Jae-in Moon will be the second world leader to visit the White House after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with the US president earlier this month.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in will visit his American counterpart, Joe Biden, in Washington on May 21, the White House announced Thursday.
Presidential spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement that President Biden looked forward to working with President Moon to further strengthen his alliance and enhance his close cooperation.
He added that Moon’s visit would highlight the protected cooperation between the United States and the Republic of Korea and the broader and longer relations between our rules, peoples, and marketplaces.
Moon will be the second world leader to visit the White House since Biden’s inauguration in January after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with the US president earlier this month.
Both meetings reflect Biden’s priority in relations with US allies in Asia in the face of rivalry with China.
The head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, and the head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin, visited Seoul in March to reaffirm the joint strength of the two countries in the face of the growing ambitions of North Korea and China.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Moon called on Biden to reopen talks with Pyongyang over North Korea’s refusal.
According to the Yonhap agency, the chief secretary for Public Communication of the South Korean Presidential Office, Chung Man Ho, has confirmed that Moon is scheduled to visit Washington for a meeting with Biden.
The South Korean president’s visit will be the first by US officials to an Asian country to address common challenges, including in Washington and North Korea.
In particular, Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with their counterparts and Moon himself during a visit to South Korea in March.
The United States on Wednesday expressed its “frustration” with North Korea’s increasingly tough measures to tighten control over its people, including orders to kill on the border with China under the pretext of fighting COVID-19.
On the occasion of North Korea’s Freedom Week, State Department spokesman Ned Price has shown the United States’ support “for the millions of North Koreans whose dignity and Human Rights continue to be violated by one of the most important states. repressive and totalitarian of the world”.
According to a statement from the area, the spokesman has denounced that “more than 100,000 people suffer unspeakable abuses in the regime’s political prison camps.”
The government has expressed frustration with the increasingly drastic measures, including orders to shoot at the North Korean-Chinese border, to tighten public control under the guise of fighting COVID-19 and impressed, to add that there is no place for such cruelty and barbarism in the civilized world.