President Park Geun-hye is expected to visit Washington this year for a summit with her counterpart Barack Obama as the allies ramp up diplomatic efforts to better counter North Korea’s threats and coordinate related policies.
Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held talks on the margins of a security conference in Munich on Saturday to discuss Park’s envisioned trip and review the situation around the peninsula, the region and the globe.
Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice unveiled on Friday that Washington had invited the leaders of South Korea, China, Japan and Indonesia for summits as part of its efforts to deepen security and economic engagement with the region.
“The two ministers concurred that Park’s visit to the U.S. this year will be timely and desirable given the current situation on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia and the world,” Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
“For her trip to be successful, they agreed to continue consultations on the time frame, format, agenda and other details through diplomatic channels.”
Park’s visit is predicted to be in the latter half of this year and take the protocol of an official visit or official working visit. She traveled to Washington in May 2013 for her first overseas outing as the head of state and was in New York last September for the U.N. General Assembly, while Obama has come to Seoul four times since his swearing-in in 2009, most recently last April.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will likely go to the U.S. when this year’s U.N. conference convenes in September, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as early as late April, both for a state visit.
Briefing on Obama’s 2015 national security strategy, Rice reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to its strategic refocus toward the Asia-Pacific. “Our rebalance is deepening longstanding alliances and forging new partnerships to expand cooperation,” she said during a seminar at the Brookings Institution.
During their talks, Yun and Kerry shared “deep concerns” about North Korea’s increasing nuclear capability, pledging to speed up consultations between neighbors to formulate a strategy and detailed plans to induce progress on its denuclearization, the ministry said.
The peninsula appears to be hanging in the balance as Seoul seeks cross-border rapprochement offering high-level dialogue while Pyongyang’s relations with an already aloof Washington have further soured in the wake of its purported hack on Sony Pictures.
Intensifying outreach to North Korea, Russia also said recently it had received “positive” signals that leader Kim Jong-un would attend a May ceremony in Moscow marking the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Cheong Wa Dae is yet to decide on Park’s participation. “We will come to a decision in the final stage (before the event) after looking comprehensively into her jam-packed diplomatic schedule and the international situation,” Yun told reporters in Berlin after the meeting.
The allies have in recent weeks been stepping up diplomatic efforts to minimize any policy discord, with a series of top U.S. diplomats visiting Seoul and stressing in unison there is “no daylight” between them.
Though the security blueprint reiterated calls for a nuclear-free peninsula, the prospects remain murky for a restart of six-nation denuclearization talks or any sweeping shift in the Obama administration’s “strategic patience” approach, dogged by an unabated Middle East turmoil, escalating rivalry with China and Russia and other mounting challenges at home and abroad.
“The efforts of neighboring countries are imperative in leading North Korea to make the right choice, for which we concurred that we need to deliver consistent messages to North Korea,” the minister added, stressing “impeccable” coordination between South Korea and the U.S.
