President Joe Biden will meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-In at the White House on Friday, the U.S. president’s second in-person summit with a foreign leader since taking office.
A core focus of the meeting will be the efforts to make the Korean peninsula a “nuclear-free environment,” one official said, and the two nations’ strategy on North Korea going forward.
The Biden administration recently completed its policy review of North Korea, which involved consultations with outside experts and people from previous administrations.
“Our policy calls for a calibrated, practical approach that is open to and will explore diplomacy with [North Korea] and to make practical progress that increases the security of the United States, our allies, and deployed forces,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in an April 30 briefing.
On Wednesday, a senior administration official said Friday’s meeting was meant to be an initial engagement with the South Korean allies without overly specific outcomes in mind.
“I would simply say that we've tried to design it to be flexible,” the official said. “We understand where previous efforts in the past have had difficulties and we're determined to try to learn from those past efforts.”
Former President Donald Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un twice during his administration, once in Vietnam in 2019 and once in Singapore in 2018, when the two leaders reached a broad agreement but did not move concretely toward denuclearization.
Going forward, the U.S. hopes to build on the Singapore summit and previous administrations’ work in the region, an official said.
President Biden first welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to Washington, D.C. in mid-April, another key ally in the Indo-Pacific region.
“We believe this indicates the importance of the region,” a senior administration official said Wednesday. “Working closely with allies and partners on shared challenges, including China, is a significant component of our overall approach.”
Another topic of Friday’s meeting could be the effort to address human rights abuses within North Korea.
“We continue to be deeply concerned about [North Korea’s] wide-ranging human rights abuses, including severe restrictions on religious freedom,” said Daniel Nadel, Director of the Office of International Religious Freedom, in a May 12 briefing. “Hundreds of thousands of people remain in prison camps, including for their religious activities.”
President Moon is first set to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday in Washington and then Vice President Kamala Harris earlier Friday before the summit with President Biden.