President Obama will host South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House on Thursday to discuss North Korea’s provocations as the two will be among the dozens of world leaders gathered in Washington Thursday and Friday for the Nuclear Security Summit.
The meeting comes just after new laws take effect on Tuesday allowing Japan limited rights to self-defense for the first time since World War II.
It also comes days after Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump suggested that the U.S. break its 56-year-old security pact with Japan and withdraw troops from South Korea if the two Asian nations don’t pay the U.S. more for its defense of those countries.
He also suggested allowing both allies to become nuclear powers, something Tokyo immediately rejected.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said Trump’s comments change nothing.
The “seriousness with which we take our treaty commitments to Japan and to South Korea” is unchanged, Kirby said Monday. “Nothing’s changed about our view of what the future of the Korean Peninsula needs to look like in terms of de-nuclearization. And again, nothing’s changed about the support we’re going to continue to give to the government of Japan as they work through their own review of their defense posture and, again, how we can help them in that regard.”
Obama is separately hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping during the summit and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg shortly after the confab to curb nuclear proliferation wraps up.
