Vice President Kamala Harris plans to visit the border between the Republic of Korea and North Korea, marking the first time that a top Biden administration official has gone to the Demilitarized Zone.
The visit will take place on Thursday.
“I think your visit to DMZ and Seoul will be very symbolic demonstrations of your strong commitments to the security and peace to Korean Peninsula and we are working with you and U.S. in dealing with North Korea,” South Korea’s Prime Minister Han Duck-soo told Harris in Japan, where she had gone to attend the state funeral of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
President Joe Biden did not make the trip when he traveled to South Korea and Japan in May.
The visit comes as the White House has struggled to engage North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on talks over his country’s nuclear program, and as Pyongyang has launched a series of ballistic missile tests decried by the U.S. and its allies as provocations.
Harris is visiting both South Korea and Japan on a trip intended to burnish her foreign policy credentials.
A senior administration official said Harris’s trip was intended to honor the legacy of Abe, while re-affirming the existing alliances and economic ties within the region.
Harris was scheduled to spend just one day in Seoul, holding a bilateral meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to discuss the threat posed by North Korea as well as the importance of peace across the Taiwan Strait. Leading up to her visit, senior Biden officials deflected any questions about a potential DMZ visit.
In August, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to the Panmunjom truce village in the Demilitarized Zone. The place where soldiers from the two sides stare down each other is a symbol of military tensions that have simmered since the US came to South Korea’s defense in 1950 after North Korea invaded and started the Korean War.
