Despite his pledges in public to be more engaging with North Korea and review the previous administration's decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system, South Korea's newly elected president Moon Jae-in is unlikely to bring overhauling changes to the region, APA reports quoting Sputnik.
"The conditions for his meeting with Kim Jong-un will be the denuclearization of North Korea".
South Korea's new president Moon Jae-In spoke to the leaders of China and Japan Thursday, hours after a telephone call with his USA counterpart Donald Trump, officials said, as he began shaping his approach to the nuclear-armed North.
In their first phone conversation, the two leaders "agreed that denuclearising the Korean peninsula is the two countries' common goal", Moon's spokesman Yoon Young-Chan told reporters.
Moon has taken a more conciliatory line with North Korea than his conservative predecessors and advocates engagement.
A spokesperson for the liberal leader Moon Jae-in said Xi, who initiated the call, "explained the reasons for Beijing's strong and repeated opposition" to the deployment, Yonhap news agency reported.
Jon Wolfsthal, a former senior National Security Council nonproliferation official, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Abraham Denmark made the suggestion in a joint article in Foreign Policy, stressing the "real center" of any strategy toward the North should be close coordination with the South.
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Last month, the state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun claimed US-Australian military exercises in northern Australia were preparation for nuclear war against North Korea and threatened Darwin with a potential retaliatory strike.
The Prime Minister called Moon Jae-in to congratulate him on his election victory and to discuss the crisis around North Korea's nuclear weapons test programme.
China says the system does little to curb the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, which it has been pressing ahead with in defiance of United States pressure and UN sanctions. "Trump's invitation for Moon to come to Washington, D.C., for consultations on a combined alliance strategy on North Korea is a good first step", they said.
North Korea last week accused the Central Intelligence Agency of plotting with the South to assassinate Kim using a biochemical weapon, an allegation impossible to verify - and following the killing of his half-brother Kim Jong-Nam in Malaysia with a banned nerve agent, a murder widely blamed on Pyongyang. "After Pyongyang's the fourth and fifth nuclear test, South Korea finally moved away from engagement".
Moon also raised the issue of economic retaliation against South Korean firms in China, Yoon said.
As well as clouding efforts to rein in North Korea's nuclear ambitions, the THAAD deployment has also led to recriminations from Beijing against South Korean companies.
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