troops remained in South Korea" and the provocations of the South Korean puppets continued and were stepped up Dermot Hudson concluded.

Speaking about the present, Dr Hudson said that as far as regarding relations with Korea is concerned, Trump "no longer has people like Bolton and other people that he claims he doesn't like. His government is full of loyalists and we're seeing that he's going forward with these aggressive military operations, war games, against the DPRK. So I think we'll see this in the next four years of his Presidency, but I think it's pretty obvious what his intentions are with regard to all these things."

Censorship imposed on KFA UK and life in the DPRK

Dermot was asked about the broad attack on freedom of speech and the censorship of the KFA UK and other pro-DPRK channels with no accountability from the big corporations carrying out this censorship.

Dermot pointed out that KFA UK was using sources from the DPRK "and then suddenly on March 4, with no warning, no consultation, no negotiation, a thing flashed up on my phone that 'your channel has been disabled because you're breaking the US sanctions policy'. Now it wasn't clearly explained what sanctions we had broken. We only can assume we've apparently broken the US sanctions against the DPRK simply by showing content from DPRK media. We weren't actually importing DPRK goods, or trying to promote them on the channel! It was simply because we used videos from the DPRK. This was enough to get the channel deleted and it was never clearly explained which sanctions we had broken. As far as I'm concerned, US sanctions have no legal force in the UK. US sanctions stop at the US border they don't apply to third countries and not only had the YouTube channel been deleted, but the whole Google accounts associated with the channel had been deleted, so we lost an email address that we'd us ed for emailing members. I'd been writing a book that was on the Google docs attached to the account. So two months of work was wiped out by Google and there was no appeal system. I tried to contact Google about five times but there was no reply but a total brick wall."

"We had similar experiences with Facebook a few years ago when they very suddenly without warning, or consultation actually deleted the old KFA UK Facebook page which had built up a big following of about 12,000 followers probably making it the biggest English language pro-DPRK Facebook page. It was just wiped out overnight again we lost videos and pictures that we had on it and you know there are patterns to this because the propaganda in a number of countries against the DPRK is hotting up again particularly in the UK and some European countries."

Dermot continued: "They are trying to censor pro-DPRK voices in order to create a false narrative to create an impression that there is no support for the DPRK. They don't want people seeing actual videos from the DPRK - anything that is actually factual. A lot of the videos on KFA UK channel weren't militantly ideological. They were just showing the reality of the life in the DPRK. A few years ago there were several different YouTube channels run by DPRK citizens. One featured a girl university student who would just give very factual reports about life in Pyongyang, what was happening. Then there was a young girl at primary school. She also had videos about her life - again nothing very ideological, just showing family life - and YouTube deleted those."

In conclusion, Dr Dermot Hudson thanked the host of the channel interviewing him and for their solidarity drawing attention to the issue of the censorship of KFA UK. Dermot said he still had his own YouTube channel but that they may start another KFA UK YouTube channel and or re-activate a channel on Rumble. He said that KFA UK can easily be found via their website, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and that they also have a KFA UK channel on Telegram. [3]

Notes
1. What Does the Return of Trump Mean for Korea? - Dermot Hudson KFA-UK,
The Flame of Liberation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQk6J83y_KY
2. Other Participating Nations:
Besides the US and ROK, Freedom Shield involves service members from other United Nations Command (UNC) Member States, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Great Britain.
3. KFA UK website:https://www.kfauk.com/news/
KFA UK Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kfauk1/
KFA UK on Telegram: https://t.me/s/kfa_uk
KFA UK on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UKKoreanFriendshipAssociation/
KFA UK on X: https://x.com/Korea_Friend_UK

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