South Korea supports US President Donald Trump\u2019s efforts to resume dialogue with North Korea, but aims to ensure its security posture is not weakened and that Seoul is not sidelined, South Korea\u2019s national security adviser said on Friday.<\/p>\n
Seoul believes the resumption of talks between the US and North Korea should focus on progress on the North Korean nuclear weapons issue and must not undermine the country\u2019s security readiness, Wi Sung-lac told reporters.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne point to keep in mind is the need to coordinate with the United States to ensure that any resumption of US-North Korea dialogue leads to substantive progress on the North Korean nuclear issue, alongside efforts to establish a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,\u201d Wi said.<\/p>\n
To achieve these aims, policy coordination and communication between South Korea and the United States were more important than ever, he said.<\/p>\n
Wi cited Trump\u2019s order earlier this month to substantially scale back major joint military drills between the two allies, saying the US president was signalling a willingness to engage with North Korea.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Seoul should ensure it was not \u201csidelined\u201d in Washington\u2019s efforts to restart talks with Pyongyang, Wi said.<\/p>\n
Trump cited in part Seoul\u2019s refusal to offer help in the Iran war for cutting short the Ulchi Freedom Shield drills this month and said they sent a wrong message to North Korea. Trump has been seeking a new summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.<\/p>\n
The two met three times in 2018 and 2019.<\/p>\n
South Korea, Japan and the United States will conduct joint military drills from September 9 to 11 to test readiness against North Korea\u2019s missile and nuclear weapons threats, South Korea said on Friday.<\/p>\n
Wi said South Korea is seeking to deepen cooperation with Washington on a range of issues that have sometimes caused friction between the allies.<\/p>\n
These include South Korean investment in the US agreed under a trade deal, the treatment of US-listed e-commerce firm Coupang, security cooperation, intelligence sharing and the transfer of wartime operational control, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Korea supports US President Donald Trump\u2019s efforts to resume dialogue with North Korea, but aims to ensure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[74,31,34,33,207],"class_list":["post-135175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-north-korea","tag-donald-trump","tag-korea","tag-north-korea","tag-south-korea","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}