South Korean president to visit United States for summit

It is not the first time for Park to stay at the house, which was where she laid her head during her first visit to Washington two years ago.

President Park will arrive in the U.S. on Tuesday for her second visit since she took office in early 2013, Xinhua news agency reported citing the office as saying.

FILE – Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, applauds with, from left, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, South Korea President Park Geun-hye and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, during a parade to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender.

Meanwhile, Park and Obama are also expected to discuss cooperation in space technology, engineering and energy. China, however, likely views the South Korean outreach differently: as an opportunity to pull Seoul away from the US alliance network in Northeast Asia.

Civilian exchanges between South and North Korea are expanding rapidly as Pyongyang has shown a few indications of a positive shift in its policy direction, a top official here said Thursday. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un proclaimed that his country was ready to fight any war started by the US.

With existing nuclear talks all but dead, Park is under domestic pressure to resolve a crisis that for decades has cast a terrifying pall over South Korea’s spectacular economic emergence.

The US wants to deploy a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) unit to South Korea, where a few 28,500 American troops are stationed, to better defend against ever-growing threats from North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Park’s overriding goal and mission is the unification of South and North Korea, bringing together one country of 50 million people and among the world’s wealthiest, with another country one half its size and among the most impoverished. It has become evident that North Korea utilizes these reunions as leverage when striving to demonstrate a distaste with the actions of its Southern counterpart.

Park is also accompanied by scores of businesspeople who will be trying to drum up business and investigate belated Korean membership in a controversial free-trade bloc, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

US officials hope that the tensions can be reduced during sideline meetings between Abe and Park at two major global summits this fall, the climate conference in Paris and the G20 economic gathering in Turkey. It has not received that priority for the Obama administration, according to Washington analysts.